This is the full text from Omar Hamoui, founder of AdMob.

Today we announced that AdMob has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google for $750 million. We are extremely excited about this new partnership and what it means for our publishers.

AdMob’s people, products and tools will continue to work to effectively monetize your mobile traffic – no interruptions. Our product and engineering teams will keep building great products for our customers. Our sales team will keep working with our thousands of advertisers to deliver successful campaigns.

After our deal closes, AdMob will work with Google to accelerate the pace of innovation in mobile and do an even better job for you. We believe this deal will benefit our developer and publisher partners by:

* Building even more powerful technology and tools to monetize mobile traffic.

* Increasing the effectiveness of display advertising on mobile devices by leveraging Google sales team, infrastructure and relationships.

* Improving the already high level of service and support we deliver to our publishers.

You can read more about this deal at www.admob.com/google.

Omar

AdMob is like the AdSense for mobile sites serving billions of mobile ad impressions per month. Google AdSense for Mobile has also been recently introduced by Google but hasn’t really taken off. Acquiring AdMob is the next logical step. I just didn’t image how much that traffic acquisition is.

I’ve been doing some consultancy for a number of start-ups for some time now and one of my biggest advise to them is to invest in the mobile web this early. Just last week, I told one of them that AdMob could be Google’s next target. I’m just surprised my prediction happened this soon.

According to AdMob, the Philippines ranked #5 on their mobile web ad traffic report, up from #9 or #10 a couple of years ago. And for the last 2 years, I’ve been trying to get hold of them so we can have them talk on our annual Search Engine Marketing Conference about the mobile web and advertising.

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I downloaded my AdSense data for the last 15 months and plotted the eCPM as shown below. Indeed, the trend is significantly visible.

There could be several reasons for this downward trend and let’s try to look at it from a wider perspective:

• Fewer Competition. Since AdSense is driven by the competition that’s coming from Google AdWords, it is possible that there are much fewer competing bidders in your niche. For example, the automotive industry and the travel industry are among the highest hit. You could see fewer car related ads or in the case of the travel industry, fewer airlines, hotels and travel agents advertise on AdWords. Fewer competitors will drive low bid rates which in turn result to lower cost per click on AdSense and eCPM.
• Ad Relevancy. With fewer competing advertisers, you get less relevant ads. Less relevant ads will result to lower CTR and eventually lower eCPM. Say you have 3 AdSense ad placements with a total of 10 ad slots. If only 4 of them are relevant to the page, you have 40% ad relevancy and that could drive CTR down. So, if you reduce your ad placements to 2 with a total of 6 ad slots, you have 67% ad relevancy that could help boost CTR.
• Changes in Site Traffic. If your site or blog has been steadily growing in the last year, it could affect your eCPM both ways but there’s a higher probability that it involves a drop in CTR. Higher pageviews doesn’t alway mean higher unique visitors.
• Change in Site Context or Niche. If you’re running a finance or automotive blog which generally are higher CPM industries then you switched content to entertainment or showbiz, then that traffic will surely get you lower CPMs.
• Competing 3rd-party Ads. If you have placed more ads on every page, it will dilute the effective CPM of all other ad units in that page. That doesn’t mean though that your Page CPM will go down; it might even go up. However, the share of AdSense for the Page eCPM will be lower. For example, 3 years ago all I had on this blog was mostly AdSense ad units so it had 90% share in Page eCPM. This year, AdSense only has about 30% share in Page eCPM since I have more direct ads competing for clicks on the same page. Even though my monthly AdSense revenue is down, my total ad revenue is still up.

Of course, there will be other factors to consider like Smart Pricing or maybe Google has changed the percentage share with AdSense Publishers without them knowing about it. Nobody would notice if that alleged 70% share that AdSense Publisher used to get is now down to 50% or maybe even less.

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You should be able to see the new link inside your AdSense Publisher Panel via the AdSense Setup tab.

You can now start monetizing all of your un-used domains hanging around. You will need to do some DNS modifications on the Registrar level in order to completely set up AdSense for Domains but it should be an easy step.

