Adsense Publishers Report Massive Dip in Earnings and CTR

Google's decision to shut down Made-for-Adsense websites and Adsense Arbitragers could be affecting the earnings of regular Adsense publishers.

Several members of Adsense forums at WebMasterWorld and DigitalPoint have reported significant drop in CPM and CTR values in the current month (June 2007).

Here are some Adsense CPM / CTR figures reported by members in the discussions:

1. Page views with Adsense: unchanged, EPC: down 25%, CTR: down 15%, Revenue: significantly down.

2. EPC down about 20% from last month.

3. I've gone into a freefall today. Epc down by 80% across a variety of sites and topics.

4. I'm beginning to think there has been a new flawed algorithm added with good intentions, but bad results, that is doing this and is causing a lot of advertisers earnings to fall.

5. Clicks, traffic remains the same. but the revenues are going down about %50-60

6. June - Down 50%

7. CTR is down 40%. Net result is less money.

8. At the moment we are looking at our stats, shaking our heads and asking 'what have we done to deserve this?'

9. I'm having a 40% reduction in eCPM

10. We are now down over 60% from ANY month last year, so tomorrow it will be adios to G.

11. My traffic and CPC are basically the same, yet Adsense earnings are still down by about 45%

12. The clicks that used to be over 2.00 dropped to 0.03. So strange and frustrating.

13. Same amount of clicks but I've got from about $5.00 a day to about $0.50

Full discussion threads available at Adsense Nosedive and Adsense Freefall.

Smart pricing could be one of the reasons behind this free-fall but it could also be attributed to some algorithm changes at Adsense. Or does it have anything to do with eBay suspending their Adsense campaigns ? [Picture: wiseacre]

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Preview the New CNN.com Website That Includes Widescreen Video

Starting next month, CNN.com website will sport a refreshing new design.

The new site will offer wider (575x325) video clips and they'll will be fetching related blog posts for every article using Sphere blog search engine. [expect some traffic if you cite a CNN story]

If you would like to preview the new US edition of CNN.com, visit beta.cnn.com. The international edition of CNN.com will however be unveiled only on July 1st.

Like all other video sharing websites, CNN too has moved from Windows Media to Flash Video - so you'll no longer require the Windows Media codec to watch CNN videos inside your web browser.

CNN has also added Live news video feeds and the entire archive of news videos on CNN.com will now be available to all for free.

Since the CNN news videos are now streamed from pdl.stream.aol.com/cnn/ as FLV files, it will be much simpler to save CNN videos locally.

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Blogging Slogans and Badges for Blog Addicts

  

More blogging taglines for T-Shirts on PrintPerfection and CafePress.

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When Web Celebrities Quit Current Jobs To Join A Startup

If you are a startup company planning to hire some web celebrity (like a high-profile blogger), make sure your web servers are capable of handling the web traffic - it could be equivalent to getting Digged, Slashdotted, GigaOmed, Scobleized and TechCrunched simultaneously.

The following Alexa graph depicts the traffic at Podtech.net (maroon) and Zillow.com (blue) - look at the spike in traffic when Scoble resigned from Microsoft to join the podcasting startup.

In case of Zillow, traffic peaked when Vanessa quit Google to join Zillow.

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Know What Your Favorite Blogs Have Written About a Web Page

Long ago, Google released the Web Comments extension that shows which blog posts are linking to a web page that we are currently reading in Firefox - an extremely neat idea but not always helpful because it shows only the latest posts linking to the current web page - there's no option to sort results by blog authority or to filter spam blogs.

Imagine if you were able to instruct Blogger Web Comments to show commentary only from certain blogs / bloggers that you trust - that's where BlogRovR comes into the picture. You can think of BlogRovR as a far more useful and customizable version of Google Web Comments - both are Firefox add-ons and help you track incoming links but the former gives more flexibility and spam-free results guaranteed.

When you install BlogRovR, it is pre-configured with a bundle of most popular blog feeds (like GigaOm, Mashable, TechCrunch, Scobleizer, etc) - you may edit this list and include your personal favorite blogs individually or just import your entire reading list into BlogRovR through the OPML route.

Now when you visit some web page, BlogRovR will show you (in an unobtrusive auto-slide box) summaries from your favorite bloggers that are linking to the current web page and what tags they have used.

Another excellent feature - you can even read the full blog posts of your favorite blogger in-place without visiting his / her blog site - BlogRovR will show the blog post as a Sticky note over the current page itself.

