This week I talked about Google’s Smart Pricing and its effects on publishers in comparison to Yahoo Publisher Network. My main concern was how Google’s Smart Pricing allegedly lumps an entire Adsense account together rather than judging each site seperately. I think this is an especially bad deal for publishers who own, buy, and sell content sites.

Besides that small issue, I have no doubt that smart pricing is a very good thing for advertisers and publishers.

The New York Times has a very good article about Google’s advertising techniques. If you are wondering why Yahoo seems to pay more, but gets fewer clicks than Adsense, read this article.

Besides demonstrating the huge competative advantage Google’s advertising algorithms give them over Yahoo, it also talks about Google’s future plans to conquer other advertising markets. Interestingly, the article mentions that Google is planning to deliver viewer-targetted advertising through television. I’m not suprised — I’ve actually been thinking about this myself lately. If the technology is here to deliver highly targetted television ads.. why not?

The article also covers privacy issues related to Google’s advertising system — and it makes a good case that Yahoo and Microsoft actually have worse privacy policies.

For every page that Google shows, more than 100 computers evaluate more than a million variables to choose the advertisements in its database to display - and they do it in milliseconds. The computers look at the amount bid and the budget of the advertiser, but they also consider the user - such as his or her location, which they try to infer by analyzing the user’s Internet connections - as well as the time of day and myriad other factors Google has tracked and analyzed from its experience with advertisements.

Investors Business Daily has an article about Facebook.com. Facebook is a social networking site that allows college and high school students to connect & communicate with each other in a way similar to Myspace.

Zuckerberg started the Facebook - essentially an online student directory — while he was a sophomore at Harvard. The psychology major tells me that it took about 10 days — during finals — for him to build the site.

He paid $85 a month for three months to run his tiny operation. But things improved — and his site was a hit on his own campus. He decided to take a leave from Harvard his junior year and move to Palo Alto, Calif.

DNJournal’s October cover story is about the recent TRAFFIC East 2005 conference for domain name owners. The keynote speakers were Mike Zapolin and Andrew Miller from InternetRealEstate.com.

Here is a quote from the article at DNJournal by Ron Jackson:

Miller and Zapolin detailed the various stages (and the time frame of each) that they take a domain through from acquisition to the end result – a fully developed business with strong cash flow. It is clear their methods have had a major impact on others in this space. I spoke with representatives from many other well funded groups who are planning to follow a similar blueprint. The emphasis is rapidly moving from passive monetization to active development of prime properties. Fabulous.com COO Dan Warner mentioned to me that a year or two from now we will not be talking about selling domains, we will be talking about selling businesses.

This is good news for web surfers — less pay per click parking pages — and even better news for domain owners & developers.

I’ve been closely watching both the domain market and web site development market for months now. Interestingly, the two seem to be very seperate and distinct. There is almost an animosity between the two communities. Web developers hate the idea that they have to pay thousands of dollars for the domains they want. Domain owners see developers as “cheap.”

Domain development is already alive and very well — its just that we are going to begin seeing it on a much larger scale over the next year.

Since Yahoo launched their beta advertising program most publishers have reported better earnings. While the clickthrough rate has been lower, the payment per click has often been substantially higher.

It appears that one of the largest factors to this is smart-pricing. Jensense has a very good post about this today.

Google has been calling people who have switched from Adsense over to YPN. A phone call from one representative revealed some previously unknown details about Google’s smart pricing. Allegedly poor converting ads on one site can lead to an overall drop in payments throughout your entire Adsense account.

There is another side to this. Already many Adwords advertisers avoid the content network (Adsense) because of low converting ads. Are advertisers who actually pay attention to their conversions going to want to pay even more on Yahoo Publishing Network? So far, the answer seems to be yes.

In the short-term online advertising growth is going to continue at a record pace. However, long-term more and more advertisers are going to be paying very close attention to their conversion rates. Unlike television, radio, and print media, tracking the performance of online advertising is far easier.

I suspect that Yahoo will also implement something simular to Google’s smart pricing if they haven’t already. Without smart pricing, or buying ads from individual sites, traffic quality affects all the sites on a network as a whole. If an advertiser’s traffic is converting — he’ll pay more for it. If its not, he may lower his bid. That means that a big site sending low-quality traffic could drive down the revenue of a smaller high-quality traffic website.

Smart pricing is just a tool. Yahoo may have an advantage over Adsense right now, but I doubt that it will last.

