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ConversionRater A discussion of online advertising, web entrepreneurship, and personal ramblings from Pat McCarthy.

Monthly Archives: February 2007

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Learn About Your Ad Cookies

February 27, 2007 11:48 pm / 2 Comments / Pat McCarthy

A fellow Right Media employee, friend, and one of the smartest ad guys I know named Mike Nolet is now blogging at MikeOnAds.com.

It looks like Mike is aiming to uncover mysteries and dispel some of the common myths about things in the ad business, and his first major post is a good one that teaches people about what’s in an advertising cookie. Many adware and spyware removal programs accuse cookies from ad companies as being spyware-related, when as Mike shows they aren’t that nefarious by explaining how they work and what’s really in an ad cookie.

I’m looking forward to learning more from Mike about many of the technical details of the ad network/exchange/technology world, so keep it up Mike!

Posted in: Advertising, Right Media

Right Media In Business 2.0

February 26, 2007 2:07 pm / 2 Comments / Pat McCarthy

Right MediaIn the latest issue of Business 2.0 they focus on the Next Net 25, and one of the articles is about “The quest for the perfect online ad” and features a good section about my employer Right Media. I thought there might be some more interesting stuff to focus on than how we fought back against spyware, but there were some nice comments and it’s some good press.

Also interesting in the article was Yahoo! and others saying that there is a huge opportunity in display advertising that’s still untapped that could potentially be bigger than search. That’s along the lines of a blog post written by Right Media CEO Mike Walrath in early January that questions if we’re underestimating display advertising.

Posted in: Right Media

Speaking at SXSW in Austin on March 10th

February 25, 2007 12:10 am / 2 Comments / Pat McCarthy

SXSWOn March 10th in Austin I’ll be on the Online Publishers and Ad Networks panel at SXSW.

The panel will be moderated by publisher Jonathan Weber of NewWest.net, and will have me representing Right Media and the ad exchange market, Cody Simms of the Yahoo Publisher Network representing the contextual network market, Larry Allen of Tacoda covering behavioral targeting and ad networks, and Justin Ward from Feedburner covering RSS advertising.

Hopefully it will be educational and worthwhile, I know I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never been to SXSW, so I’m anxious to check out many of the other sessions and speakers as well.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Conferences, Publishing, Random, Right Media, Yahoo

Off To New York

February 24, 2007 11:45 pm / 1 Comment / Pat McCarthy

Heading to New York in the morning for various meetings and to sync up with the mothership office. Should be a good time and it’s always good to be around the New York coworkers to get more energy and news. Blogging will be light.

Posted in: Personal, Right Media

Google Selling PR7 Links For $10,000!

February 23, 2007 4:04 pm / 108 Comments / Pat McCarthy

paidlink.jpgWhile doing some research, an astute coworker of mine noticed that the Google Enterprise Solutions page has links to their partners’ websites who are part of their Enterprise program. What’s interesting about this is that the page has a Google PageRank of 7/10, and to get listed on that page you have to pay Google $10,000 per year to be part of their program.

Before you claim I’m overreacting, let me state my case with some evidence:

1. The only way to get a link on this page is to pay Google $10,000 per year.

2. Google is against the inclusion of paid links in their Pagerank algorithm that helps determine search results. Here is a quote from their Corporate Technology page:

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results. Google’s technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance. There is no human involvement or manipulation of results, which is why users have come to trust Google as a source of objective information untainted by paid placement.

3. Google’s most prominent blogger Matt Cutts has spoken out against paid links and recommended use of the rel=”NOFOLLOW” attribute.

4. Google could add the “rel=NOFOLLOW” attribute to the links on that page in order to not pass Pagerank credit from the page to the partner websites. According to the Wikipedia page on Pagerank:

In early 2005, Google implemented a new value, “nofollow”, for the rel attribute of HTML link and anchor elements, so that website builders and bloggers can make links that Google will not consider for the purposes of PageRank — they are links that no longer constitute a “vote” in the PageRank system.

Why isn’t Google putting the rel=”NOFOLLOW” on these links?

As a side note, the links to Google in this blog post have the rel=”NOFOLLOW” on them because I don’t want to be passing on PageRank to that Enterprise Partners page.

5. Google could also just not rank the Enterprise Partners page with PageRank as they appeared to have done with their Adsense Case Studies page. You’ll see it is not ranked, and the page has existed for a long time meaning Google has intentionally chosen not to rankthis page. They also don’t even link to the publisher websites or in the case studies themselves for the most part, they just write out the text like ApartmentRatings.com with no link. However, I did find that a couple of the older case studies like the Weblogs Inc. one that do have links out. Of course, there is no page rank on the case study giving them no benefit.

Why do the partners paying $10,000 seem to get links with a high PageRank?

6. Google IS including the Enterprise partners page in their index which leads me to believe they are counting the Pagerank on the page. See the #1 result on the search query for “google earth specialist”.

The counter argument to my evidence is that the partners really aren’t paying for the link, but that the $10,000 fee is for the overall Enterprise partner program. True, but the ONLY way to get listed on the Enterprise Partners page is to pay Google $10,000 per year, which means the ONLY way to get a link on that page is to PAY FOR IT!

From what I can tell Google is not taking the steps to exclude the power of those links in their algorithm. Those are not just “editorial votes” as a natural link is supposed to be in the algorithm, those links are there because money exchanged hands.

I actually agree with Google’s stance on not including paid links in their algorithm, but there’s really three options here:

1. Google is being sloppy and not intending to be counting paid links, but they are.

2.
Google is taking money for links and looking the other way.

3.
I’m missing something, please let me know if I am.

In closing, I see that Google acquisition YouTube.com has now been added to the Google Products page that happens to be a PR9 page. If they’re charging $10,000 for a PR7 link, let’s hope YouTube didn’t have to give back too much of that $1.65 billion to be listed on this page!

