Post Excerpts form Google’s Official Blog
We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

The web has been growing – faster and even faster. Several thousand domains being registered every day, another several million content pages being posted everyday. How much of web URLs this would add up on the web?

The web world is vast. Information being loaded everyday on the web pages. But the question is about the legitimity of the information being flooded. How much of this content is worthwhile and unique?

Points of Concern
1. How much of the content on the web is duplicate?
Image a same news being published on several news websites. The same news being again republished by several other website owners (either through RSS feed or other mediums)

2. How legitimate the information is?
The advent of blogs has flooded the internet with new webpages as blog enable a normal non-technical person to write a web page. Anyone can write a web page now!

When it comes to Google Adsense, majority of publishers only use Adsense for Content. A few others use Adsense for Search. Lately, Google introduced “Referral Ads” with Google Adsense where the Publishers get paid only when the user performs the desired action i.e. generates a lead or completes a purchase as defined by the advertiser.

Why Referral Ads
Since Referral Ads are based on per Action basis, the returns per action are high ranging from 50 cents to $20 or more.

Who should use Google Referral Ads?
If you know your website users well- their demographics and psychographics; you can monitise well with Referral Ads. Select the relevant advertisers and categories for display with Referral Ads and place them at prominent place on your website.

FAQs for Referral Ads

How much will I earn from referrals?

Your earnings for referrals will vary depending on the product you’re referring. They may also depend the location of the user you’ve referred.

For non-Google products, each individual advertiser decides the actions they’d like users to complete on their site and how much they’re willing to pay for those actions. You can view the amount of this payment displayed on the product details page for each product. For every action the advertiser has defined, you’ll see your potential earnings listed in the Payment column.

You’ll be credited for non-Google referrals if a user who clicked on your ad completes the advertiser’s conversion criteria within 30 days of clicking.

Why am I not earning my maximum referral value?

When you first begin displaying referral ads, you may notice that the earnings you receive for an ad are less than the maximum referral value displayed for the referral. This is because initially, advertisers will only be asked to pay the minimum referral value as Google monitors your account data to determine that the conversions generated are valid. Once the validation period ends, your earnings will reflect the maximum value of the conversions as disclosed going forward. We’ve put these safeguards in place to make the referrals network more appealing to advertisers, therefore bringing more quality inventory and greater potential revenue to publishers.

When will I earn my maximum referral value?

Google will use your site’s activity history to determine if you are delivering valid conversions. Once we have sufficient data to ensure that advertisers are receiving valid conversions from your site, you will start receiving the maximum value of future referrals.

For example, let’s say you choose an ad with a minimum referral value of $3.00 and a maximum referral value of $10.00. You will earn $3 for conversions during the validation period. Once the validation process is over, the maximum referral value of $10.00 will be applied to future conversions.

For most publishers, the validation period should end quickly, but it will vary by publisher due to differences in the time it takes to collect the necessary account data. You’ll know the validation period has ended when your earnings for a referral ad reflect the maximum referral value displayed in the product details page for that ad.

How do I add a referral to my site?

To create a new referral unit and add it to your site, please follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your AdSense account at www.google.com/adsense.
2. Visit the AdSense Setup tab and choose Referrals as the product.
3. Choose your referral locale by picking a location and language in which your site’s visitors will most often view your ads.
4. Find ads that are appropriate for your site in one of two ways:
– Search or browse for products and services that you would like to display on your site. Remember, you don’t have to pick just one; you can pick multiple ads that we’ll automatically rotate based on performance.
– Alternatively, choose your referral units based on keywords you select, allowing you to take advantage of any ads that are later added to our system matching those words.
5. Choose your category, keyword, or product. What’s the difference?
6. Pick from available ad formats.
7. Select a color palette for text ads, and a custom channel if you wish.
8. Copy and paste the referral code from the Your AdSense code box into the HTML source code of your site.

The referral button you’ve added should begin appearing on your page in moments.

