Agylen

Joel Spolsky: “It is important to remember that AdSense is just one part of Google’s revenue. A more significant part is AdWords, which covers the ads that appear on Google’s own site. AdWords are still susceptible to some fraud, although you can’t make money clicking on those ads, so it’s much less of a problem. There is a minor problem where advertisers hire clickers to click on their competitors’ ads, which cause their competitors to waste money, but that’s penny-ante stuff, and rare enough that advertising through AdWords still works well.”

OK, there’s a bit of confusion here. AdSense and AdWords are just two faces of the same program. If you are an advertiser, you subscribe to the AdWords program and your ads might go on Google’s search result pages, on other Google property like Gmail, or on pages of web publishers who subscribed to the AdSense program.

AdSense is not part of Google’s revenue. All ad revenue to Google comes in from advertisers using AdWords and aprt of it is used to pay AdSense publishers.

Apart from this minor point, Joel’s analysis is correct. And worrysome for advertisers, small publishers and Google alike. I can attest that Google takes click fraud very seriously, to the point that sometimes their net catches some innocent bystanders, together with the fraudulent clickers. But this might indeed be an unsolvable problem, in general.

It had to happen, didn’t it?

Everybody’s biggest gripe with Gmail is the lack of a delete button, there’s no question about that. Well, no more, if you’re using Firefox, thanks once more to a cute little Greasemonkey script:

Arantius.com - Greasemonkey User Scripts - Gmail Delete Button: “I’m having fun writing greasemonkey user scripts! For the uninitiated, greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that lets one modify a web page with javascript in powerful ways. Here’s another one based off of the request wiki. It puts a delete button next to the archive button, and performs a ‘Move to trash’ action when clicked.”

This had already been spotted in a few selected blogs, but now it’s available to everyone.

The Google Blog: Feed me:

Enter AdSense for feeds, launching today in beta. The idea is simple: advertisers have their ads placed in the most appropriate feed articles; publishers are paid for their original content; readers see relevant advertising - and in the long run, more quality feeds to choose from. Given the great flexibility that feeds can offer, it’s essential to get the model right, especially so that readers are satisfied. Towards this end we have outlined what we believe are some best practices for advertising in feeds. Publishers who want to participate in the public beta can apply here.

I know some are against this, but personally I agree with Steve Gillmor:

Which reminds me: those who still fear ads in feeds, try this experiment–give us a full text feed with ads (or not, if the content is the ad) and maintain an abstract feed without. Then let the market choose. I know what I think will happen. And quickly too. All we are saying… is give feeds a chance.

It had already been foreseen, now it’s happening for real:

Jason Calacanis: “In case you didn’t notice, some of your favorite Weblogs, Inc. blogs now have Google Adsense in the RSS feeds.”

However, if you’re clicking an AdSense ad appearing in an RSS feed, like TUAW’s, in NetNewsWire, you get the following error message (assuming you have it configured to open pages in its embedded browser):

One reason you may not be able to access this advertiser’s website is because your web browser or email application is not configured to accept cookies. Cookies are small bits of text that websites place on visitors’ computers to identify that they have visited a site previously. To access the site, you’ll need to follow the steps below to set your browser or email application to accept cookies.

The moment this feature is available to all the publishers, I will probably revert to publishing a full RSS feed, with ads. Frankly, if I can make a little money with ads, after I have covered hosting fees, I won’t complain. One problem with this is that my feed is aggregated in places like Planet Apache, which is not too picky with HTML code it digests and regurgitates.

Indeed, if you happen too publish a truncated RSS feed and by chance an entry gets truncated after an opening tag (<em> for example), but before the corresponding closing tag, everything that follows will be italicized, in the example.

This probably means that it will happily display all the ads included in the RSS feeds it syndicates. Some people have already indicated that they wouldn’t accept this, and I fully understand this sentiment. It wouldn’t be fair for my ads to be carried by a community site like Planet Apache.

While it could be argued that this is a bug of Planet Apache (other aggregators, like javablogs.com for instance, sanitize all HTML code before republishing it), I’d better investigate if WordPress can be configured to produce both an ad-free, summarized feed and an ad-carrying full feed at the same time. Besides being nice to Planet Apache, this solution would give more choice to all of my readers who use an aggregator. What do you think?