Google initially opened AdSense for Domains last December 2008.

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The Inside AdSense blog breaks the news:

Many publishers have approached us looking for a way to monetize their domains, and today, we’re excited to announce the expansion of AdSense for domains. This product allows publishers to earn revenue through ads placed on undeveloped domains.

With AdSense for domains, users can find relevant information rather than see empty pages or “page not found” errors. Today we present ads, links, and search results on the pages, and may add other useful information in the future. To ensure positive user experience and the quality of our network, these sites are monitored for policy compliance and prohibited from using text and images designed to confuse users.

This new feature in your AdSense account will be rolled out in phases, starting with English-language publishers in North America followed by other regions.

That means AdSense Publishers in the Philippines might not see this activated in their account until 2009.

Question now is whether this will eventually kill third-party domain parking service like Sedo. My guess is as good as your but it will most likely kick them off the market (unless they offer better profit sharing).

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The feature will show up in your AdSense account anytime soon (mine hasn’t). Here’s a short video outlining that feature.

Before, if you want to monitor per page performance, you had to create a separate channel in your AdSense account and manually place them in the target pages.

Now, this will done for you automatically for all pages on your website or blog. This will further help you optimize high-earning pages and make more for the same traffic.

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Though we cannot share actual figures like CPM or CTR, I think I can say the they are much lower than AdSense for Content Page CTR/eCPM by factors of 4 to 5.

Still, if you have a large RSS subscriptions, the monthly revenue can still be significant. Mine hasn’t broken the $100 barrier and I guess it will take many more months to get to that.

So I’m thinking, for publishers with a few hundred subscribers, this might turn out to be practically insignificant to almost useless. There’s noticeably less advertisers in the network as well.

Anybody out there getting significant results from their AdSense for Feeds?

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Google AdSense for feeds will normally follow the same basic system as AdSense for Content but there’s a huge possibility that revenue model will be based on CPM if you’re a large publisher:

Our salesforce will sell cost-per-impression (CPM) ads directly to the largest advertisers, while the rest of your inventory will be filled with contextually targeted cost-per-click (CPC) and CPM ads. This means that more of your feed items will be sold and with higher overall revenue, than with any other feed network.

If you’re running Feedbuner to process your feeds, then you’re just one step away to running AdSense on your feeds. Migration will be done manually so you have to email adsense-support-aff@google.com and provide them with your Feedburner account username and AdSense account email (they have paused this migration for now because of the volume of requests).

Take note though that for the CPM earnings to kick in, all of your subscribers will have to view the feeds. RSS to email subscribers must open and read their daily feeds in order for that to be credited to you.

To find out how many of your RSS subscribers actually read your blog via feeds, login to your Feedbuner account and look for the stats on “reach”.

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DST rates aren’t that high though. The announcement says it’s Php0.30 for every Php200 or just about 0.15% of total amount remitted.

Here’s a sample computation they gave:

Amount Remitted: Php2,000
DST Deduction: Php3.00

Amount Remitted: Php10,000
DST Deduction: Php15.00

Amount Remitted: Php50,000
DST Deduction: Php75.00

Amount Remitted: Php100,000
DST Deduction: Php150.00

And yes, this includes all AdSense Publishers who opted to get remittance via Western Union (DST Section 18 of the 1997 Tax Code, Republic Act 9243).

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Google started introducing the AdSense Referral Program back in November 2005 where publishers can get $100 bonus when they successfully referred someone into the AdSense network.

They slowly continued this program to include Google products (AdWords, AdSense, Picasa) as well as FireFox with Google Toolbar. And though western publishers get $1 for every Firefox downloads they refer, Asian publishers like in the Philippines only get 10% of that referral fee or $0.10 (I know it’s unfair and is tantamount to racial discrimination *hehehe*).

Then, Google finally expanded it globally with hundreds of 3rd-party affiliate products from airline tickets, to hotel reservations and several other commission-based sales.

For some unknown reasons, they started killing the AdSense Referrals back in January of this year and though they’ve somewhat retracted on that announcement, an email from Google AdSense just a couple minutes ago confirms my suspicions — Google is terminating AdSense referrals:

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate your patience during this transition and here are some alternative options to consider:

• Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit: http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/.
• AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AdSense for content ad units.

