Is Google Vulnerable in Advertising?

Steve Rubel just twittered an article from today's International Herald Tribune entitled "Google shows vulnerability in Advertising." It's almost a completely ridiculous article, but for the small weaknesses that Google does have in its ad platform. Of course, because the Time Magazine, Digg and Facebook havedecided to go with other ad partners other than Google, it isn't necessarily spelling the beginning of the end for the giant.

In June, Vivek Shah of Time magazine awarded a three-year, $100 million contract to Quigo Technologies, a venture capital-backed New York company that will handle ad space on more than 15 sites, including CNNMoney.com and People.com after spending six months assessing whether Google, Yahoo or Microsoft could most effectively attract advertisers to the publisher's Web sites.

The article in the IHT focuses on an alleged weakness that the Google AdSense system supposedly possesses - the inability to target your ad towards a single site. Granted, the system is set up on a bidding system, but there is the capability built in to not only put text advertisements on a preferred site (albeit at a CPD, elevated rate), but also video ads, one of the hot new areas of advertisement that is supposedly (at least according to IHT) being ignored by Google.

What is the big problem with Google then? Why are big sites like Digg and Facebook going with Microsoft right now? Essentially, it comes down to two things, in my analysis: targeting and subsidy.

I doubt that in any of their cases, Google is offering publishers big lucrative deals to switch the entire site's ad platform to Google. Microsoft clearly is, in a way that most likely doesn't make sense for Microsoft long term. This can be interpreted as a strength or a weakness for Google, depending on perspective and preferred business strategy.

The other thing: targeting. I know from my own personal experience that while Google's targeted ads on search are generally spot on, the targeted ads for content are usually so far off the mark (although in recent months they've gotten better), that I ended up removing Google AdSense from my site completely. My entire ad inventory for the site is now handled by the ad agency Project Wonderful. So far, they've pleased me far more than Google. When traffic spikes occur, of course, my income doesn't similarly spike, but they're good for a predictable and reliable income stream above what AdSense was able to provide for my level of traffic at the blog.

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RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP49

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 49 - download now - subscribe now

• A member of the TechPodcast Network @ techpodcast.com. If it's Tech, it's here.
  
• Remember, if you're listening on the podcast recording, you can call into the show live if you tune in through TalkShoe.com at 2:30 PM EST every weekday.
• If you like the podcast (and you haven't already given us a rating), head over and do so, and don't forget to sign up for the discussion list.
• Other Podcast Plugs:
  
• TalkGirls comes on Tuesday nights. Check out the TalkGirls Podcast ... it's good times!
• Cotolo Chronicles: Frank is a good friend of the show, and an associate of the late great Wolfman Jack. Check out his podcast.
• NewsReal: Good friend to Art and I - has one of the best hours of news podcast each week.
• You Are the Guest: Bill Grady turns the microphone on the internet's most interesting people.
  
• Sponsors:
  
• Try GoToMeeting for 45 days! Visit www.GoToMeeting.com/podcast to start your free trial today.
  
• J. Douglas Barker - Voice-overs for you! www.romancingthetone.com

Succumbing to the pressures of the media around us, Art and I spend the first half of the show talking about presidential politics and campaigning, and whether or not Ron Paul has a real shot at winning this thing. Mark says 'maybe' and Art says definitely not. Noteable Futurama quote from the conversation:

On the TV, candidate Jack Johnson is debating candidate John Jackson

Johnson: It's time someone had the courage to stand up and say: I'm
against those things that everybody hates!
Jackson: Now, I respect my opponent. I think he's a good man. But,
quite frankly, I agree with everything he just said!
Fry: These are the candidates? They sound like clones.
[Squints] Wait a minute. They are clones!
Leela: Don't let their identical DNA fool you. They differ on some
key issues.
Johnson: I say your three cent titanium tax goes too far!
Jackson: And I say your three cent titanium tax doesn't go too far
enough!

