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: Website Revenue Strategies Blog1 in 5 Typo Domains Funded By Google
McAfee’s new report on typosquatting details how 1 in 5 typo-squatted domain names is being funded by Google AdSense.
For their report, McAfee studied 1.9 million typographical variations of 2,771 of the most popular and well known Web sites. Of these, nearly 7% were suspected typo-squatters, defined as domain names registered for the sole purpose of generating advertising revenue from people who mistyped URLs.
The five most highly squatted categories are game sites (14.0%), airlines (11.4%), main stream media company sites (10.8%), adult sites (10.2%) and technology and Web 2.0 related sites (9.6%).
Besides the scale of the problem and its effect on legitimate business, what disgusts me the most is that Google AdWords have no way to opt out of having their advertising displayed on parked domain names.
Addendum: While there are legal routes for trademark owners to recover domain names that are owned by typosquatters, the process is long and expensive. Typosquatting would a much smaller industry if AdSense and other networks took a strong stance against the practice and stopped making it so lucrative.
Google And Paypal To Pay You For Xmas Shopping
Google and Paypal are waging a war this Xmas to convince online shoppers to use their system for paying for online purchases:
This year, Google is offering two frequent-flier miles on any of seven airlines (all the majors except American) for every $1 spent. It also offers $5 to $50 discounts, with minimum purchase, at several dozen merchants … PayPal has fewer merchants but its offer is more lucrative for shoppers in some ways, with 20 percent of purchases credited to the buyer’s PayPal account.
Are incentives like these going to convince you to try one system over the other? And what incentives are you offering visitors to your sites this holiday season?
Jeanne Jennings Speaking at ClickZ Email Marketing Conference
Jeanne Jennings, email marketing guru and author of SitePoint’s The Email Marketing Kit, will be speaking at ClickZ’s event, ClickZ Specifics: E-mail Marketing, next Tuesday October 2nd at the Hilton in New York City.
“ClickZ Specifics: E-mail Marketing” is an intensive, one-day event designed to educate, inspire, and instill confidence in anyone using e-mail to communicate with their customers and prospects.
If you’re looking to get to grips with email marketing, grab yourself a ticket today!
How to Boost Your Ad Revenue 70-110%, Automatically!
Did you know Google AdSense allows for 9 billion different layout/size/color combinations of its ad units? Do you know which one is the best for your site, or for that matter, which ad network will make you the most money at any point during the day?
PubMatic, a new service that just launched in “Alpha Mode”, will help you answer those questions by dynamically optimizing the ad space on your site.
Currently they work with Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, ValueClick, and Komli — and they are planning on adding additional ad networks in the future.
As part of the Alpha launch, they are looking to recruit 100 innnovative publishers. If they can replicate their early results, this could be boon to publishers everywhere who continually struggle to find and optimize their ad inventory across multiple networks.
Can forums still make money?
It appears that larger advertisers (the ones that pay) are asking ad networks to block forums from showing their ads. The larger the advertiser is, the more controlled they want the content to be. Just a few days ago I received an email blast from Tribal Fusion:
I wanted to reach out to you because we have begun to see more frequent requests from advertisers to block forums from their campaigns. These are usually premium advertisers with large advertising budgets that need assurances that their ad will run only on appropriate content. Since even moderated forums are difficult to police, they will most likely ask us to block forums from their campaigns. In the past we could not offer this functionality, but due to popular demand, as of August 15 we will be able to offer this option by request.
So can you still make money off of forums? The answer is yes. Now, personally I would never start a forum simply to make money because it will quickly become obvious to the end users and they will not stick around long. But, if you would like to at least cover cost here are some things that can still help pay the …
Is Selling Text Links Dangerous?
There’s no doubt that selling text links is big business, but is is a risky business? The question, is selling text links dangerous, pops up in web master forums with increasing frequency. For me, two questions really come to mind:
1. Will selling text links hurt my site?
I don’t think there is anything wrong with selling (or buying) text links. But my opinion doesn’t matter. The fact is, buying and selling text links could potentially hurt your site. From Google’s webmaster guidelines:
“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank”.