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August. We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is retired:

• Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.
• Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information.

For most Publishers, this move is inconsequential as not many are actively using Google Referrals. The big players though (bloggers like Darren Rowse earning thousands of dollars from referring the AdSense program) who are in specific niches that get volumes of conversions will lose a passive income stream.

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Defensive, aren’t we? Maybe because this partnership smell awfully like anti-competitive. Kordestani explains:

* This is not a merger. Rather, we are merely providing access to our advertising technology to Yahoo! through our AdSense program.

* This does not remove a competitor from the playing field. Yahoo! will remain in the business of search and content advertising, which gives the company a continued incentive to keep improving and innovating. Even during this agreement, Yahoo! can use our technology as much or as little as it chooses.

* This does not prevent Yahoo! from making similar arrangements with others. This arrangement is not exclusive, meaning that Yahoo! could enter into similar arrangements with other companies.

* This does not increase Google’s share of search traffic. Yahoo! will continue to run its own search engine and advertising programs, and the agreement will not increase Google’s share of search traffic.

* This does not let Google raise prices for advertisers. Google does not set the prices manually for ads; rather, advertisers themselves determine prices through an ongoing competitive auction. We have found over years of research that an auction is by far the most efficient way to price search advertising and have no intention of changing that.

In essence, Yahoo is saying that this deal means:

• That Yahoo! Publishers Network (YPN) is inferior compared to Google AdSense. We all know that already. Question is — why are they giving up this early?
• Better ads, better revenue for YPN Publishers which is good but what about Publishers who are banned from AdSense and went to YPN?
• Yahoo! announced a minimum bid of $0.01 per click on their Search and Content network. Google has a $0.05 minimum bid on AdWords. Say goodbye to the $0.01 for the advertisers?

The agreement only puts the partnership in the United States and Canada but might expand globally later on. Would be interesting how Microsfot would react to this. *heh*

As expected, the market didn’t like the idea of Yahoo going into a suicidal plunge. Shares dropped from $26 to $23 (-10%). Google did a little better with one and a half percentage point increase.

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Well, not much really, unless you’re already in the FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN):

Well, publishers already in the FeedBurner Ad Network will continue to see premium CPM ads directly sold onto their content, but with the added bonus of contextually targeted ads that will fill up the remainder of their inventory. That means you get the best of both worlds: a dedicated Google sales force that knows how and why to sell onto your content, with the added revenue that full back-fill coverage provides. And with AdSense, you’ll know that your back-filled ads are using the strongest contextual ad engine, ensuring the most relevant and profitable ads are delivered to your subscribers. And yes, ads are also sold via Google’s AdWords program.

Actually, AdSense for RSS feeds have been in best for years now — even way before Google bought Feedburner late last year. I’ve been in the FAN for over a year now and I think I’ve only made around $50 the entire time.

It’s not clear though if a Publisher needs to be qualified for FAN before they get accepted for AdSense for Feeds. I’ve already applied for that a year ago but have not gotten any reply from them. My guess is that it will be open to everyone once it goes out of beta.

It’s also unclear whether AdSense ads will only appear on feeds or will also be attached to RSS-2-Email deliveries as well. It’s been an observation that more than 50% of most RSS subscribers do so via email.

If FB would allow it, they might bump into a problem — if an RSS email subscriber signs up with a GMail account, then ads will be displayed in their GMail Inbox which happens to have AdSense ads too. That means, you get 2 competing AdSense ads — one from the publisher and another from GMail/Google. And that’s against Google AdSense TOS right?

Well have to wait and see how they implement this.

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So far, Japan and Hongkong are the only Asian countries to get support for EFT from Google AdSense but I guess it’s just a matter of time before it’s also available in the Philippines.

Electronic Fund Transfer was first introduced back in December 2005 and the list of supported countries aren’t growing as fast as we’d like them to be. EFT or Direct Bank Deposit is much more convenient since your AdSense payouts are deposited into your preferred back right on the day it’s released. No need to visit or line up (in my case, reserve the expected amount one working day before I claim it) in your local Western Union station.