Turning to actual news, Art and I comment on what can be a real positive move for the monetization of New Media video efforts:

Adsense For Video, Google Still Lagging

Google has announced a closed beta test of Adsense for Video.

According to the post on Inside Adsense, Adsense for Video consists of “in-stream” advertisements. Publishers define at what point the advertisements will appear for each video.

It’s a change in the right direction for Google. The previously announced advertising trials for YouTube consisted entirely of text advertising overlays that lead to video-on-video click to play advertisements; a form of advertising that can easily be ignored by the viewer. Whilst many may find in-video style advertising annoying, it at least comes with a guarantee that viewers are going to see the advertisement.

Adsense for Video, as it is currently explained lacks contextual delivery. Allowing publishers to select where a video is played may empower content creators, but it does nothing in terms of automatically optimizing advertising for the viewer.

Google appears to be lagging in this market; the technology to contextually serve advertising within video is already available, ScanScout providing such a service. Given the massive market share Google holds in the online video hosting marketplace through YouTube, it would normally be expected that Google would be leading development in this field. For reasons unknown, they are not doing so.

Looking for an alternative for Alexa? Your ship may have come in... Art and Mark both give positive reviews of Compete:

Compete API Open For Business

Web analytics startup Compete.com opened its API for public use today. Websites and applications can now access Compete’s data and incorporate it into their own products.

This is timely for the company, which competes directly with Amazon’s Alexa. Recenty, Statsaholic has been in a very public dispute with Alexa over use of its data, with both sides looking bad. That dispute recently went to litigation. As some services shy away from Alexa, either due to public perception or inflexibility over the Alexa APIs, Compete could grab additional market share.

In related SEOish news, Technorati's new changes to their search engine are not well recieved around the net:

Technorati's Authority
Technorati made some changes this month to show it's more than a blog search engine. "Technorati continues to grow well beyond its roots at the leading blog search engine; increasingly, we are the main aggregation point for all forms of social media on the Web, including blogs, of course, but also video, photos, audio such as podcasts and much more", noted David Sifry last month.

The site also introduced a score for each blog that measures the "authority". The pretentious name has one purpose: to cover the real meaning of the number. "Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has," explains Technorati's blog. So each blog that links to me (no matter if it's a spam blog or Slashdot) increases my authority with 1. Imagine what would happen if Google's PageRank was proportional to the number of links to a page in the last 6 months: the top search result for most of the queries should be a page from yahoo.com or google.com, sites that would have the PageRank 100,000. It would be easy to increase your PageRank: just create a new site that links to you; it's as important as a link from New York Times. But fortunately, Google found a better way to rank web pages:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.

Buzz Out Loud will probably be talking about this later today:

Senator Warns of Email Tax This Fall
cnet-declan writes "State and local governments in Washington this week began an all-out lobbying push for the power to tax the Internet, according to our article at News.com. A new Senate bill would usher in Internet sales taxes, and the Federation of Tax Administrators (representing state tax collectors) advised senators at a hearing on Wednesday not to renew a temporary moratorium limiting broadband taxes that expires in November. One irked Republican senator warned that unless the moratorium is renewed, we could start seeing email taxes by the end of the year. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey blames it on the Democrats taking over, as do Yahoo and eBay lobbyists. Is this a non-hoax version of bill 602P?"

Mark talks of his experiences with red-light cameras, and applaud's Texas's move to ban them:

Texas Looking To Ban Speed Cameras?
There are all sorts of problems with things like speed cameras and red light cameras, starting with technical problems and moving on to the more serious questions about whether or not they make the roads any safer. Since they're usually offered in combination with private companies who receive a large percentage of the fines, it's often pointed out that these cameras are more about making private companies and government coffers money, rather than any real attempt at increasing safety. Still, they've only become more and more popular recently, with a new speed camera catching over a thousand speeders in a single day. However, it looks like Texas may actually be heading in the other direction. Jeff Nolan points us to the news that Texas lawmakers have approved a ban on speed cameras. The law also requires signs warning about red light cameras -- though, it's unclear if that will help, since studies have shown red light cameras often increase accidents, as drivers are more likely to slam on their brakes.

