Good piece by Publishing 2.0 » (Google Is Killing the Economics of Content) on how Google’s AdSense is killing the internet by driving the creation of sites that exist solely to squeeze money from AdSense. Here’s how it works in brief, based on Robert Weisman’s piece in The Boston Globe : A company amasses hundreds of thousands… Read More »
Further to my piece about Apple going after web sites using “iPod” somewhere in their name, is the company Apple going after third party developers using Google AdWords? A piece in TidBITS (“Apple Cracks Down on Google AdWords”) paints a worrying picture of trademark protection gone mad: some recent unsettling events indicate that Apple may… Read More »
Google has removed an adword on its search engine placed by a competitor to its Gmail service. AlienCamel, an Australia-based email service (full disclosure: I use the service), applied to have the word ‘webmail’, along with several others, inserted into the ‘sponsored links’ section of Google’s search pages when people entered the search ‘webmail’. After… Read More »
Gmail: Better than spam? ClickZ reports that an interesting side effect of Google’s new ad-supported email application, Gmail, are contextual ads from competitors. “Because the contextual ads are targeted based on e-mail message content, as determined by Google’s technology, commercial messages are the ones most likely to trigger ads. That’s because they’re most likely to… Read More »
Is the whole pay-per-click industry swamped by fraud? WebProWorld says that Michael Bradley, recently arrested for trying to extort money from Google, is a wake up call to the PPC industry. He claimed to have developed software that would automatically click on Google ads, potentially costing both Google and their advertisers millions of dollars. (Here’s… Read More »