Only drawback with EFT is that it’s only remitted in local currency and there’s no option to get it in US dollars.

Like in the case of Paypal Philippines, the introduction of EFT highly depends on our country’s banking regulations. If other states like Slovakia, Turkey and the Czech Republic can get it, I’m sure the Philippines will get its turn. eBay/Paypal did it in a year. Google can do better.

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In the exclusive story by The Register:

Exclusive: Google has murdered the AdSense account run by one of the web’s most influential anti-Scientology sites.

Yesterday, the search giant cut off all ads served to Enturbulation, a fledgling site dedicated to promoting activism against the Church of Scientology and all its related organizations. This could have something do with the nature of the ads Google was serving. Many of the Google-driven ads funding the anti-Scientology site were paid for by the Church of Scientology.

“While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers,” read Google’s letter to Enturbulation, a kind of home base for the now famous Anonymous movement. “Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account.“

And according to the updated terms and policies of Google AdSense, publishers can be banned for “any action or practice that reflects poorly on Google or otherwise disparages or devalues Google’s reputation or goodwill.” Though we haven’t heard of any sites critical of Google getting banned from their ad network, technically, they can legitimately do that if they want to.

Say for example, you put up a blog against your ISP or a certain company and put AdSense ads on the site. All the ISP or the company needs to do is run an AdWords campaign and they can legitimately request Google to ban your account. Is this the end of those &^%$#Sucks.com blog? Not likely.

In essence, if Google is to choose between a feuding AdSense Publisher and an AdWords Advertiser, Google will almost always side on the latter. Show me the money!

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I know this has been answered and discussed many times before but I’ll just put this out clearly for those who don’t know about it yet.

You already have your first Google AdSense Check which is in US Dollar denomination. You don’t have a dollar bank account and you can’t afford to open up an account. The lowest initial deposit I know is Banco de Oro which is $200.

From experience, there are several ways to go about this.

Option 1. Wait out for your next check from AdSense. Hold them off until you get the $200 minimum initial deposit. Use the combined checks to open a US Dollar account. Ninety (90%) percent of the time, banks will not allow this so make sure you’re familiar (or friendly) with the bank’s account manager. Maybe he or she can make an exception for you. Go with the bank where you already have an account (a regular peso account) — they will likely to give you a favor since they already know you (or at least have a good record on your account). Another way to increase the likelihood of getting the exception is if you have several US dollar bills to go along with a deposit — maybe a $100 dollar bill and a $100 dollar check will cut it. Tried these strategies before and it worked.

Option 2. Shoot an email to Google AdSense Support team (adsense-support@google.com). Tell them you want to have the check canceled and the credit be returned to your AdSense account. There was a time I thought I lost a check in the mail so I emailed AdSense Support and told them to cancel the check. They replied in about 2 days. Use your AdSense email account when sending out the email along with your complete name and publisher ID.

Once the AdSense team has adjusted your account, you can either set your check payouts in Philippine Peso or move to have Western Union disbursements.

If you opted to get it as a Philippine Peso check, you will have to have a peso bank account to get it encashed. It’s good for people who already have a bank account since it forces you to make a “savings ” deposit. My first year’s checks were in US dollars because I wanted to force myself to save and it was an effective strategy for me. Be careful though. A lot of AdSense publishers have lost their checks in the mail before.

If you want cold hard cash pronto, then go with Western Union disbursements. It can be in US dollars or in Peso and you get to spend it asap.

