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OK the long overdue follow up post to my last year’s shit storm post on why I hate Google AdSense: 

- The Rich get Richer. Well it’s a joke really that the only ones making any money are the owners of Google. If you are the one actually producing any of the content that they get rich off of, most likely you are still a broke ass. It is the sheer gap of wealth from the amount of money being printed to the actual publishers that makes me the most angry. With a 200 billion market cap, they could pay their top ONE MILLION publishers $100,000 and still have 100 billion left over. No but Google Officers like Doerr are cashing in 43,475 shares for a cool $30,000,000. He must need a new set of rims for his hummer?

- The Poor get Poorer. Yes, you guessed it. If you have been using AdSense as your only source of blog income you now know that AdSense blindness is setting in on your readers and they are clicking less and even if they do click, CPC’s are down. The money you used to buy your daily coffee with is now only paying for the soy milk upgrade.

- Lack of customization. Color palette change, rounded edges. Wow. Some customization. In the gaming world it’s common place to be able to customize your character to look almost identical to you or anyone you like, and this coming from much smaller development companies, let alone a billion dollar behemoth. Too busy counting their money I guess. I mean when the geek sitting in the cube next to you is worth 4 million on paper, why work? He is too busy twittering and checking out his net worth.

- Loyal promoter? We don’t need you. OK so you’ve been doing a money making blog for years and sending tonnes of fish over to the big shark as an affiliate referral. They pay you a bounty and then suck millions out of your referrals, but now depending on where you live, they might not want your krill. edit  - (OK they fixed this since I wrote this post a while ago, but now they still don’t accept certain countries.)

- Still only a CPC model.  Wherever there is someone paying for a certain call to action there is a way to game the system.   Yes, click fraud is alive and well and Google really doesn’t care that much about it, especially since the buzz about it has died off over the years.  Why not let the publisher decide what format to charge?  CPM, flat rate?  Adify.com allows these options for publishers. I’ve always preferred flat rate, and you can’t game a fixed price.

- Follow our rules or else. Want to sell your own text links on YOUR own site. Forget it. Cutt’s will even get you to sell out your own mother down the river for making money on the side. Big G will come down on your ass like a Columbian Coke lord on a cocaine farmer for chewing on leaves…

(And kill it at the same time…)

1. Use a services like PayPerPost or sponsored reviews and pay someone to blog positively about your product but don’t worry if the blog is completely off topic to your market.
2. Sign up a bunch of fake alias in multiple forums, answer a few questions, and then start flogging your product to yourself.
3. Create a few splogs loaded with scrapped content and loaded with relevant keywords and then blog about your own product.
4. Spam all of your friends and ask them to Digg and stumble your blog posts daily until you have no friends.
5. Create a FaceBook fan club for your product and invite everyone you know and do weekly updates to everyone even if they didn’t join the group.
6. Offer your product for ‘free’ to prominent bloggers only if they write something nice about you
7. Buy a whole bunch of fake traffic and then put your site up for sale on SitePoint telling everyone how much major traffic you have, then cancel the auction and tell everyone, that you site is way too valuable to sell.

Got any more fun ones?   Add them in the comment field.

Newspaper advertising is in big trouble and  and in its current form it will die in the next 10-15 years.  The newspapers need to step up to consumer demands and adapt quicker.

“According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.”

Some of my suggestions to adapt:

- Come up with 2 different formats - A home version and a ‘travel version’.  Have you ever tried reading the New York Times on the subway?  UK newspapers are starting to get smaller and some major North American publishers have cut the size slightly to make it more manageable, but to truly get portable, have a power summary edition in a magazine size.  Smaller will be key especially with everyone going green and with the paper wastage.

Start Selling your product - Newspapers have just gotten lazy over the years, and think that people ‘need’ their product and that people will just buy it.  Start pitching it again.  Remember the paper boys that used to be on the street corners selling newspapers or the kid who used to come to your house once a week and collect the ‘paper money’?  How could you cancel your subscription from a pimply 12 year old trying to earn a buck.    Or even the homeless guys selling them at major red light intersections.  I used to buy one from them even if I didn’t really want one. 

- Give it away FREE - Create a free version that is super small and handed out at major hubs and subway stops.  Most major cities already have several small free entertainment or news type mini papers that are giving out free, the major players shouldn’t be giving away the market share to these small players.

- Customized newspapers - OK, we’re still away’s off with this one, but users should be able to fully customize the paper they receive.  Until the fully customization options are scalable, users should be able to at least pick and choose which sections or the current paper they receive.   My Dad only reads the sports section or the paper, I only read entertainment and business.  Why do we need 20 sections if we only read 2-3? 

Time is running out big boys, adapt or die slowly and painfully.

I was at a great session at SXSW last week called “The Worst Ten Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007″ and although I didn’t agree with all of their choices, (I thought the beer ad rocked :) I completely agreed with the overall message of the session; that you need to tread lightly when planning a ‘viral’ campaign as it can badly backfire and that you can’t force a conversation down someone’s throat if they are not listening to you.

The funniest one and the overall winner was a campaign gone wrong from HP where they had a women get her kids to take a actual hammer to the competitions camera and smash it. The kids were both toddlers which made the brainwashing even more horrifying.

My favourite (or least favourite) and also the runner up, was the Cisco ‘human network’ campaign. I’m really glad they chose this one, as I thought it was a painfully forced attempt at getting the blogosphere and Wikipedia users to want to talk about a slogan.