The BlogRovR extension is so good that Mozilla guys have made it an officially recommended Firefox extension. Give it a try, you'll love it more than Blogger Web Comments.

BlogRovR.com | Developer Blog | Mozilla Add-ons

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Capture Web Page Screenshots in Safari Quickly

Do you know that Apple Safari browser has an in-built screen capture feature - it's not for taking snapshots of wide or long scrolling web pages but a perfect tool for grabbing the visible portions of the web page as an image (very similar to Print Screen key with auto-save).

Apple never told you about their secret screen capture tool because they use it for getting bug reports from Safari Users.

Goto Help, Report Bugs to Apple and select "Send screen shot of current web page" - As you press submit, the screenshot will be automatically saved in the temp folder of your computer (like C:\temp) as a BMP image file (Safxxx.bmp)

You can even manually type the URL of the website that you want to save as an image.

Also see: Capture Website Screenshots Online

Important: If you are worried about privacy, don't use this feature since the data is also sent to Apple. [May help when you are in a cyber cafe where the computer has no application other than the web browser]

More Web Page Screen capture tools for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

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iPhone vs Nokia N95, BlackBerry Curve, Treo, Samsung BlackJack

Just ten days ahead of the much-hyped iPhone launch, Apple has released a smartphone matrix comparing the physical dimensions, talk time and battery life of some of the most popular smartphones that are available in the market today.

As per the matrix, Apple iPhone is the thinnest smartphone (half the thickness of N95 or Treo 750) with the largest screensize and Wi-Fi capabilities. [pdf]

While there's no option to swap the drained battery of an iPhone with a full recharged one, the promised eight hours of talktime and 250 hours of standby time should bring enough cheers to those who are planning to queue up outside the Apple stores at 0600 hours June 29, 2007.

In related news, a new report has suggest that 19 million Americans have strong interest in buying the iPhone, 67% of who are subscribers on other carrier networks.

Update: Nokia N95 is a Wi-Fi enabled phone and Apple has now updated the phone comparison chart.

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Those Who Search for GOOG Are Filthy Rich, Seeking Luxury Homes

Try googling "GOOG" (the stock ticker symbol of Google) and you are likely to see the following ads:

Filthy rich? We'll help - Throw away your newfound cash at Woot. You're welcome.

LuxurySiliconValley.com - $3 Million+ homes and condos for sale in the Silicon Valley

Surprisingly, Google currently has no ads for people googling for BRK.B (Berkshire Hathaway Inc.) - this stock trades at 7x the stock price of Google

For MSFT (Microsoft) and YHOO (Yahoo) - the ads are related to jobs in both cases:

Write beautiful code? - www.ooyala.com/careers [Thanks Rakesh]

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Single Sign-in for YouTube and Google Accounts

Good news YouTube fans - you have one less username / password combination to remember since you can now move your YouTube data to Google account.

See: Multiple Sign-in for Gmail and Google Accounts

And if you have never signed-up for YouTube before, you can now create a new YouTube account with your existing Google Account. [you'll still need to supply an additional YouTube username though which is kind of strange]

Everything remains the same except that a new YouTube icon will show up in your Google Account Services page.

What's a Google Account - if you are on GMail, Google Groups, Adsense, iGoogle, Google checkout, etc - that's your Google Account - it may not necessarily be a @gmail.com address.

If you would like to unlink your YouTube and Google Account association, goto youtube.com/my_account_unlink.

If you unlink your accounts, you will no longer be able to login to YouTube with your Google account. Your YouTube account will stay the same otherwise, and you can still login with your YouTube username and password.

See: Secure your Google and Gmail account

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Cheerleader Girls Wearing T-Shirts with your Message

Click To Play

[this post contains a video which may not be visible in your newsreader]

Philips created this Cheerleading Girls Generator for the FIFA World cup 2006 - just type in some text message and click "Cheer Up". Time waster but fun.

Links: Cheer Up Generator | Sample Video

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Windows Live Writer - Guide for Power Bloggers

Windows Live Writer from Microsoft  is probably one of the best and most popular blog editing software around for Windows platform.

Have you explored all the wonderful features, tips and tricks of using Windows Live Writer ? If not, here's a comprehensive Windows Live Writer tutorial cum guide to help you become a power blogger:

Embed Video Clips from YouTube and Facebook

There's a very easy way of embedding video clips inside your blog posts - just copy the video embed code from YouTube or Google Video and paste that inside the normal view of Windows Live Writer (or simple drag-n-drop). You don't have to switch to the HTML view of Windows Live Writer as the software is smart enough to recognize the Flash video code and renders it just perfect.

