In the past, Google, a company who's informal company motto is "Don't be evil," has been conspicuously tight-lipped when it came to disclosing how much AdSense revenue it shares with its publishers. This lack of transparency has led to some criticism of the search engine company. Such complaints over Google's business conduct come at the same time as pressure from the Italian government, which recently launched an antitrust investigation arising from allegations of gouging from a local newspaper against Google. Perhaps in an attempt to restore some of its squeaky clean image, Google recently disclosed its revenue shares for AdSense for content and Adsense for search.

AdSense for content is Google's most popular advertising platform and consists of contextually-based advertising units that are displayed along with content published on third-party websites. Advertisers can bid competitively on this ad space through ... Read more »

Last week, the media headlines--and especially the tech blogs--lit up with the notion that Apple has surpassed Microsoft in terms of market cap. While undeniably a sign of the times, the actual significance of this supposed milestone remains in question. The key is to understand what market capitalization does and does not measure.

By its dictionary definition, market cap refers to the total dollar market value of a company's outstanding shares. The operative terms here are "market value" and "shares" as they signal that we are dealing with the stock market and the investment community. Market cap is a figure that investors use to determine a company's size without factoring in figures such as sales, total assets, employees, product penetration and so on.

The takeaway: we're talking Wall Street here. This is the same ilk of speculators who betted up the value of Pets.com, sub ... Read more »

The Web is often (perhaps too often) compared to a freeway, namely the Information Superhighway. The comparison is apt—unlike television and print, where you have viewers and readers, you have traffic; traffic that is constantly moving, changing over, passing by, dropping in and shifting direction. It’s a constant game of grabbing attention and directing traffic to your door, rather than somewhere else along the highway.

Now, we can drop the metaphor and get straight to the point: we’re talking about conversion. Getting web traffic to your website is half the battle, but the next challenge is turning your visitors into customers. Returning to our analogy, we can learn some important lessons from the agents that drive business along the highway: billboards. Here are three important lessons that billboard advertising can teach web developers:

... Read more »

This week, Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone 4 at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Along with the introduction of the newest Apple smartphone came the unveiling of iOS 4, the new operating system for iPad and iPhone, and iAds, a new mobile advertising platform. According to Jobs, iAds will benefit advertisers, developers and users alike by simplifying the mobile advertising experience. Because iAds is built into iOS 4, advertisers can quickly and easily integrate their campaigns into the entire iPhone experience. Meanwhile, developers benefit by reaping 60 percent of the advertising revenue generated by their applications. This, as Jobs explained, will subsidize the costs of developing high quality software and will encourage more developers to offer better games, utilities and apps for free. Even the advertisements themselves will be improved. Embedded iAds can be fully animated and immersive without being obtrusive. Users can click on ad ... Read more »

Imagine you are standing in a bustling pedestrian mall with a hankering for a caffeine fix. Before you is a vast cornucopia of unfamiliar coffee shops, none of which appeal to you any more or less than the other. Suddenly, your phone vibrates. You fish it out of your pocket to see that you have a new notification: "Available now: $1 off at Joe’s Coffee Joint.” Armed with your new coupon, your decision becomes clear. You stride into the coffee shop which is just twelve paces away and Joe’s gets a brand new customer. That’s the thrust of proximity marketing and so far, it’s been billed as a win-win solution for both customers and local businesses. Ace Marketing & Promotions, Inc. has recently expanded its reach of proximity marketing locations. Their system works by interfacing with customer’s mobile devices via WiFi or Bluetooth. This is different from Foursquare and Yelp, which use a smartphone’s location-based services via the cellular data networ ... Read more »

Did you know that for the typical U.S. website, about 30 to 40 percent of your traffic comes from non-U.S. visitors? While we’re all aware that the World Wide Web is truly international, few web developers consider this fact when it comes to monetizing their traffic. If you’ve ever taken your laptop on the road, you may have noticed that most ad networks tailor their banners and pay-per-click ads to the location of the browser. Most of the time, this optimizes the ads—but in some locations where an ad network doesn’t have a sales office or presence, the ads will show up blank. Because of this, international traffic is an often untapped source of ad revenue that can be captured in a few easy steps.

We all understand the importance of a landing page. A landing page is your foot in the door. It’s your elevator pitch, your 30 second audition. Recognizing this, many web developers and online businesses lavish a great deal of attention on their landing pages. They hire top web designers and stellar copywriters to make their landing pages all singing, all dancing conversion machines. But is all this investment paying off? And if it’s not, which areas do you need to improve and how do you measure your success?

Business growth? There’s an app for that—it’s your own. Not only can an iPhone app help you attract new customers, improve customer service and create revenue opportunities, having an app for your business is quickly becoming par for the course. At this years Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2010), Walker Fenton of NewsGator likened the essentiality of iPhone apps to business websites. Ten years ago, savvy businesses were setting up professional websites. A few years ago, the businesses started swarming into social media. Now, it’s the smartphone app.

The other big driver for getting your business an app of its own is how easy and affordable it is. Most developers charge anywhere from $6,000 to $8,000 to put together a customized app for your business. This quote can range higher if you want more sophisticated features—such as location-enabled notifications and social features—but on the flip side, if all you want i ... Read more »

Steve Jobs made a splash talking about iAds—both in terms of firing up advertisers and cheesing off competitors, such as AdMob. Now, Microsoft is reinforcing the hot button issue of mobile advertising with its announcement that Windows Phone 7 is an "Ad-Serving Machine.” What does that mean? According to Kostas Mallios, Microsoft’s general manager for Strategy and Business Development, it means that advertisers will have a direct channel for bringing their sponsored messages to uses in two new exciting ways. The first is an opt-in service called "Toast.” Toast allows a small ad box to slide down unobtrusively from the top of the screen to alert users of new offers. This functionality works even when the company’s program isn’t running, thanks to push notifications.

The second is the advent of live "tiles.” Tiles sit on the home screen and can be designated for a number of uses, one such, apparently, is advertising ... Read more »

It doesn’t seem to make sense—bidding on your own company for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, that is. After all, if anyone punches your company’s name into a search engine box, they are certainly going to see your website as the top result and they are certainly going to be looking for your website, right? In most cases, that’s probably true. But there are still a number of reasons why it’s a good idea to bid on your own company name for PPC ads.