Want to be part of the Rizzn-ite army? Indoctrination instructions here.

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP46

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 46 - download now - subscribe now

• A member of the TechPodcast Network @ techpodcast.com. If it's Tech, it's here.
  
• Remember, if you're listening on the podcast recording, you can call into the show live if you tune in through TalkShoe.com at 2:30 PM EST every weekday.
• If you like the podcast (and you haven't already given us a rating), head over and do so, and don't forget to sign up for the discussion list.
• Other Podcast Plugs:
  
• TalkGirls comes on Tuesday nights. Check out the TalkGirls Podcast ... it's good times!
• Cotolo Chronicles: Frank is a good friend of the show, and an associate of the late great Wolfman Jack. Check out his podcast.
• NewsReal: Good friend to Art and I - has one of the best hours of news podcast each week.
• You Are the Guest: Bill Grady turns the microphone on the internet's most interesting people.
  
• Sponsors:
  
• Try GoToMeeting for 45 days! Visit www.GoToMeeting.com/podcast to start your free trial today.
  
• J. Douglas Barker - Voice-overs for you! www.romancingthetone.com

We're focusing on immigration today, and the immigration bill being debated in the Senate right now for two reasons... we've neglected the news last week, and two, Art isn't here to provide is violent protest of immigration to America.

This comes from the Patriot Post:

“This administration has a case of the slows on border enforcement. If we have border enforcement, we will be able at that point to start to regulate the internal problem that we’ve got. Because as long as you’ve got a revolving door and you have no border—and this 2,000-mile porous border, incidentally, is our biggest homeland security problem; it’s not just an immigration problem, it’s a homeland security problem—we need to build the border fence. We need to have a Border Patrol which is big enough to get the job done, and we need to be able to ask people when they want to come into America, knock on the front door, because the back door is going to be closed.” —Rep. Duncan Hunter

I spoke at length on my ruminations on border security, immigration, and Ron Paul. I read this quote from the most recent edition of the Patriot Post, a reader's question and the Post's reply:

“It appears The Patriot is following the Leftmedia’s lead and ignoring Ron Paul. He did not even get a mention in Alexander’s essay, ‘The GOP—a party in distress’, last Friday. Why?” —Chesapeake, Virginia

Editor’s Reply: First, you know we always follow the “Leftmedia lead”! Second, we publish Ron Paul’s excellent arguments about domestic policy issues, but we do NOT support Paul as a presidential candidate because his isolationist foreign policy and national security positions are disastrously, appallingly and potentially, catastrophically wrong. Two of the president’s most important constitutional responsibilities pertain to foreign policy and national security, and Paul’s Libertarian views earn him an F- in those departments.

The bottom line is this: Why does Ron Paul get a bum wrap when he's the only candidate with a sure-fire plan to toughen border security and solve our woes in foreign entanglements? No other candidate on either side of the aisle has proposed a legitimate response to that question.

Furthermore, why does Ron Paul rank at the bottom of polls done by newspapers and certain Old Media organisations, when even now in New Media and even certain Old Media polls (like FOX and MSNBC), he's leading the pack? Is it conspiracy, bias, or his rabid base? You're responses are welcome here - guesswho@rizzn.com. They'll be read on the show this week.

Turning to other political news, we revisit the Florida Primary Voting story:

Florida shakes up early presidential voting
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. --Gov. Charlie Crist signed a bill Monday moving Florida's 2008 presidential primary to Jan. 29 and shaking up the race by bypassing a dozen other states set for Feb. 5.

The move puts Florida's primary, which had been scheduled for March, behind only the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire primary and on the same day as South Carolina's Democratic primary.