However, if Google really does use smart-pricing over an entire account rather than single websites this could split the contextual advertising market right down the middle.

Here is why:

The other day I was reading a thread on a webmaster board. A web site owner had sold his site to another person. That buyer had paid the first half of the agreed price. He wanted to put his Adsense code on the site first to confirm the earnings before paying the rest (smart move.) The buyer claimed that he was earning half of what the original owner said the site earned daily. The original owner called him a lier and is now trying to sell the website to someone else. What if they were both telling the truth?

In order to accurately value a website there has to be some kind of level playing field for the earnings. If earning drop simply by changing accounts, thats a serious issue!

As a publisher, I am going to be testing Yahoo’s ads on each and everyone of my websites. Any site that performs better over a 7-day period, I’m going to keep with Yahoo. Any site that remains the same, or is higher I will keep with Google.

I suspect most other publishers will be doing the same.

If Google is doing wierd things with its Adsense earnings algorithms, such is lumping all of the sites in an account into one pile, Yahoo will clearly have a very big advantage. Yahoo may not be able to get current Adsense users to convert all of their websites over to YPN but they will certainly be able to switch at least a portion of those sites over.

This evening I’m reading through the newest issue of Business 2.0. On page 34 there is a short article about online sales of t-shirts and other branded merchandise. The article mentions CollegeHumor.com, Cafepress, BoingBoing.net, and others, and bringing in substantial sales through t-shirts.

One interesting fact the article mentions — 1,000 new shops are started on Cafepress.. every day.

The question is: with so much competition how do you get a chunk of the online t-shirt sales pie?

Here is what I would do: first, start small. I’d be concerned more with customers and sales than with profit. There was a very comprehensive article in the last issue of Millionaire Blueprints about Joseph Tantillo who has been very successful selling fraternity merchandise online. When he started he was just breaking even on sales — later on when he had momentum he purchased expensive equipment and got the suppliers which allowed him to make a nice profit.

I would advertise on niche websites for a few hundred dollars a month each. Think niches — if you don’t have one, how do you know what audience you are trying to reach?

Next I would closely watch who is buying what shirts. Find out which designs sell and make more similar ones. Perhaps 90% of males that came from site X buy a certain design. Create custom landing pages based on those metrics.

Its not easy to make money online. If you don’t want to surpass everyone else it is hard to even be noticed.

Have you every noticed that yourdomain.com has a different pagerank from www.yourdomain.com?

The problem occurs because some people will link to your website with the www, while others will leave it out.

Use Marketleap’s link popularity tool and put in your domain with and without the www; you’ll see the difference.

You can fix this by creating a file named .htaccess. Add these lines to the file (if it already exists), replacing the yourdomain.com with you actual website’s domain name:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule .* http://www.yourdomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

You can also do the reverse so that you lose the www.

I’m not a very technical guy. I don’t know what the full implications this are to your websites search engine rankings (it definately does not hurt you.) At the very least, it will make your site more attractive to other webmasters when selling links or doing link exchanges.

(For the record, I believe there are other factors which are far more important than Pagerank.)

This is a few days late.. but in case you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Pagerank for http://www.msn.com/

You may have noticed Pagerank changes on some of your sites.This update, nicknamed “Jagger” appears to have shaken things up a bit (but not too much — I haven’t heard anyone complaining yet.) Jim Boykin’s Blog has been following this update very closely.

I’ve never been much of a programmer. I quickly figured this out when I once tried to teach myself C++.

There are infinate possibilities for programmers today. Web-based applications mean you don’t have to worry about piracy (but you do have to worry about up-time.) I’ve got quite a few ideas for community and social networking sites, but I don’t see how I can make these visions reality without a substancial investment.

Here is a very new site, BountyNetwork. Great idea which can spread virally. You can use the site to find things. That means money for finders and answers for people who are either too busy or a little lost!

Its great to have a website which lets you talk to your audience. Its even better when your audience talks with each other — which is why I wish I could program.

Remember Weblogs Inc. was purchased by AOL for $25 million? Where you one of those people who thought it was overpriced? Read this analysis of traffic for an art e-commerce site following a post on a major blog, BoingBoing. Its complete with charts and graphs. This is some good stuff.

..I ran a report to breakdown visits to the ordering page by initial referrer to the site. As you can see, even though BoingBoing readers directly accounted for 22% of the visits to the site (from the stats above), they accounted for 30% of the visits to the ordering page.