Pretty obvious how that fits. Further, Matt Cutts from Google says:
But for everyone else, let me talk about why we consider it outside our guidelines to get PageRank via buying links. Google (and pretty much every other major search engine) uses hyperlinks to help determine reputation. Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and link-based analysis has greatly improved the quality of web search. Selling links muddies the quality of link-based reputation and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results.
But can’t search engines detect paid links?
Yes, Google has a variety of algorithmic methods of detecting such links, and …
Rich Developer, Poor Developer
In case you’ve had your blinkers on, over the past twelve months the marketplace on sitepoint.com has gone completely gangbusters.
What began as a simple platform for SitePoint’s online community to buy, sell and trade web sites and domain names has exploded into an onslaught of back-to-back auctions, to which there are now entire blogs devoted.
Powered by software that was custom-built especially for these auctions (and with our team adding more features as you read this), the transactions have become so fast-paced it’s getting difficult to keep up, with over USD $1 million worth of new sites now being listed every month! The quality has increased too, with sites regularly selling for tens of thousands of dollars, and some auctions even attracting six figures. It’s an exciting community that has grown out of the forums, and it’s only getting stronger.
So is this post a shameless ad for the SitePoint Marketplace?
No! It’s a wake-up call to those web developers out there who, until now, have not explored adding additional revenue streams in their spare time. Investment gurus like Robert Kiyosaki preach that additional revenue streams are the key to financial independence — but from where should these revenue streams come? Real …
Feedburner Acquired by Google
According to Techcrunch the rumor that Google is buying Feedburner is now official. Until Google or Feedburner posts it, it’s still a rumor to me! But considering the source it looks like this deal is going through in the next 2-3 weeks. I’ve already seen talk about people wanting to leave just because Google is buying them, though I’m not sure why. When did Google buying a company become such a bad thing?
I don’t think too much will change with the Feedburner service. Google tried to start their own feed advertising program and it fizzled pretty quickly. This is likely an attempt by Google to try and get back into that market. Feedburner also offers CPM based ads which is another good fit for Google who has been expanding their ads in that area lately. Hopefully this won’t mean they’ll replace the CPM ads with the Adsense contextual ads that seem to be doing worse and worse for many publishers.
The other features Feedburner offers, like publishing your RSS feeds and providing usage statistics is another perfect fit for Google. They gain access to all those feeds which will I’m sure will be used on their blog search, among other …
Google Shuts Down Arbitrage and MFA Publishers
I talked about Making Money With Arbitrage in my last post and I touched on the fact that some people may see it as “shady”. Like it or not, arbitrage has a negative stigma. Based on the comments on my last post we have people on both sides of it. But it looks like the most important opinion is out in the open: Google’s opinion.
Unless you’ve been in a cave the last day or so, you’ve probably noticed the amount of talk on Google’s decision to disable publisher accounts of those who are engaged in arbitrage and MFA (made for Adsense). They seem to be going after the bigger fish in this market and accounts have already been shut down and given notice that by June 1st their accounts till be terminated. Though they are going to pay these publishers as per their agreement this sends a loud and clear message: Adsense Arbitrage and MFA sites are not ok according to Google. So if it wasn’t clear before, it is now.
If other PPC providers don’t follow suit it could mean more money for them as these sites shift to using those providers. On the Google Asense side it could mean …
Making Money With Arbitrage
When I first heard about arbitrage I thought someone was getting a divorce. I’d never heard of arbitrage to describe a market condition. The basic idea of arbitrage is simple: take advantage of a disparity between the cost of one item and selling it a higher price in another market where it fetches a higher price. A very contemporary example of arbitrage is when the XBOX 360 hit stores at retail price and were selling for 3-6 times that on eBay.
But that’s not what people mean when they talk arbitrage on the web. The most common example is Contextual Ad (CPC) Arbitrage in which you buy traffic at a low price and direct it to a page with contextual ads, optimized to convert, where the ads pay a higher price per click. Lets run through an example:
You do some digging on the popular Contextual Ad networks like Google Adsense, Yahoo, MSN etc. and find that “Firstime Home Loan” is paying pretty well. Say around $0.75 per click. Lets say you found this through Google Adsense. Looking on Yahoo or MSN you find that they are going for $0.55 per click. While most examples may not be this obvious or …
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