Florida has by far the largest population of any of the early voting states set for January and is the most expensive in which to campaign, giving well-funded candidates an even greater advantage and possibly drawing attention away from the smaller states.

"This is going to require the serious candidates to spend very, very large amounts of money and time in Florida," said Merle Black, a politics professor at Emory University in Atlanta. "If you can't compete in Florida, that's going to be a sign that you're not a serious contender."

Crist, a Republican, and other state GOP leaders have argued Florida's diversity and size merit more influence in deciding the nation's leadership. The delegate-rich state decided the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Florida's early election could also have implications in the Feb. 5 primaries scheduled in a dozen other states, including New York and California.

A win in Florida is a big prize because the state is seen as a microcosm of the nation with its diverse population, so it shows how a candidate might do in other states, Black said.

Remember... that's the same state who's Democrats aren't going to regard the votes of the party members, but simply decide on their own who should be the state's Democratic candidate. Does anyone but me see the irony of who the Democratic Presidential candidate is going to be largely decided by non-democratic methods?

In other political news, just a bit more about immigration:

Bush's backing of bipartisan immigration deal splits GOP

The Washington Post and McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — President Bush's embrace of this week's Senate bipartisan immigration deal has split the Republican Party.

Capitol Hill operators were besieged with calls from interest groups Friday, and immigration clearly was Topic A on conservative talk-radio shows. Other key figures, including analysts at the Heritage Foundation and National Review columnists, derided the agreement as a sellout of conservative principles, while most GOP presidential candidates criticized the plan as a form of amnesty — a characterization rejected by the White House.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who last year said similar efforts for a comprehensive immigration bill were "reasonable," called the deal reached this week the "wrong approach" to the problem. "Any legislation that allows illegal immigrants to stay in the country indefinitely, as the new 'Z-Visa' does, is a form of amnesty," he said.

Turning to Tech News, let's be talkin' bout Bebo!:

Is Bebo Worth $1 billion?

See our earlier post on possible acquisition talks between Yahoo and Bebo for $1 billion or so. The original report for the story comes from the UK’s Telegraph, based on a very weak source - “silicon valley gossip.” Still, we though it was worth a look at the most recent data to see if Bebo really could pull off a $1 billion or more sale.

We’ve pulled worldwide Comscore stats for MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. The most recent data (March) shows MySpace with 107 million unique monthly visitors. Facebook had 32 million and Bebo had 13.7 million. Bebo users tend to spend a lot of time on the site - on average they view just over 20 pages per day each, about equal to Facebook and a bit more than MySpace..

According to Comscore, Bebo today is about as big as Facebook was in May 06. Based on fairly aggresive growth estimates, Yahoo valued Facebook for as much as $1.6 billion at that time or a little later. If Bebo sold for $1 billion today, the buyer would be paying around $73/unique visitor, which is certainly in the range of acceptable.

Both Facebook and MySpace are growing faster than Bebo is today. But neither of those properties are available to Yahoo, so perhaps they are dipping down a little deeper into the social networking well.

In other social networking news, I take this opportunity to narrowcast a bit to those in my audience who I know are closely involved in social networking projects. Bottom line: be the platform.

Facebook Going Platform
It's no secret that Facebook has big ambitions and has supposedly turned down huge buyout offers. However, at the same time, there's been a lot of talk about how, despite tons of page views, advertisers weren't entirely thrilled with the returns they got from advertising in Facebook. Still, the site is unquestionably popular, and in many ways more palatable than MySpace, which has built up a tremendously negative reputation in the eyes of many. Over the past year, Facebook has also been aggressive in rolling out a variety of new features to make it start looking like much more than "yet another social network," and the latest is that the company is going to start positioning itself much more as a platform for others to build on. It's already made some effort to allow others to build on its platform via APIs, but this sounds like they're going even further in that direction. There's certainly no guarantee that this will actually catch on, but we've long believed that the strategy to really "own" the next generation of internet users has to be based on being the platform on which apps are built. This is something Google should have done three years ago, but they continue to fall down on the job and certainly have opened up a huge opportunity for others to do it instead. Seeing Facebook as the latest such entrant isn't necessarily a huge surprise, but it again shows that Google's inability to focus on the platform side of things has opened the door for many others.