Related: How to Embed Anything in your Website

Do you Paste or Paste Special ?

When you paste a block of formatted rich text in WLW using the standard Paste command (Ctrl+V), all the font styles and hyperlinks appear exactly as in the source. Windows Live Writer gives you another option called "Paste Special" that's borrowed from Microsoft Office.

Using Paste Special (Ctrl+Shift+V), you have the option to remove all HTML formatting but preserve hyperlinks and images.  Or you can try the Thinned HTML option which preserve the fonts sizes and text alignments but strips the source text of all extra formatting like CSS styles.

Not just categories, Add Tags to Your Wordpress Posts

By default, Windows Live Writer lets you add categories to your blog posts that are listed as a tree view near the status bar. In addition to categories, you can also include any number of tags in your articles by using the following syntax [not to be confused with Flickr, del.icio.us or Technorati tags]:

The Ultimate Tag Warrior or Simply Tagging Wordpress plugin will automatically recognize these tags and this line won't appear in your main blog. You can also use Windows Live Writer to insert the More tag for Post excerpts <!-- more -->

Use Link Glossary for Quick Access to Favorite Websites and URLs

Link Glossary is your personal repository of web pages or URL that you frequently quote in your blog posts. For instance, if you are regularly link to the Yahoo! homepage in your blog post, you can include that address in the Link Glossary.

The next time you want to add a link to yahoo.com in your post, Link Glossary will do that for you without you having to type the whole URL over an over again. Available from Tools -> Options -> Link Glossary or right click any hyperlink in your post and say "Add to Link Glossary".

Tumbleblog - Quick Blogging from the Web Browser

Similar to the BlogThis bookmarklets, you can select web images, hyperlinks or any portion of a web page inside Firefox or IE and quickly publish them to your blog using the Blog This feature available separately.

Windows Live Writer will automatically insert the attribution links (source URL) in the blog posts. You can also customize these HTML snippets through Tools -> Options -> Blog This. A good example would be to include social bookmarking icons, Technorati cosmos, Sphere related posts, etc.


Resize Images using the Image Handles

Most of us may know this trick but still mentioning it here since it is simply the biggest time-saver for bloggers. Sometimes that web images don't fit our blog layout so you can easily resize them right inside WLW by dragging the pointers near the image corners. Windows Live Writer will maintain a link to your source image for readers who like to view the image in full size.

To Move Draft Blog Posts from one Computer to Another

When you are composing blog posts inside Windows Live Writer, the software won't save the draft entries to you hard drive - they are only accessible from the Windows Live Writer interface. If you like to move your unfinished blog posts from one PC to another, the best option is to save them as online draft which are accessible from all computers (Goto Save Draft -> Post draft to Weblog)


Turn Off Smart Correction

When you type a string of characters that resemble a web URL or an email address, Windows Live Writer will convert that into an http: or mailto: hyperlink. You can easily reverse this change by pressing Ctrl+Z or right-click the hyperlink and says "remove hyperlink"


Insert Blog Widgets, Google Adsense Referrals and other Javascript

Switch to the HTML code view (Shift+F11) and insert any scripts or CSS code.


Important Windows Live Writer Shortcuts

• Ctrl+K - Insert Hyperlinks 
• Ctrl+L - Insert Images from the desktop or the internet
• Ctrl+S - Save drafts locally
• F7 - Run Spell Checker
• F9 - View or Hide the Sidebar

Additional Reading: More Windows Live Writer Tricks

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Apple Releases Patch for Windows Safari 3.0.1

The half baked public beta of Safari 3 bought enough bad PR for Apple and so they have silently released a new version - Safari 3.0.1.

The new patch fixes certain security issues but the font display problems persist on lot of computers. Here's a screenshot of the latest version of Safari (notice the random fonts in the menu bar, bookmarks and the About dialog)

You'll have to redo the entire exercise of editing the fonts.plist file in order to see the menu bars and websites like Yahoo or Amazon correctly.  The other option is to manually copy the Lucida Grande fonts from your c:\windows\fonts folder to the C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources folder. It has worked for lot of Safari users.

If you don't see the toolbar or status bar in Safari 3, copy the Defaults.plist from C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources\ to C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari and rename it to Preferences.plist - this will reset everything to factory defaults.

This overnight release looks more in response to the 0day exploit discovered just two hours after the public release. Should wait for another patch from Apple.

