Google has opened its Content Network to other ad networks, allowing them to serve up ads. The Mountain View, Calif. company made the move after receiving requests for new ways to generate revenue in AdSense, and gain more control over the ads that appear on sites.
The service will roll out in the coming months as choice networks get certified. The goal of this launch is to increase AdSense publisher revenue by expanding the pool of quality display advertisers, according to a Google spokesperson. Ad networks did not previously participate in the auction. But with this change, Google certified ad networks will compete just as AdWords advertisers do today.
Google does not expect any noticeable change in AdWords advertiser costs, but not all believe that’s true. And although it may prove to be positive for some participants, others could see added competition that drives up the average cost-per-click (CPC) price. The deal doesn’t pertain to text ads, only CPM display ads.
David Szetela, Clix Marketing founder, says opening the Google Content Network to a variety of ad networks could drive down available impressions and clicks, since ads from non-Google networks might “crowd out ads” from the Google AdWords Content Network.
Opening the network would also give advertisers “more eyeballs” and a better shot at reaching select consumers, such as “one-arm pet lovers.” There’s maybe a few thousand of those pet lovers out there, and opening the network adds a huge pool of inventory into the system to find those people more easily,” according to Aaron Goldman, managing partner at Connectual. “It you’re an advertiser running with exchanges and networks it helps you,” he says. “Publishers will have more people competing for ad inventory, and have a better shot of getting a higher effective CPM and more relevant ads on the page.”
Goldman and “AdWords for Dummies” Author Howie Jacobson believe the purchase and integration of DoubleClick has become the impetuous for the decision to open the network. The change makes it more difficult to rank ads and become successful. “It’s a lucrative space, but few people do it well,” Jacobson says. “The AdWords program default asks you to sign up for the Content Network, and you create an account as if you were doing search. It’s kind of the red-headed stepchild. People don’t know you need to create different ads and strategy, so it gets ignored. And until very recently it was difficult to know where your ads appeared.”
When a newbie advertiser comes into the network they imitate others, but don’t understand what they’re doing, Jacobson says. So, he provides five steps to prevent from “capsizing by the wave of third-party competition.” No. 1: Separate content and search traffic into different campaigns. No. 2: Discover the sites serving up ads and how much traffic and revenue each one produces. No. 3: Learn about the sites’ visitors. No. 4: Find additional sites using Google Ad Planner. No. 5: Create image ads to keep ahead of the competition.

Blogging has become a major social media marketing phenomenon over the years—so much so that even the US Federal Trade Commission is considering rules for bloggers to follow when working with marketers. Worldwide research from Text 100 shows just how close that relationship has become.
Nearly nine in 10 US bloggers told Text 100 they welcomed contact from PR firms or corporations with information, comments or suggestions. E-mail was bloggers’ preferred means of contact, especially in the US.
All of the US bloggers surveyed by Text 100 had been contacted by marketers in the past six months. Majorities in Europe and Asia-Pacific said the same, at 86% and 70%, respectively.
Contact was generally frequent: 96% of respondents in the US reported being contacted by PR firms at least weekly.
Bloggers are big on transparency when it comes to marketer involvement. Between 85% and 89% of US bloggers agreed that they should acknowledge when a post has been written in return for some sort of compensation. Response rates were somewhat lower in Europe and Asia-Pacific, but a majority of bloggers worldwide believed in acknowledging sponsor involvement.
Text 100 suggests one way for marketers to get blog buzz is to use “social media releases” rather than traditional press releases. Bloggers do not want to copy and paste the same article that will appear in every major news outlet—they would prefer a “deconstructed” release so they can find the angle most appropriate to their unique readership.