In obligatory Google news:

Google Cracks Down on Made for AdSense Sites
JenSense reports that a lot of AdSense users who built sites with almost no original content, but full of AdSense ads, had their accounts removed.

Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st, giving publishers about two weeks notice to prepare for the loss of the AdSense accounts... and since it seems that arbitrage publishers are the ones receiving this account disabled email, to give those publisher enough time to shut down accounts or use an alternative source for their outgoing traffic.

These users usually bought cheap keywords from AdWords and sent the visitors to their sites that also displayed ads, but for more expensive keywords. The sites didn't contain almost anything valuable, most of the time they scraped content from other sites, but they made a lot of money by tricking users.

Related links to this story: viralinstigator.com (not reccomended as a service).

And in the rumor mill this week Feedburner + Google = Feedboogle? GooBurner? heh...:

Should Google Buy FeedBurner?
When I first heard about FeedBurner I wondered what's so great about "burning your feed". Well, you get stats for your feed, you can customize your feed, add dynamic content at the bottom of each feed entry and transform that weird XML file into a nice HTML page that lets people subscribe to the feed.

FeedBurner transformed from a site that offered a way to make your feeds more humane, to the one-stop-shop for bloggers. They now offer stats for your blog, email subscriptions for feeds, ads for feeds and blogs. FeedBurner has dedicated services for companies, so there's no wonder that AOL, Wall Street Journal, Reuters are among their clients. But even if FeedBurner grew so much over the years, they keep adding new features, the customer support is excellent even for non-paying users.

There's a rumor that says Google intends to buy FeedBurner and this seems a very good idea. Not just because FeedBurner is the Google of feeds and has a great team. What could FeedBurner do for Google?

* make Blogger's feeds smarter out of the box

* FeedBurner's services could become totally free (currently you have to pay for more advanced stats)

* offer a lot of interesting information to mine

* integrate the stats for feeds with Measure Map and create the perfect analytics solution for blogs

* FeedBurner has a very big number of feeds: more than 700,000. Google has a lot of advertisers, but the AdSense for feeds program is still in closed beta.

Has Blogging Reached It's Peak?

There's a lot of things I could talk about today. It's definitely been a hellish week for the ol' Mr. Rizzn here. A lot of my stress has been brought on by this guy, but I've gotten my nerdy revenge, with my smooth SEO skills. Doing a Google Search for who is now, I suppose, a declared nemesis of mine, will yield my account of his atrocious behavior at Rank 5. Go me!

It's not been all bad. I'm also at Rank 6 for this Google Search, which is a good thing (I was, but now I'm at 11 and 12).

At any rate, I picked up this story today from ValleyWag for today's RizWords. It all refers back to the State of the Blogosphere release by Technorati recently that noted the end or at least stall of the growth of the blogosphere. There's been a lot of talk as to why this has happened, but no real concrete theories that set well with me and go towards really hitting towards the heart of the issue.

As you real Rizzn-ites know, it's darn hard to create a viable business model that supports the participants in any Indy-Journalism venture. I've attempted to create several such ventures here .. the most recent of course being the Oblong Box network, ModernOpinion and PoddedMeat. Other similar ventures in the past were things like BlipMedia and even my own blog, Rizzn.com, what you are reading right now.

I've never really publicly discussed why these ventures have failed, but I'll bet the intelligent reader can guess: Money.

It comes down to money, and the inability to properly monetize the production process of producing quality online content. Let's go down my list of ventures, and explore the sticking points.