Download Safari 3.0.1

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Search Video Clips from Popular Video Sharing Sites

How do you find videos on the web related to some topic? The Youtube website is probably a good place to start but if you confine the search only to YouTube, you will miss so much exciting stuff that exists in other places.

DailyMotion, Metacafe, Vimeo, and other video sharing websites may not be as big as YouTube but they still have a great fan following and host tons of video clips that may well be of your interest.

We often ignore searching video content on these "non-YouTube" sites because of lack of time - fortunately, this problem is now a thing of the past with uLinkx - a comprehensive video search engine to help you conveniently search multiple video websites from one place.

uLinkx provides RSS search feeds for your video search queries. And you can also watch any of these videos without leaving the uLinkx website - no more hitting the back or forward buttons in your browser.

My favorite feature is the Live Video search which is like a common wrapper for all video sharing sites. You execute a live query on YouTube or sites right inside uLinkx.

Other than video search, uLinkx can be used for bookmarking video clips from multiple sites or organizing them in video playlists. [image a single playlist that streams videos clips coming from different sources like YouTube, Metacafe and Google Video]
Wishlist - more customizable RSS feeds and support for BrightCove and Blip.tv. I also faced problems subscribing to the Video search feeds in Newsgator but they worked fine inside Google Personalized homepage.

Update: uLinkx is no longer available but you can use Bing Videos for video search.

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Social Bookmarking Enters YouTube, Related Videos Now Optional

The YouTube Videos website sports a new look today that looks cleaner and more usable with the re-arranged modules. The site has moved from a 3-column layout to a 2-column with the embed section now placed just below the actual video clip.

They have added two new features and also removed few things:


Other than the cosmetic changes, the very interesting news is that YouTube is now giving users an option to embed video clips on their sites with or without the related video thumbnails. This option is available near the Embed box.

For existing videos in your blog, you can insert the parameter "&rel0" to the Youtube URL to include related video clips or "&rel1" to hide the related videos - the default setting is that related videos will be shown in the video clip.

Another enhancement is that use can now share YouTube videos on Digg, Delicious, Furl, Reddit and StumbleUpon directly from the YouTube interface.

YouTube has removed the favorites link that suggested how many YouTube members have marked some video as their favorites. The star ratings stay.

Also missing are the links which showed the top five websites who have embedded that video clip.

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View or Search Your Web Browser History in a Picture Timeline

Thumbstrips is a wonderful Firefox extension that helps you view recently visited web pages in a visual manner - it's a more user friendly and powerful approach than the native Firefox History view (Ctrl+H).

Thumbstrips, like an automatic screen capture program, takes screenshots of the websites that you are visiting and also records other details like how long you stayed on that web page and the number of times you viewed that page in your current session.

With recording turned on, press F2 and the website thumbnail images will display as a filmstrip in chronological order - move your cursor over the thumbnails to browse through your web history or right click any image to get more details about your interaction with that particular webpage.

Since thumbstrips will also save the associated HTML source code of web pages, you can use it for searching the browser history with keywords that may be in the title, URL or body of the webpage. The thumbnail images can also be saved to a local folder or shared with friends.

And Thumbstrips will save a snapshot of the webpage as you see it in the web browser - not the entire webpage which could span several folds.

I was expecting Thumbstrips to consume tons of memory since it is always processing in the background but fortunately, that's not the case.  Give it a shot.

Thumbstrips Extension [Firefox Only] | Thanks Dave

Related: How to Capture Web page Screenshots

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Find Alexa Rank of any Website using Google Talk

Imagine typing "whois xyz.com" inside GTalk to find out who owns that web domain name. Or saying "alexa abc.com" will show you the Alexa Traffic details of that website right inside your Google chat window.

You can now easily run popular network commands inside Google Talk, Yahoo!, AOL or Windows Live messenger through IMified - just add imified@imified.com to your buddy list and start using the chat window as a network command line tool.

Other than whois, commands like traceroute and ping can also be executed from GTalk.

We earlier mentioned IMified as a quick tool for publishing posts on Wordpress or Blogger blogs through messenger clients.

The service has come a long way since then and now works seamlessly with tumblr, jaiku, twitter and so on.

You can even use Imified to add bookmarks to your del.icio.us account from Google Talk. How cool is that.

imified | Add it to your friends list and the add the netlookup widget.

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Convert Powerpoint Presentations to Flash with GMail PPT Viewer

GMail now has an inbuilt PPT viewer that lets you view Powerpoint attachment as a Flash picture slideshow in the web browser itself without requiring Microsoft PowerPoint application.

