What do offline media journalists have in common with Made For AdSense publishers, i.e. online publishers who create sites with junk content for the sole purpose of making money off of Google’s pay-per-click ads? Quite a lot it seems — Google is destroying their business models from either end of the content quality spectrum. Compare [...]

Google has so many conflicts of interest, e.g. delivering the highest quality “organic” search results vs. tolerating high ranking sites that clearly have no purpose other than to make money from Google AdSense (i.e. “made for AdSense” sites). There’s also pay-per-click arbitrage, where someone buys keywords in Google AdWords in order to send users to [...]

It’s clear now that the media and advertising industries, which thanks to Google and Web 2.0 now include the software industry, will be dominated by a new breed of company — the vertically integrated media and advertising company. Google’s AdWords created a new model by combining a media company — Google’s search results and its [...]

I saw one of Google’s “agency relationship managers” give a pitch to a top agency, where she gave the standard line that Google doesn’t want to be an ad agency. I didn’t believe it for a second. And neither does WPP, one of the top agency holding companies, which just announced the acquisition of 24/7 [...]

The following piece was co-authored with Robert Young.
One by one, the big media companies and the Internet giants have started to ante up for the big poker game over the future of the video content business. Google started it all with its acquisition of YouTube. Then GE’s NBC-Universal and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp responded by [...]

I’ve spent a lot of time on Publishing 2.0 talking about the impact of digital media on periodical publishing, i.e. newspapers and magazines, and about online publishing broadly defined, e.g. search results as a form of publishing, that I’ve only rarely looked at the publishing form that gave birth to modern publishing — the book. [...]

Everybody in the video content business is focused — to the point of obsession — with distribution. Viacom is going to distribute through Joost. NBC Universal and News Corp are creating their own distribution channel. CBS is going to distribute through everybody and their dog.
All these content owners are right to be focused on distribution. [...]

As anticipated, Google has launched a “cost-per-action” advertising program that allows advertisers to pay only for specific results, such as a sale, lead, sign-up, etc. Andy Beal thinks this is a threat to online affiliate marketing, and surely it is. But Aaron Wall’s comment jumped out at me:

If they push this as hard as they [...]

Microsoft released a research report about the scourge of search engine spam (via NYT).

Nick Wilson has an excellent podcast on the topic, in which he observes that Google is perversely incented NOT to clear up spam in its search results because it actually makes money off of those spam sites by supplying the ads.
Nick also [...]

Web 2.0 is all about openness, right? At least that’s the ideology. But as to the BUSINESS of Web 2.0, the most successful money-making machine of the Web 2.0 era, Google AdWords, derives huge strategic advantage from opacity.
Today, Google lost some of that advantage when upstart Quigo forced Google to open the kimono on its [...]

Buried in the Time interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt is an astonishing admission:
Another example of a question that we are debating right now is: we have this amazing product called AdSense for content, where we’re monetizing the Web. If you’re a publisher we run our ads against your content. It’s phenomenal. How do we [...]

There is a fundamental tension in Web/Media 2.0 between openness and control — openness is required to leverage the network effect of the Web and harness the power of socially-connected users, but control is required to get a share of any money that changes hands.
Google has been most successful in walking this line — [...]

The state of search marketing was on full and vivid display at the 2006 Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose this past week, masterfully orchestrated by Danny Sullivan and Co. (thanks for the invite, Danny). I came away with pages and pages of notes, but here are some observations that rose to the top [...]

Om Malik took an interesting critical look at the Google deal with News Corp, which got me thinking about whether MySpace matters much at all to this deal, despite all the hype:
In a conference call, FIM executives noted that a very large number of people leave MySpace to go to Google. According to data collected [...]

What does it say about an advertising format when an industry “council” has to be formed in order to arbitrate the problem of advertisers not knowing whether they are getting what they paid for? That’s what happened to both pay-per-click advertising and TV advertising this past week, and the similarities between these two ad councils [...]

Google has had an excellent PR day with the announcement that it will disclose to advertisers how many fraudulent clicks are being caught in Google’s filter. Yes, this is step in the right direction, and all that flowers and sunshine, but I have one question:
What EXACTLY is the definition of a fraudulent click?
In his independent [...]

An NYU professor conducted an independent analysis of Google’s efforts to combat click fraud and found that, while Googe’s efforts are “reasonable,” pay-per-click advertising “does not offer any ‘built-in’ fundamental protection mechanisms against the click fraud since it is very hard to specify which clicks are valid vs. invalid in general” and that any particular [...]

Explain this — Google is penalizing AdWords advertisers “who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages,” and yet Google just signed a deal with GoDaddy.com to run AdSense on parked domains (via JenSense):
Now, GoDaddy is offering customers the ability to run AdSense for Domains on their parked pages – for a [...]

I’ve been critical of AdSense of late, but let’s give credit where credit is due — AdSense, i.e. a distributed, shared-revenue advertising platform, represents the new paradigm for monetizing content. That’s why I remain skeptical that MySpace, despite being the current center of gravity for social media and despite its current off-the-charts traffic growth, will [...]