When I started BlipMedia, arguably one of my most successful projects, I was just in the right place at the right time with a good idea. It was a free podcast hosting company, with the added benefit of having instant updates available to the content producers - they didn't need to be in their studio to create podcasts... they could simply call in from anywhere they could find a telephone. This was a novel idea at the time, and that feature combined with there being free unlimited hosting made for an explosive growth on the site.

Unfortunately, then, as now, there was a real problem finding advertisers willing to speculate with their dollars on monetizing such a bleeding edge media. This fact, combined with a devestating hurricane that destroyed our office in Florida, meant we could no longer keep the service alive. If not for that, we might still be around today, and we might be breaking even - as of current, there isn't that many people willing to venture out in the podcasting market to advertise, although this is quickly changing now, thanks to the efforts of companies like TalkShoe, PodTrac, and Blubrry.

After that, I started Oblong Box - and this was the offer I put out to a bevy of writers: Have a free domain name, free hosting, and free design. All you must do is post to the blog. I had worked out a series of monetization deals with companies like Blogitive and PayPerPost that should have subsidized all my expenses, and put us way out on top. Unfortunately, as in the Blip days, Blogitive and PayPerPost were very slow to sign up new advertisers, additionally they created very complex and restrictive posting policies that more or less strangled our financial growth.

As a result, I was unable to pass the cash down to the writers quickly enough to keep them around, and one by one, they ended up dropping off the network, and consequently, we only have a fraction of the writers on the network who still write - those that write simply for writing's sake.

ModernOpinion was based upon the same principals, but with an optimized website and domain status in an aim to get around the restrictive policies that PayPerPost and Blogitive had instituted. Unfortunately, it was not enough, and despite investing hundreds in promotion and advertising on the site, the money was not enough to pay the writers, and much like OblongBox, they lost interest, and stopped writing.

PoddedMeat is a similar story, although technically the company is not dead, simply on hiatus. We tried another bleeding edge technology - video podcasting, right at the start of the video podcast craze that iTunes was attempting (and continues to) fuel.

Again, though, we could not find advertisers that would keep pace with production costs. Simply put, there are no ad agencies out there that can get enough money to subsidize these types of ventures. At it's peak, PoddedMeat's two shows were recieving in excess of 60,000 views/downloads a week. Unfortunately, this was not enough to entice advertisers into making the leap to the new medium.

There are simply not enough ways for the average blogger and podcaster out there to make enough money to justify their habit. As I have seen, only those with a true passion for writing, podcasting, or video podcasting will continue, regardless of what it pays. And, it would appear, there are only around 15 million of these people in the world.

15 million is a large number, though, isn't it? That's still a lot of people, and with that number, someone should be making money.

That's an excellent point, and several people are making money off this. Just not the people who are doing the bulk of the work (i.e. the content producers).

Digg, Google, PayPerPost, Blogitive - these are the people who make a lot of money off these bloggers. However, when it comes time to reward them, they are handed a pittance. As I've said on the show many times, my blog has been here for around 10 years. I've been monetizing it for about half that time, primarily with AdSense, although I've used PayPerPost, Blogitive, BlogAds, and other smaller services ad various points.

AdSense, on my best month, produced around $24.00, shortly after I broke the Christopher Walken story and posted the pictures I took of Suge Knight being hauled off to the hospital after he was shot in the leg. In total, I've recieved about $200 over three years from AdSense.

Blogitive produced me about $600 over five months.

PayPerPost produced me about $200 over two months.

BlogAds produced me about $24 over one year.

I produce consistent quality content and have a significant audience that reads my words, and many of my ventures have grown to the point where actual percentage points of the internet have been exposed to me (at least that's what Alexa says). I have my own wikipedia page, for cryin' out loud!

Despite this, the blogosphere continues to punish me monetarily. I'm stubborn enough to keep coming back.

If you're looking for your reason why the blogosphere is slow to grow, though, that's it.

/rizzn