Google reported Tuesday that it will give the average Joe who creates and uploads a video to YouTube the option of making money from the plays through a revenue-sharing deal. The Mountain View, Calif. company has extended the YouTube Partnership Program (YPP) to include popular videos on their site.
Shenaz Zack, Google product manager, explains in a post on the company’s blog that people with videos racking up “lots of views” could get an invite from YouTube to make money from the content. Factors under consideration include the number of views, frequency of the video going viral and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service.
Producers of eligible videos will receive an email and see an “Enable Revenue Sharing” message next to their video on the watch page, as well as in other places in the person’s account. Zack explains that once the video becomes eligible, YouTube will sell advertising against the content and pay the owner a revenue share into their Google AdSense account monthly. Those who don’t have a Google AdSense account will need to create one.
Individuals are not eligible for many of the benefits of user partnerships, such as enhanced channel features or the ability to monetize other videos in their account, so Zack encourages all to apply for membership into the YPP.
Zack says the delay in offering YPP to individual users stems from a need to develop the proper content management tools and other infrastructures to handle the service. The revenue-sharing platform also means more income for YouTube.
Google continues to struggle when it comes to turning a profit for YouTube three years after agreeing to buy the video-sharing site in a $1.65 billion stock deal.
Trip Chowdhry, a senior analyst at Global Equities Research, says Google should have generated a profit from YouTube within three years based on the purchase price. “YouTube should be generating $1 billion in revenue and be profitable for the acquisition to be considered smart and good,” he says. “I don’t think they generated even $20 million in revenue per year so far. It’s a very dumb acquisition. You don’t pay $1.65 billion for a lab experiment.”
It’s not that YouTube doesn’t generate high traffic. Nielsen data indicates that 92.2 million U.S. home and work Internet users visited YouTube in July, and each person spent, on average, a total of 1 hour, 19 minutes and 21 seconds.
Chowdhry says expanding YPP to include videos from individuals demonstrates another failed example, because he doesn’t believe it will add enough revenue to make a difference. He says growing site traffic doesn’t mean anything if it can’t earn revenue and generate profit.

While display ad success has traditionally been measured by click-through rates, online marketers have begun looking beyond such direct-response metrics for ways to measure branding.
A panel-based study from comScore and dunnhumbyUSA set out to do just that, by monitoring online ad exposure and subsequent supermarket purchases.
The research firms found that online ads were more effective than advertising on TV for increasing sales lift for consumer packaged goods (CPG). The CPG sales lift among US consumers exposed to online ads in 2009 was 9% over three months, with 80% of campaigns studied showing a statistically significant lift.
That compares to 8% lift over 12 months for TV ads, according to Information Resources Inc. (IRI). Just 36% of the TV campaigns studied by IRI in its “How Advertising Works” research paper induced a statistically significant sales lift.
“These early results confirm the ability of online advertising to successfully build retail sales of CPG brands on par with the impact of television advertising,” said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore. “It is likely that the more precise targeting ability of the Internet—especially in terms of accurately reaching the desired demographic segment—is a key reason for its effectiveness.”
The results should remind marketers that the click is not the only metric of success.
“While direct response is attractive to marketers because of the immediate gratification of almost-instant results, they must take a longer view when measuring branding effects, which are cumulative in nature,” wrote eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey in the special report “Online Brand Measurement: Connecting the Dots.”

Google’s domination of the search market continues, according to July 2009 data from comScore qSearch. But Microsoft’s Bing is making small inroads.
Microsoft sites were the only major search player to increase market share between June and July 2009, climbing 0.5 percentage points. Search query share going to Google and Yahoo! was chipped away slightly, by about 0.3 percentage points each.
Google still held tight to the top spot, with the vast majority of July’s searches. Almost one-fifth of searches were performed at Yahoo! sites, and 8.9% at Microsoft sites—a share they hope to increase as part of their upcoming partnership.
Total US search queries were down 3% month over month in July. Microsoft was the only search provider to see an increase in queries, of 2%. At Google and Yahoo!, queries were down 4% and 5%, respectively.
According to ForeSee Results, one reason Google remains firmly entrenched in first place is that the search giant enjoys very high customer satisfaction. Google scored an 86 out of 100 on the University of Michigan’s latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the highest for any search property. Yahoo! ranked second, with a score of 77.
“Google is unquestionably king of search, so the only competition is for second place,” said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results. “The research was done before Bing entered the market, so we don’t know what effect its entry will have. But Google’s customers are pretty happy and have little reason to try something new, so Bing has a real uphill battle ahead.”
That battle has high stakes: eMarketer projects nearly $12 billion will be spent on US search advertising in 2009, almost 49% of the total US online ad market.

