Google announced that by the last week of January, there will be changes on their Adsense referral units.
Adsense referrals will be retired to publishers outside North America, Latin America and Japan.For publishers not located in any of the three regions detailed above, we'll soon be retiring referrals promoting AdSense. We've found that this referral product has not performed as well as we had hoped in these regions. Again, please keep in mind that you can still generate referrals for the other products listed under the 'Referrals' section of your AdSense Setup tab.
That's fine with me. I don't really earn from adsense referrals that's why i stopped putting it on my websites months ago. Remaining publishers from the North, Latin America and Japan will also encounter changes with their adsense referrals by returning it to it's original pricing structure.
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technorati tags: adsense referrals, google
Adsense Referrals Changes
Sightings of new Adsense unit similar to Widgetbucks
As I do my daily blog hopping (and dropping of entrecards at the same time), an article on Problogger caught my attention. A new interactive Adsense unit was reported to have been spotted on several sites.
The picture above was seen on a UK site- Technical Itch. Seems like Google has begun testing new adsense formats that will compete with other popular shopping widgets like Widgetbucks and Chitika's eMinimall. Another test ad was also spotted on freakitude.com.
The widget, i mean gadget, has the usual "Ads by Google" on the right side, and a link with the words "Add the Google Checkout gadget" on the left side. Does this mean ads displayed will only come from sellers of Google's Checkout service, not Adwords? There's actually a gadget similar to this, called "Shop with Google Checkout," which you can only add to your personalized iGoogle homepage.
So, has anyone else seen these test ads? What's your say with this new adsense unit? Do you think Google will still allow publishers to display third party shopping widgets once they officially launch this ad format?
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technorati tags: google, adsense, google gadget ads,google checkout gadget ads
Google 'powerless' to stop AdSense theft
I personally encountered this before, I was checking one of my sites on an internet cafe months ago and was shocked when I saw porn site ads displayed on my adsense spots. I know it can't be from Google, coz if it's from them then they are already violating their own TOS. I was using Internet Explorer then so I tried checking it on Firefox, and there the regular adsense text ads can be seen. Found out that it was some kind of a malware that infected IE on the pc i was using. There I realized what if other users also have the same trojans on their pc, knowing that majority of web surfers are still using IE (w/c is more vulnerable to spywares), there is indeed a big possibility that this can affect not only mine but also other publishers' adsense earnings.
Unfortunately, according to Nishad Herath, senior researcher at McAfee's AvertLabs, Google is powerless to stop the Trojan stealing Google's space on third-party sites."There's nothing a search vendor can do to protect against the problem since it works by locally modifying content that's being displayed on the browser. There's absolutely nothing that Google or any ad vendor can do about that."
Google said its policy is to remove sites that redirect users to malicious pages, but this approach will not prevent the Trojan from damaging its revenue since it sits on the user's PC and causes the browser to bypass the AdSense network completely. So my suggestion to all internet users out there, always keep your computers safe by frequently updating your anti-virus/spyware programs, and try using safer browsers like Firefox. ^_^
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technorati tags: google, adsense trojan, malware, porn sites
Are you a moron? Click here now!
Ah, what a dumb year it was! And with that Fortune created the "101 Dumbest Moments in Business" for the year 2007.
This particular adsense unit shown below just brought Google into the said list:
To test Google's ability to block harmful advertising, Belgian IT security consultant Didier Stevens posts an ad that reads "Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!" It is accepted by Google and displayed 259,723 times; 409 web surfers actually clicked on the ad.
Other tech groups also included on the list were Apple, Sony and Intel. One group I noticed missing on the list is Bill Gates and co. Does this mean Microsoft didn't do anything stupid this year?
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technorati tags: dumbest moments, business, google, adsense