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DoubleClick is technically an ad display network servicing large online publishers. When Google bought them, everyone thought it was a move to expand their advertising network. It turns out, Google will be using the DoubleClick ad delivery platform as a complimentary service. Hence, the AdSense Ad Manager:

Today, we’re announcing a new tool for publishers with the beta launch of Google Ad Manager. Directed at addressing the ad management and serving needs of publishers with smaller sales teams, Google Ad Manager is a free, hosted ad and inventory management tool that can help publishers sell, schedule, deliver and measure their directly-sold and network-based ad inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user experience with Google speed and a tagging process so publishers can spend more time working with their advertisers and less time on their ad management solution. And by providing detailed inventory forecasts and tracking at a very granular level, Ad Manager helps publishers maximize their inventory sell-through rates. {source}

Currently, small-time independent publishers would resort to free, open-source platforms such as Open Ads. I’m actually using OpenAds to serve some of the in-house ads. The system allows you to manage ads and control their delivery as well as track statistics like impressions and clickthroughs.

So, Google AdSense is like going that way now. But why free and all? Well, by helping publishers manage their direct ads, Google has direct contact/access with these non-AdSense publishers and maybe convince them to fill up unused inventories. I can see how it will look like — “AdSense Ad Manager — oops, ad campaign has expired; want us to put AdSense Image Ads in there?”

It’s currently under beta but I’ve sent in my application.

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If you’re not familiar with the changes on Google AdSense, here’s an illustration:

This change was good for advertisers as it avoids accidental clicks. However, it had major effects on publishers that have optimized their sites for such occurrences. Markus Frind of Plenty of Fish experienced a drastic drop in his Adsense CTR:

The CTR on text ads declined about 60% in the last 2 months with Google’s changes. Image ads on the other hand stayed the same. If you take a screen shot of a text ad and then run it as an image ad it will get 2 times the click thru rate.

As a result total paid click ads dropped for January 2008 and caused the market to react. Google’s shares dropped further to just over $400 (from an all time high of $750+):

With this development, it might scare away huge publishers to move on to more high-return networks. That could further hurt AdSense’s performance and drive down revenues in the coming months.

Still, for most small time publishers, Google will still be king of the hill.

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Recently, Inside AdSense blog announced a similar move for AdSense on Google Videos:

… we’ve decided that AdSense for video will use the InVideo ads adopted on our own property, YouTube, which enable advertisers to make a single buy at scale. Also competing in the auction – and unique to AdSense for video and AdSense video units – are text overlay ads which are contextually targeted to signals in your videos and on the page where the video lives. The InVideo ads are paid on a CPM basis, while the text overlay ads are paid on a CPC basis. You can see ad demos here. While we’ll continue to test a variety of ad formats, we believe that overlays are the best way to balance user experience with the needs of our publishers.

It’s a start though I hear some viewers don’t like their videos covered up with ads, Google needs to make money out of service videos otherwise they’d end up like Revver.

AdSense for video is now available to publishers who, at a minimum, serve one million video streams each month and are based in the U.S. with English language sites. In the near future, we do plan to expand the program to more publishers of various sizes and locations.

Us in Asia, especially the Chinese Backstreet Boys, will have to wait out a bit. Demo videos here.

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We’ve witness the crusade against paid reviews by Google in the last couple of months. Why now would it enter into paid reviews itself? Google Search Quality Engineer Matt Cutts explained this before.

Shoemoney thinks the idea might make sense:

• Publishers – Google already has a amazingly huge database of publishers.
• Advertisers – Nobody has no online advertisers then Google AND now they they have taped into the news, magazine and radio network they have access to tap even more advertisers on the shoulder to pay for reviews of their service.
• Blogger – Google already owns the biggest blog network in the world and they seem to already have a relationship with wordpress for easy implementation of Google AdSense on wordpress.com (that would make sense anyway).
• Metrics – Between Google toolbar, Adsense, and Pagerank data Google has by far the best metrics to price a site for a review. They already use these metrics for Adwords in selling contextual ads and links.

Commenters on Shoemoney’s blog says this is a monopolistic nature of Google which it has shown recently — killing link selling competitors to AdSense and benefiting from that same market. IMO, this move could either strike at the credibility of Google or totally straighten up how paid reviews should be done and make it completely legit.

A Googler responds to this and denies anything resembling paid reviews: “In terms of a paid review service through AdSense, I certainly haven’t heard of any such product. I’ve done some searching around the web and found some speculative reports that were the first I’d heard of this product.”

Maybe, this is just a flat out rumor.

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