UPDATE:
Apparently Google had a different but somewhat similar problem with using NOFOLLOW on most of the links on Google Video except for the links to their advertisers. Matt Cutts responded in the comments that it was a mistake and would be fixed as fast as possible. Good to see them fix and own up to the mistake. But the question remains, is the case I mention above a mistake?

UPDATE Part 2:
The page in question no longer carries a Pagerank. I’m guessing from the comments Matt Cutts had this changed. Thanks for taking action Matt, as I believe Google should be careful with links that may be considered “questionable” on whether or not they are pure natural links.

Posted in: Google

Cracked the 1000 RSS Subscriber Mark

February 23, 2007 3:50 pm / 1 Comment / Pat McCarthy

As you can see in the Feedburner chicklet to the right, this blog has now cracked the 1000 subscriber mark. A big help was the 300 subscriber jump that occurred when Google Reader and Google Personalized Home Page numbers were added to Feedburner’s count.

Either way, I’m happy to achieve the somewhat meaningless mark, but what’s more interesting is that the way publishing has changed as I’m pretty sure now that those RSS subscribers probably provide more attention and readership on this blog than actual on page viewing. Obviously this means RSS tools and advertising should just continue to grow in the future, even though there has been a lot of hype about RSS for years now, we’re still ahead of the mass user adoption curve.

Posted in: Random

Fox Interactive Acquires Strategic Data Corp

February 22, 2007 11:55 pm / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

Interesting news on the ad optimization front as Fox Interactive acquired ad optimization company Strategic Data Corp. I admittedly don’t know much about Strategic Data Corp. but I aim to find out more. From all the articles it appears that they plan on building in their optimization technologies to help monetize Fox’s massive amount of advertising across their network of sites including MySpace.

One thing I should note though, in the Techcrunch article Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:

For a related example of a large content network taking control of an outside ad optimization service, see our coverage of the Yahoo! deal with Right Media in October.

Just to clarify, Yahoo! didn’t “take control” of Right Media, they purchased a non-controlling minority stake of 20%. It’s important to note the difference as Yahoo! behaves as a client of the exchange and has no control or special rights in the buying and selling of advertising on the Right Media Exchange.

Posted in: Random, Right Media, Yahoo

Business 2.0 Releases the Next Net 25

February 22, 2007 8:59 am / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

Business 2.0 Magazine just released their 2nd annual hit article the Next Net 25. Featured in this year’s Net 25 are some of the darlings of the blog and new media world this year:

Social Media
StumbleUpon
Bebo
Meebo
Slide
Wikia

Video
Joost
Blip.tv
Dabble
Metacafe
Revision3

Mobile
Fon
Loopt
Mobio
Soonr
Tiny Pictures

Advertising
Turn
Adify
AdMob
Spot Runner
ViTrue

Enterprise
SuccessFactors
Rearden Commerce
Janrain
Logoworks
SimulScribe

I admittedly don’t know a ton about the mobile and enterprise companies on the list, but I’m not too surprised by any of the other ones. I think there are some very good companies missing, but when you’re cutting a list to 25 with multiple categories, it can be tough to get everybody worthwhile in there.

Last year’s list is doing pretty well, as Google itself bought YouTube, Jotspot, and Writely, and many of the other companies like Digg and Last.fm are doing really well.

Posted in: Startups, Web 2.0

ClickTracks Has Free Classes with Avinash Kaushik

February 22, 2007 1:22 am / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

ClickTracks has announced a couple of free online classes coming up this next week on February 26th and 27th with web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik.

The class is about “Unleashing the Power of Web Analytics” where you can get some advice from Avinash on how to make a difference in your business with web analytics. It sounds pretty worthwhile, but I’ll be in New York on business and won’t be able to virtually attend.

There’s also an interesting story behind the class where Avinash asked for more free features in ClickTracks Appetizer product, and they’re going to use web analytics to test the results and decide if they keep the additional features. In the process, they asked Avinash to teach a class.

I’ve always enjoyed how ClickTracks has made themselves different from the rest of the web analytics vendors out there. Their product has always had a different feel and workflow (although I must admit that I used ClickTracks twice in the past and didn’t stick with it), and they seem to behave differently by doing things like these free classes.

Posted in: Random, Web Analytics

Compete.com Rolls Out Some Improvements

February 21, 2007 1:08 am / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

Compete announced today that they rolled out some enhancements to the Compete.com site. Compete is now a site I’m visiting more often to research web publishers and get a different look at data instead of just using Alexa.

The primary improvements they made were to their search feature. Their search is powered by Yahoo Search results which isn’t that unique, but they added a couple of things to make it an improved experience over just using Yahoo directly if you’re in site research mode. In the upper right corner of the screen a preview of the Compete snapshot will appear when you search for a term that’s likely to be a specific website. Such as this search for Apple.com shown in the screenshot below. You can see the traffic graph for Apple.com over a recent time period.

Compete Screenshot

Additionally, if they have data showing that users spent a lot of time on any sites in the results for that term, they’ll highlight it by making them “Compete picks” that show up in the blue box. I found that I skipped over the box at first thinking they were sponsored ads, but now that I know it’s pretty helpful.

Compete also announced an API that allows developers to play with and use Compete data, which is of course cool. If more APIs were available from other data services I could build a tool to make my Web Revenue Blog Rankings automatic!

And last but not least, if you’re curious about how they get their data and how it compares to other services like Hitwise, Alexa, and Comscore, check out their detail matrix that explains it.

While I’d still like to see their overall data get more complete, I think Compete is on the right track. I also enjoy reading their blog as they highlight interesting data comparisons of top web properties.

Posted in: Web Analytics

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