An open source tool that Google created to test and compare site search results from two separate search engines has been made available for free.

Side-by-Side, offered through Enterprise Labs, lets employees test and rate results from two different search queries on the same body of data while searching a company’s intranet to determine the one that provides the better results.

It allows users to tell search administrators whether the correct results come to the top of the search engine results page (SERP) by allowing them to compare two engines side by side. For example, it would allow users to view side-by-side results from a company’s existing site search engine, and Google Search Appliance 6.0, the latest release. People who use the tool see two panes on the screen, each containing a set of search results.

Only 25% of businesses have enterprise search solutions, says Cyrus Mistry, Google product manager for Side-by-Side, citing a recent stat from the marketing department. “I would have thought most companies have something,” he says. “We think of enterprise search as an overarching search-all-of-your-system solution, but many times companies will have a portal and tools that come integrated with search.”

The company’s administrator decides the set of queries, and users visit an internal Web site where they see the queries and vote on the set of search results they prefer. After voting, a side-by-side tool reveals the site that received the most votes. It also lets companies test configurations, shows results, and determines whether there’s enough data to be statistically significant. Side-by-Side is available for free on the Google Enterprise Labs Web site.

Mistry says Google developed the tool for internal use when Google employees needed an easy way to test one search configuration versus another. “We experimented with many of the old-fashioned ways that were very cumbersome,” he says. “We would make them rank every query for every result — literally all results.”

When Mistry first arrived at Mountain View, Calif.-based Google three years ago, he was given 75 queries to test. Knowing there is a much easier method to accomplish the same task, he put a bug in the ears of Google engineers to create a side-by-side comparison tool to see the two sets of results. The tool would enable users to vote on the one that performed better.

In the end, users just want to see the best results at the top of the search engine results page (SERP), he says.

About 25,000 enterprise search customers use one of Google’s site search tools: Google Site Search, Google Search Appliance, or Google Mini.

Whodunit fans of CSI:Miami and CSI:New York will be happy to learn that an interactive version of the popular TV crime series is running at the Ambassador theatre in Dublin from this weekend until December.

Visitors aged ten and over to CSI: The Experience can ‘investigate’ a crime scene for €18 or try and solve all three crimes for €50. EMS Exhibits have made cutting edge technology available for fingerprinting, DNA sampling, toxicology, ballistics and dental records examinations.

One of the scenes involves the body of a model found in a motel car park. The second is of a man found slumped in the driver’s seat of a car which crashed into a house. In the third scene, a human skull and bones are found in the desert. Was it murder or just a misguided tourist?

The CSI interactive show starts in a week when a TV presenter in Brazil stands accused by police of killing off drug traffickers and filming the action to boost his Canal Livre show’s ratings. Former police officer Wallace Souza also faces separate charges of drug trafficking and gang involvement.

But the fact that Souza is a state legislator in the Amazonian jungle city of Manaus, he is currently immune from prosecution in Brazil.