This slideshow feature of GMail will be useful since you no longer have to download the full PPT attachment in order to view that 16th slide of the presentation.

Here are two additional situations where it may help:

1. If you have to view a presentation on some computer that has no copy of PowerPoint, gmail yourself the PPT file and watch the slides inside the web browser. [similar to converting PDF to text using GMail]

2. GMail converts every slide of your Powerpoint presentation to a Flash (swf) file - if you manually advance the entire PPT slideshow using the arrows, all the slides will become available as Flash files in your browser's temp folder.

Just a quick way of transforming Powerpoint slides into SWF documents without using any desktop conversion software. The swf files may then be embedded in your blog for sharing with readers. Nothing great since Scribd can also convert your PPT to Flash paper.

Do you know if GMail Powerpoint viewer can read PPS (Powerpoint Show) formats.

Related: Reduce the File Size of PowerPoint

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Know The Articles That Visitors Are Currently Reading on your Blog

There exist hundreds of web analytics software to help you understand how people discovered your website, how long they stayed on some web page, what browser they were using, etc.

Whos.Amung.Us takes a different approach to web stats and answers two very useful questions in a visual manner. The questions are:

(a) How many people are currently on your blog ?

(b) What stories of your blog are they reading at the moment?

whos.amung.us is not about pageviews or organic search keywords, it's about visualizing content that is being read by visitors on your blog this very moment.

No registrations, no javascript, just insert a small HTML image code and your site stats will begin to show. You can also change the color of the widget to match your blog style.

Like the del.icio.us tag cloud, this service will also show a list of your most popular blog pages - the larger the font, the more hits or more people reading that page.

Since it uses a simple GIF or PNG image, you can use the service to track visitors in Flickr, MySpace or any other site that doesn't accept Javascript code but allow the IMG tag.

http://whos.amung.us/ | Developer Blog | Color Wheel

I think we can also use this service to get email read receipts by inserting the tracking graphic as an inline image in the email.

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Safari 3 Is An Half-baked Web Browser from Apple, Wait for a Patch

If you are also excited about the new Safari Browser for Windows, please defer installing the beta version on your PC until Apple releases a new Safari patch the fixes the display problems.

The current version of Safari, which is more of an alpha version, has problems rendering text on web page, adding bookmarks and crashes often. The Safari support forums on the Apple website are flooded with complaints from Windows Users who are also facing similar problems while loading web pages inside Safari.

Infact, there seems to be a clash between the Lucida fonts bundled with Safari and the ones that are existing in your Windows fonts folder. If you use the Apple supplied fonts, your browser Menu bar, bookmarks and toolbars will either disappear or show greek characters.

Related: Fix Font Display Issues in Windows Safari

Look how the Yahoo! website appears inside Safari for Windows - the text near the Yahoo! services is not displayed while the news headline fonts are showing random characters:

One of the geeky solutions suggested is to manually edit the fonts.plist file in the c:\documents and settings\<User Name>\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari folder and restart the browser.

Add the following lines at the beginning of the second <dict> node the file:

<key>Verdana</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\verdana.ttf</string>
<key>Verdana Bold</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\verdanab.ttf</string>
<key>Verdana Italic</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\verdanai.ttf</string>
<key>Verdana Bold Italic</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\verdanaz.ttf</string>
<key>Tahoma Bold</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\tahomabd.ttf</string>
<key>Tahoma</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\Tahoma.TTF</string>
<key>Trebuchet MS</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\trebuc.TTF</string>
<key>Trebuchet MS Bold</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\trebucbd.TTF</string>
<key>Trebuchet MS Bold Italic</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\trebucbi.TTF</string>
<key>Trebuchet MS Italic</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\trebucit.TTF</string>

Apple should quickly fix the problems in the Windows version of Safari else it may soon leave an average impression in the minds of Windows XP or Vista users.

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Heads or Tails: Toss a Coin Online

Do you flip a coin in the air when choosing between two alternatives?

Normally coin flipping requires a metal currency coin but you can now toss coins right inside your web browser using Coin Flipper from Random.org, a popular random number service.

The interesting bit about Coin Flipper is that you can flip coins from several countries in different denominations - even the antique coins of the Roman era are available for flipping, virtually.

Other than simulate the coin tossing activity, Random lets you simulate roll dices, pick state lottery ticket numbers or generate random bitmap images. Random.org

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