The Dollar Factory

Advertiser spying annoys consumers

Written on April 2, 2008 – 2:33 pm | by admin

I am both an online advertiser and a consumer. I know that if I want my online ventures to be successful, i.e., maximize the monetization of my web site audience, I have to carefully monitor their behavior, collect data, and target advertisements accordingly. As a consumer, I know that many advertisers and advertising agencies collect such data and use it to practically force products on me. A new survey conducted by TBS Global on behalf of TRUSTe, i.e., a consumer privacy organization, has revealed that many consumers are aware that there behavior is being carefully watched and they are not happy about it.

Ars Tecnica reports on the people participating in the survey and the main result after analyzing the data,

TNS randomly selected 1,015 nationally representative adults in the US “whose households belong to TNS’s online consumer panel” for its survey. Although only 40 percent of the group was familiar with the term “behavioral targeting,” most users were well aware of the practice. 57 percent reported that they weren’t comfortable their activities tracked for advertising purposes, even if the information couldn’t be tied to their names or real-life identities.

As I said earlier, as a consumer I am also uncomfortable that my online behavior is so carefully monitored and data are collected without my permission. At the same time, as someone who is trying to make a living online, I understand the need for collecting the data. It is next to impossible to make a profit online without carefully analyzing web user data considering how competitive the online marketplace is. I think that some guidelines that the data should be collected in a way that individual people could not be identified. Moreover, user data should be deleted after a certain period of time, i.e., after 6 months. Hopefully, simple strategies such as those I just suggested could help online marketers to earn the trust of consumers and remove some of their online privacy concerns. The hardest part would be to enforce such guidelines if they are ever agreed upon.

Read more: Web surfers know advertisers are watching—and don’t like it.

Posted in Advertising | No Comments »

Revision3 commits click fraud and gets away with it!

Written on March 21, 2008 – 1:33 am | by admin

Yes, you read the title correctly. Revision3 is currently committing click fraud and gets aways with it for no other reason that they are a big publisher and when you are big you can get away with murder. While many webmasters lose their accounts for not following Google’s Terms of Service to the letter, the premium publishers cheat advertisers out of their money and Google looks the other way. How do I know that Revision3 is committing click fraud? Well, keep reading.

On March 6th, 2008, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback wrote on their public blog announcing “Revision3 hops in bed with Google.” His post explains that the company is in the business of making money and so they have decided to sell advertising on their videos via Google’s new AdSense for Video program. AdSense for Video displays PPC ads as pop-ups in the video while it is playing; similarly, PPC ads are also shown at the end of the video. So far so good. There is nothing wrong with announcing a monetization model for content that they produce in house and is not free. The problem is that in the very next paragraph, CEO Louderback explains to readers how to help make this a profitable venture for Revision3, namely committing click fraud,

Feel free to click liberally on both the bottom-based and those end-of-video ads – you’ll be supporting Revision3 with every click!

What? Are you serious? If I wrote anything close to that on my blog asking people to click on the ads, I would have my account banned for life because this is in direct violation of the program’s TOS. Yet, the Revision3 guys can get away with it. Last I checked, Google still displayed ads in their videos.

Sadly, their viewers find no problem with clicking liberally on these ads since as one of them explains in a comment,

I do click stuff on digg.com just cuz i know it helps, so i don’t mind doing that here. So even if you download and don’t stream stop by and click a couple. Maybe we can start get Martin some ram for his state of the art built tough computer.

Funny thing, the one person who pointed out in a comment that the CEO was asking users to commit click fraud had his/her comment deleted. The whole thing is disgusting to say the least.

Posted in Pay Per Click | 1 Comment »

How to monetize your blog video

Written on March 6, 2008 – 9:39 pm | by admin

The video below shows an interesting whiteboard discussion between Jeremy of Shoemoney.com and Rand from SEOMoz.org. Jeremy talks about how AdSense is not necessarily the best method for blog monetization and how affiliate marketing and direct ad sales can be much more profitable. He only points out things that are basic and most people who have spent any time trying to make money online will know all these by now but if you are new to blogging then this 10-minute video is a great introduction to monetizing your online property.

Posted in Blogging | No Comments »

Overlay.TV: Monetize your videos

Written on February 14, 2008 – 9:31 pm | by admin

Overlay.TV launched today with the aim to help everyone to monetize their videos by making them clickable. Basically, they allow users to stream videos from popular video sharing sites such as YouTube and provide the tool to overlay clickable regions over the frames. When a user clicks the region, the video pauses and he/she is given the option to be taken to another site to make a purchase. Do you like those sunglasses that Britney Spears is wearing? Click on them and be taken to eBay where you can buy your own pair at bargain prices. Will this work? I don’t know but if the technology is easy to use and it doesn’t annoy the users then it might give you another income stream. Probably worth a look. I plan to sign up for an account and give it a try on a couple of my sites. In the meantimes, enjoy their (I have to admit rather entertaining) marketing video shown below.

Posted in Online Video | No Comments »

How does Google make money from Blogger?

Written on February 11, 2008 – 9:47 pm | by admin

Someone made a post at the DP forum today asking the following,

Google offers lots of services like Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa Web etc. i have all those but I have never seen ads being put on any of the pages.

I thought Internet companies earn from ads, but how come they are not displayed on any of these products yet they offer free storage space and bandwidth?

Is there any other way they earn from these products? If it is there then what is it?

I thought that I take a few minutes to respond to this question on my blog. Actually, I will focus on only the part that is asking about how Google is monetizing Blogger. A mistake that the poster is making is that at least Gmail is monetized using pay per click text ads; also, Google Docs is a very new and experimental service that is not at the point of offering itself to monetization and since Google has no immediate need to earn from this service, it can wait until it is a mature product capable of competing against office software offered primarily by Microsoft.

On that note, why did Google buy Blogger but never bothered to somehow monetize it?

First of all, Blogger already has the mechanism setup for AdSense revenue sharing with publishers. However, they never take a cut from publishers, i.e., the percentage is set to 0%.

Okay, so they don’t make money from revenue sharing or it looks like it. However, since Google bought Blogger, they do make money from AdSense revenue sharing with publishers. How does that work, you ask?

First, Blogger is a platform that allows anyone to become a Web publisher regardless of their technical background. Second, Google makes it easy for these publishers to obtain an AdSense account. In fact, if you want to practically guarantee getting an AdSense account then start a Blogger blog and run it for a couple of weeks (as in post new content for a few days) and then apply for an account; chances are that you will be approved.

So, Blogger makes it easy to create and manage a blog and Google’s advertising program makes it easy to monetize it. We all know that Google takes a percentage of the money paid by an advertiser per click. So, they get a cut from the publisher’s AdSense earnings. Before Blogger was part of Google, they would have to have a revenue sharing system over the profits given to publishers from AdSense. Now, however, that Google owns Blogger, they receive a cut directly from what the advertisers are paying; at the same time, Google has access to a vast network of blogs that are generating fresh content for their advertisers.

This is how Google is making money from Blogger.

Posted in Blogging | No Comments »