The Coca-Cola Company has launched a Twitter and Facebook page to bring awareness to a new soft drink dispenser that relies on radio frequency identification (RFID) technology it has begun to test in the southern California market at a variety of restaurants, such as Carl’s Jr., El Pollo Loco, Jack in the Box, and Subway. The smart-machine collects extremely detailed information about drink choices (the dispenser can mix up to 100 different soft drinks) and continually relays it to the company — the Terminator of vending machines.
While the Facebook fan page has more than 1,000 members since the launch at the end of July, Helen Tarleton, senior communications manager at Coca-Cola, just grabbed the Twitter page, @ccfreestyle, late last week. As of Monday 11:38 PST, Tarleton had only sent a test tweet. “Social media will drive traffic to participating outlets,” she says.
Coca-Cola Freestyle, the brand name for the fountain dispenser, dispenses more than 100 beverage brands from one unit. While it took more than four years to plan, the platform’s design taps RFID technology from Seattle, Wash.-based Impinj.
Monza tag chips and Indy reader chips provide the core RFID capability for the system. It uses RFID to monitor, track and maintain dispenser operations as well as to provide real-time business analytics about product consumption and preferences.
There are 15 dispensers on the market. The network will include 75 by the end of September, according to Tarleton. “That’s when we’ll really start to collect data,” she says. “Each unit will connect to the Internet and talk back and forth to the main system.”
Tarleton says a direct ordering system, Coke Smart, will let customers who use the machine in their store order from an e-commerce site on the Internet. Coca-Cola also can download new recipes direct to the machine.
Freestyle will let Coca-Cola test new drink flavors, such as adding various vitamin combinations to flavored waters and juices. The dispensers contain 30 flavor cartridges tagged with RFID that mix up 100 different drink combinations. Each dispenser unit contains an RFID reader. The dispensers collect data on customer choice. The systems will collect data on sales, which in turn will give marketers information on where to best market specific products.
Brian Garber complains on the Coca-Cola Freestyle Facebook fan page wall that there’s “no iced tea on these machines,” although he finds the “dispensers pretty nifty.” Priya Mapara calls the machine “Amazing!” after going to the Subway location on Golden Lantern in Dana Point, Calif.
Consumers also have begun to video their experience with the Freestyle machines and upload the content to Google’s video sharing site, YouTube.
Tarleton believes combining consumer feedback on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter with data from the Freestyle machines will help Coca-Cola provide consumers with more choices. Consumers can find a full list of southern, Calif. locations testing the machine on the company’s Facebook page.

The Irish final of the World Cyber Games – considered the equivalent of the Olympics for computer gamers – takes place today. Four of Ireland’s top gamers will battle it out during the final, with the eventual winner going on to represent Ireland at the international World Cyber Games in China this November. The four finalists will compete in the ‘TrackMania Nations Forever’ game, a car-racing game in which players strive to achieve the fastest lap-time. Three of the finalists are still in their teens: Diarmuid Ryan from Meath is only 15, while his opponents Sean Walsh and Graham Mills (both from Dublin) are 16 and 18 respectively. The fourth finalist is Alan Brierton from Longford, who is 22. Sean Walsh is the hotly-tipped favourite for tomorrow’s final: the 16-year-old is regarded as Ireland’s top ‘TrackMania’ gamer and has already secured a contract with a professional gaming team based in the UK. China’s Ambassador to Ireland, His Excellency Mr. Liu Biwei, will attend tomorrow’s final and present Ireland’s gaming champion with his prize.

Realex Payments has signed up to be headline sponsor for the 2009 Irish Web Awards. They will take place on October 10th, 2009 in the Radisson SAS, Golden Lane. The Awards, now in their second year are unique for Ireland in that they are totally free to enter with every entry being judged by a panel of judges who use a publicised scorecard. This year, each website’s score will also be made public. Categories for the Web Awards include: Best Practice, Most Beautiful Website in Ireland, Most Useful Website in Ireland, Most Accessible Website and the overall Grand Prix of Best Website in Ireland. Last year’s winners included The Irish Times, RTE, Boards.ie, Phantom FM and PollDaddy. Speaking about the Web Awards and their transparent philosophy, organiser Damien Mulley said: “The web has always been about democracy and transparency and so it seems right to follow suit with these Awards. As well as an all-welcoming entry criteria and all the scores being made available, we also listen to the public and have changed some categories and added new ones based on feedback. It’s as much about the community as it is about giving out the trophies to winners.”