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Alex Schultz

Category: adsense

  • Geotargetting, IP sniffing and behavioral targeting has a bright future

    I saw some very interesting research from Forrester today about the growth of online advertising. They feel that the growth of direct response advertising like PPC will at some stage be outpaced by brand advertising, banners and so on, online.

    Look at it this way, of my sites my cocktail recipes site has a smaller level of traffic than my paper airplanes site but the cocktail recipes traffic is predominantly adults in the 18-35 bracket which is definitely of more value to banner advertisers.

    Users unknowingly tell webmasters and ad networks a lot about themselves. Operating system, referring domain, browser and version, JavaScript enabled. I am positive that someone who elects to use firefox is telling you something meaningful about themselves.

    Geotargetting is already huge at a country level and is the first step into more granular targeting of users. A typical way of monitoring offline ad performance is to have dark regions and light regions and then observing what happens in each region.

    Google has made a move with CPM banners into their adsense network but I wonder if their brand has the elasticity to stretch beyond being a highly targeted direct response advertiser. There is a space here for someone else to really nail this… could it be Yahoo?

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  • Using PHP setcookie() for an adsense test

    I have wondered for a long time whether people who come to my site via google behave differently in respect to ads than other users. There are lots of reasons for wondering this but specifically for now I am thinking that potentially someone who has just come from google may be more likely to click on an adsense link than someone who has come from somewhere else.

    Thankfully I have 10s of k’s of ad impressions daily to test this on and the technology isn’t exactly challenging. I have set up a cookie on every page of my largest site that drops on a users computer once every 72hrs where they have been referred from.

    Then lower down the page on every page I have a similar include that powers my advertising. Within this include I read in the cookie and test whether it contains the string “.google.” (not perfect I know but good enough for my purposes.

    Note the === in the strpos() function is because strpos() doesn’t always return false when it is false therefore you have to look for responses equivalent to false (===) rather than just equal to false (==). So for me this looks like it could be a really interesting test, I will of course paste the results of the test here and if there’s any substantial difference in results I will of course make changes to capitalize.

    I may choose later to also split out people with cookie blocking (since I love vinny’s article) and see how they behave but for now I will just let the results tick over like this for a couple of weeks.

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  • Paying for community created content

    Postbubble has an awesome article today about digg, netscape, social news and remuneration for community driven content. I think this is a really interesting area since there is inherent value in content created by the community but there is also value in giving people a soap box.

    At the moment digg, amazon reviews, wikipedia and even webmasterworld run on a similar basis to speaker’s corner… I like the sound of my own voice, I love having an audience hence I contribute.

    There are however a new breed of sites out there that are starting to pay people to create content. Some examples are Google Video, forums.digitalpoint.com, Netscape Navigators and About.com guides.

    The old adage goes there is no better price than free but as a contributor, you know what? I want to get paid.

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  • Releasing an API can make you more money

    So facebook have released an API earlier this week. I just can’t see the revenue upside for them. This is a neat segway into the flipside of my earlier post saying natural search APIs are poorly supported due to the lack of revenue upside.

    For me the power of a lot of sites is in the platform they offer and the fact that this platform is their revenue base. APIs that enable use of a platform to make the API owner more money are the best supported tools out there.

    I am writing this post through the typepad api using the great windows live blogging tool and Typepad simply don’t care since I pay them for using their platform. Offering out their API is helping to keep me a loyal customer.

    eBay’s API is awesome. Without the eBay API such companies as channeladvisor and marketworks probably wouldn’t exist. The beauty of this API is simple, eBay makes money wherever and however users buy and list so long as they use the eBay platform.

    I am a passionate fan of forward thinking corporations who use APIs to their advantage. In summary if you want to make money from an API make sure it’s users interacting with the platform that’s valuable for you and not visitors to your website.

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