The panel consisted of Henry Copland, Steve Hall, Jeff Jarvis, Rebecca Lieb, and Charlotte Selles.I think they did an excellent job on this panel. It was funny, insightful and interactive and it was also refreshing that they actually brought and showed all the examples that they references. There is nothing worse than have someone go, “you remember that viral video, the one from Dove”, or” the one where that chick cut off her hair” and half the audience going’ huh’?

Stay tuned for my next blog post. “Social Media Advertising - Why big companies just don’t get it”

Seth Godin wrote and interesting post today that actually brought me out of my blog rut.

While I don’t agree with his first comment:
“Frequency, Frequency, Frequency and the paradox of the Net. The #1 contributor to success in advertising, without any question whatsoever, is frequency. “Repeat yourself until everyone is annoyed but your accountant,”

I’m really not sure that anyone should be taking advertising advice from their accountant? :)

I certainly agree with his next comment:
“The challenge online is this: smart people are bored by frequency.”

Today’s advertising game, especially online, is not about annoying the most people you can. Online advertising is about getting the right product in front of the right audience. It’s about the ultra niche markets talking directly to their target client base. Not broadcasting to mass markets in hopes that you may or may not get seen by your potential audience. Ignorant marketers are the ones that are still buying huge run of network campaigns on massive portals to get as many ‘eyeballs’ on their ads as possible. That is a huge waste of precious ad dollars. With technologies like behavioral targeting or even the basic geo-targeting, and demo-targeting, why advertise to someone who will not only never buy your product, but can’t even use your product? EVER. As a male, one product that is marketed towards me constantly is tampons. Why? I can’t use them. TV airwaves are inundated with these ads everyday, and while massive current TV ad networks can’t filter the audience by gender, you can online. A simple request for female only demo-targeting with your online ad buy and presto, your ad budget has just doubled. Not using geo-targeting on your campaign is just laziness as well. Why have your advertising running in China if your product can’t be bought there?

The really exciting thing about online advertising is that you don’t need a massive advertising budget with hundreds of thousands of dollars and blast advertising banners everywhere you can, buying up super cheap CPM’s to spam as many viewers as possible. With a few hundred bucks you can get started with keyword campaigns and advertise only to your direct niche. And with millions of small blogs out there on every topic imaginable you don’t have to go to the large portals to do you ad buys, you can go directly to your audience and engage with them.

Get your product or service in front of the people who want it, or ever better, create a brilliant product and your users will actually advertise it for you.

Google is at it once again.  Pissing off its subjects with the latest PR shakeup, dropping the rankings of almost everyone including those who choose not to bow down to the king and surprisingly even those who do.
OK, so what is a Google PR?  PR stands for Page Rank and basically it is Google acting like the king of the da internet, rating all sites on a scale of 1 to 10, and of course putting itself right up there at a 10.   And in essence making everyone else clamour and obey the king doing everything they can to appease him hoping that just maybe he will lift up your rating to a coveted 8 or 9.
 Should you care? Unfortunately it still holds some clout.  Certain people whether buying ads or even buying your site will often use your Google page rank as a meter of its success.  Today’s shuffle will hopefully wake up a few people that put too much importance on this and see it for what it really is.   Google’s way to influence and controls its subjects.  
Some theories on why sites PR might be penalized:
-   The main theory, is if you purchase text links or sell text links
-   A blog roll could cause too many similar circle of friend links
-   NOT using Google Adsense on your site
-   Even exchanging un-paid links to your site.
Problogger is down to a PR 4 which is way too low for his site. (Mines a 4 for crying out loud ;)
DailyBlogTips has a list of some of the big blogs that have dropped. 

AndyBeard has put together a list as well.
Stumble Upon is my single highest source of traffic and surpassed Google search listings, and I’m guessing a lot of other blogs are finding that too.
Let go of your fear of the King and set your blog free…
    

As a long time veteran in the advertising & marketing world you become more and more aware of sneaky forms of hidden advertising.   Some, if done correctly are actually a value add to the users experience and others are just down -right malevolent and borderline ethical.  Let’s take a look at one example in the entertainment media news world.  The TV show Entertainment tonight is pretty much a 30 min advertisement with barely any content that hasn’t been paid for.  To the untrained eye you might not even notice that almost everything is fact an advert.   An interview with 2 of the hottest actors with their new movie that is coming out, a behind the scene look at a new fall show, the trendiest restaurant in Hollywood, the coolest new accessory for your outfit.  All paid placements.  Some of it is a bit obnoxious, but most of it is relevant to the show so as a viewer you usually don’t even notice or mind.
Occasionally when I’m reading a feature article in a magazine about a new product or company, I’ll actually flip over to the back to see if they have bought the back cover.    Fortune magazine is notorious for doing big features on companies that also advertises in the magazine.
Now let’s take a look at the guys on the block in the blog world that are taking full aim at credibility and potentially blowing it right out of the water:
Smorty:  Don’t just ask bloggers to write paid content, but ask the bloggers to sign up more Smorty users by the way of an affiliate program J
Blogvertise: Throw in a cool picture of the offending bloggers to make it look facebook’ish and perhaps a little less slimy? (Not one, but 3 links to the advertiser is required)
PayPerPost :  The king of the hill, the one company that seems to always take the heat when this topic comes up and rightly so.  I think they may even relish in it.  (The one thing these guys have changed over time is making disclosure required.)
Blogs were the original pioneers of one person’s true voice and un-biased opinions on a product, service or corporation.  It was the little guy who could be heard in a sea of millions and make a direct impact on the giants.   Paying the one voice, causes the listeners to hear a little boy cry wolf…
Related posts:
Tivo kills their PayPerPost campaign
PayPerPost launches random new service