For more information on getting started with Referral Ads, please visit Quick Start Guide

The popularity and easy-to-use interface of blogs have attracted millions of people to write blog and share their knowledge and experiences over the internet. While it will bring you recognizance through your blog articles, some sort of advertising options can shed you considerable revenues too.

Google Adsense has been the most popular advertising options for majority of the website/blog owners. The reason being contextual advertising that serves ads relevant to the content of your website pages. The other reason opting for Google Adsense is the reliability and timely payment.

Besides Google Adsense, Affiliate Ads can also give higher returns. While Google Adsense program is generally based on Cost Per Click (CPC) basis (though CPM- Cost Per Thousand Impressions and CPA- Cost Per Action is also there), the Affiliate ads are based on CPA only but give higher returns as compared to Google Adsense.

Some of the popular Contextual Ad Networks:
1. Google Adsense
2. Yahoo Publisher Network
3. AD Brite
4. Chitika

At times, you may need to track the traffic on a particular subdirectory. Say for example you started some new campaign or mini website at /campaign/ subdirectory and want to analyse the traffic to this particular directory.

Here is the solution for Google Analytics users

In order to track visitors to a particular subdirectory, create a new profile by choosing the option “Add a Profile for an existing domain” and name this profile as say “sitename/campaign”

Then go to Profile Settings and Add a new Filter

Filter Type: Include only Traffic to a Subdirectory
Subdirectory: ^/campaign/

**replace campaign with your directory name

That’s all. You are done!

Your this newly created profile will track traffic to your subdirectory only

Note: When you add a profile for an existing domain, the tracking code for the new profile will be identical to the original profile’s code, so data will be imported simultaneously into both profiles. You won’t need to change the tracking code on your site, and any filters applied only to the second profile won’t affect data in the first.

HolidayIQ, India’s popular holiday planning website, has been selected by Google, the global leader in the internet search business, to provide user generated content, specifically hotel reviews and hotel photographs to Google’s India local search.

HolidayIQ and Google have entered into an agreement in which content from Holiday-IQ’s hotel, resorts, home-stays & other accommodation database (user reviews and photos of all kinds of Indian travel accommodation) will be made available in Google’s local search. This service is expected to go live in early 2008.

Local search is like a “yellow pages” directory moving to the internet. It is a service that lets users search businesses in a particular city (place).

It allows you to query across the entire web and retrieve results that match the subject you are interested in and which are also relevant to a particular geographic area that you specify.

It can be accessed at http://local.google.co.in. HolidayIQ.com is owned by Leisure & Lifestyle Information Services (, India’s first travel media company. Earlier this year, HolidayIQ received a significant minority investment from Bennett Coleman & Co Ltd, the holding company of the Times of India Group, the largest media organisation in India.

News Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – YouTube, which has had to pull copyrighted videos off its site after legal attacks by some big media franchises, has enjoyed a surge in U.S. audience share that leaves it far larger than the next 64 video-sharing sites combined, a survey found.

The U.S. market share of visits to YouTube, which Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) bought for $1.65 billion last November, rose 70 percent from January through May, online audience measurement firm Hitwise Inc. said in the survey published on Wednesday.

By contrast, visits to the next 64 largest sites tracked by Hitwise rose only 8 percent during 2007′s first five months.

“As of May 2007, YouTube’s market share was 50 percent greater than those 64 sites combined,” Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott said in a summary of her firm’s data.

YouTube’s share of the U.S. online video market was 60.2 percent in May, according to Hitwise. Its closest rival, News Corp.’s (NWSa.N: Quote, Profile, Research) MySpace Videos site, had 16.08 percent of market share, the survey of Web surfing habits showed.

YouTube’s sister site, Google Video, held 7.81 percent, while Yahoo Inc. (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) had 2.77 percent and Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) MSN, 2.09 percent, according to the study.

Start-up Metacafe ranked No. 8 in U.S. visitors to video sites with 1.07 percent, Time Warner’s AOL Media had 0.94 percent and Veoh was No. 10 at 0.86 percent, Hitwise said.

News Source: http://www.reuters.com