ZillionBits-Its about number$ and te<h^0!0gy

If it isn’t enough to conduct your searches, read your email and do your chatting via Google, you can now also build and host your web site there. Taking a cue from older communities like GeoCities, Google has released their new Google Page Creator, a WYSIWYG style editor that allows users to create a web site and host it at theiraccount.googlepages.com.

Google Page Creator is available for free to anyone with a Gmail account, though new registrations are closed right now due to “heavy demand.” (Apparently Google didn’t learn from the Google Analytics experience.) The system works off of a “What You See is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) editor that will allow even those unfamiliar with HTML to create their own web sites. With all of the pages gathered together under the googlepages.com domain, Google will be able to build it’s own online community.

The service will run on both IE and Firefox and will require the use of cookies and JavaScript. Individual web sites will be limited to 100MB in server space. It’s still in beta though (and listed in Google Labs) and a full release date hasn’t been announced. Read the rest of this entry »

Someone asked me today if I thought it was possible to run a successful website that does not get updated frequently. My answer: absolutely! There are many types of content sites out there, discounting blogs and forums the two most common types are what I call web magazines, or ezines, and reference or resource sites.

SitePoint is a web magazine, they have a large amount of repeat visitors that come expecting new content, like this blog post. On SitePoint’s homepage you’ll find recent content getting the most exposure, this is because that is what visitors want to see, the new content, because chances are they’ve read the old content before.

Now I tend to run reference sites, as I find them to be easier. Wilderness-Survival.net is one of my reference sites and it has been around for about 5 years. If you visit it you will see that there is no real featured content, no recent content to speak of. Instead the content is organized like an encyclopedia or other reference book (hence the term reference site). In fact this site hasn’t had a content update since it was originally launched 5 years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Do MSN users click more ads?

Although getting a high ranking in Google always seems to be the #1 priority for webmasters, a number of AdSense publishers have commented on the fact that it may be better to get a #1 ranking in MSN if contextual advertising is your income source. Why? Because it appears that MSN users click AdSense ads more often than Google users do!

Now why would this be? There are several possible explanations, and I’ll leave it up to you to judge which are the closest to the truth:

• MSN users don’t realize they’re clicking ads. This is an argument made for a lot of online advertising, actually, but the point here is that MSN users as a class may be unaware that AdSense ads are, well, ads. Until recently, for example, Dell was using a branded MSN page as the default home page for its computers. So MSN probably got a lot of traffic from casual users that way. And of course from the default Windows installations, too.
• Google users develop ad-blindness. More Google users, on the other hand, know what the ads look like and develop “contextual advertising blindness”.
Read the rest of this entry »

When Google first started, you basically just earned a certain percentage of whatever the AdWords advertiser was paying per click. It was pretty simple. If the advertiser paid $1.00 per click and if you as a publisher were earnings 50% of that, you made $0.50. Easy. Google started to realize, though, that all clicks were not created equal. Clicks from some sites were more valuable than others, at least that’s what they figured. So they came up with an alogorithm, a mathmatical equation for determining how valuable your AdSense account, sites and pages are, and use that equation to determine what percentage you get per click.

Speculation Galore
Smart Pricing has triggered a HUGE amount of speculation on the part of AdSense publishers. Google is notorious for having very little to say about the way its algorithms work. Their thinking is that the less people know about it, the less chance they are going to be able to cheat the system. This lack of communication has caused all kinds of speculation about how Smart Pricing works, what it looks for, etc. Nobody knows exactly how it works, but I’ve got hundreds of websites, and track everything. I’ve learned a few things about what Smart Pricing seems to like and what it seems to not like. Read the rest of this entry »