The “Suggest An Ad” button was first spotted by Jens Wiese in Germany, and it seems like the feature is in a very early test phase.

I logged in to my Facebook Advertising account and didn’t see that feature present yet. Facebook is known for testing out new products and features on a small subset before rolling it out to everyone, so I assume that this is another one of their tests.

While I am not sure if having this new feature will actually boost Facebook’s ad sales dramatically, but new advertisers might find this feature useful if they are clueless about ad copy and has no experience whatsoever with online advertising.

So I’ll keep an eye on this feature and will write about it again when I know more.

Twitter has just announced their revenue model (sort of) via ads which they are calling “Promoted Tweets“.

Basically it will allow advertisers to “promote” their regular tweets for more eyeballs and thus it will show up in the twitter search and also in user’s timeline based on the context. John Battelle has a great post up on his blog where he compares the program with Google Adwords. Like adwords, Promoted Tweets seems to have certain elements/checking that will ensure that only ‘well performed’ ad lives. (Just Like Quality Score of Google Adwords). John also believes that this will be welcomed by developers because they will finally find a way to monetize their efforts!

But What about the publishers?

Who made twitter, “Twitter”? Its Us! Our time, our efforts and our 140 characters of tweets has made twitter this big today. Twitter/Developers by right doesn’t own any of the content, we (publishers) own our tweets.

One of the main reason for which Google’s Advertising platform – Adwords is so successful today is because of its other side – Google Adsense. Thousands of publishers were pretty much promoting Google’s advertising platform for free to the whole world when they opted in to that service. And thats how all the online advertisers eventually got to know about adwords. Because of adsense, the advertisers also believed in the platform — Ad inventory is the key and google is by far the biggest due to adsense. Adsense did our web economy a lot of good too – It encouraged new publishers to come in and produce more content which now powers the whole web.

So when twitter says that they are going to put “promoted tweets” on my stream, it sounds insane. Twitter don’t own my tweets, how can they just insert a paid tweet inside? Imagine if Google didn’t had Adsense porgram today, They could have started framing every website that it sends traffic to from its search and on top of the site they could show contextual ads inside a frame. How irritating would that be?

I’m glad they didn’t do it! Because Google doesn’t own the content of the web. They are just a medium for users to find me. But what google did was smart, they made an option for me to OPT-IN to their program that allows me to show their ads and receive a ‘cut’ for it. That’s fair I’d say.

What Twitter Needs to do

If twitter’s revenue model is really “Ads” (I thought there were other cool ones) they really need to get us (publishers) involved in it. Our tweets combined actually make twitter. So twitter shouldn’t be making money on what we are creating. Well, they certainly can if they get us inside their advertising eco-system.

So will this work? Well I don’t have a full proof plan yet, but this is what I can think of right now. We (publishers) can opt-in to twitter’s advertising platform which will give access of our demographics/profile information to the advertisers. So an advertiser like DELL can choose to promote a tweet to all the tech enthusiasts in “USA & Canada” or the whole world. As a publisher, I’ll agree to auto “re-tweet” the advertisers message to my followers using the twitter’s official re-tweet function. This way my followers will see “Dell” on their tweet stream and not me, but they will know that they are seeing that on their stream because of me.

Since the ads will be engaging, my followers can interact directly with Dell. But twitter should be able to track that “my re-tweet” to my followers actually converted into a conversation between one of my follower & Dell. (a conversion for Dell on this case).

Based on my performance (no of conversions/actions taken), I can be given a small percentage of the advertiser’s ad spend. The percentage may vary depending on my account performance and this will encourage publishers to write ‘better tweets’. I’ll engage more with my audience (my followers), and eventually they will be more supportive of my stream. And its a win-win situation for everyone. If a particular user doesn’t want to see ads, he/she can simply choose to un-follow the publisher.

What do you think? Comment here or reply via twitter - @saadkamal

What others are saying:

The Twitter Ad Model Revealed (What Were You Expecting, a Pony?) – GigaOm

Full Details On Twitter’s Long-Awaited Ad Platform: Promote – Techcrunch

Twitter’s Advertising Scheme is Delightfully Boring – Just As It Should Be – Read Write Web

What is Apple iAd ?

Apple iAd is Mobile Advertising platform for the iPhone OS4 which will eventually power all the iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch (3rd gen onwards) & of course the most talked about iPad. iAd will be a built directly onto the core OS thus developers will be able to use that platform to monetize the apps that they make for all the apple mobile/handheld products.

Steve Jobs raised an interesting point about mobile advertising, he says – unlike personal computers where people go to a search engine to search for stuff most of the time, on a mobile device they are always inside different apps! So advertising on search isn’t very relevant when it comes to mobile advertising.

The average user spends over 30 minutes using apps on their phone. If we said we wanted to put an ad up every 3 minutes, that’d be 10 ads per device per day — about the same as a TV show. We’re going to soon have 100m devices. That’s a billion ad opportunities per day! This is a pretty serious opportunity, and it’s an incredible demographic. But we want to do more than that. We want to change the quality of the advertising. We’re all familiar with interactive ads on the web. They’re interactive, but they’re not capable of delivering emotion

Right now there are thousands of Free mobile apps out there which are ad supported. However most of these ads are poorly designed and doesn’t engage the users. One of the biggest issue previously was – there wasn’t any multitasking on the iPhone OS. So basically if a user takes an action on the ad it would totally interrupt/close whatever the user was doing previously. However iAd can now totally take the advantage of the the new iPhone OS4 Multi Tasking feature and deliver ads that are Interactive & also deliver emotion.

What is in it for Mobile App Developers?

With the launch of this platform, apple will run some sort of advertising inventory. Thus if you are an app developer, you can be sure to find advertisers for your app. Also this might push the ‘freemium’ model more, as developers would want to stop charging for apps to get more user base and eventually make the money off from advertising via iAd platform. Most importantly Apple is being very transparent about the revenue sharing of iAd, 60% of what advertisers pay will go to the publisher/developer of the app.

What is so new about iAd Platform?

You must be thinking, why is this any cooler than the other mobile advertising that you may have already experienced on your mobile device? Well, Steve jobs did show some cool iAd demo and after taking a look at some of them I have to say that I’m pretty impressed. In fact I haven’t seen anything quite like this before. The most intriguing thing about the iAds are:

• The ads are very interactive: On the first demo, jobs showed off an advertisement inside the Toy Story app and the ad sort of shows up as an integrated microsite in a window. They even included a game inside this ad so the user is tempted to interact with the ad
• The ads are location aware & allows in ad purchases: This is definitely revolutionary. Imagine buying movie tickets directly from an Ad. The Ad can use your location and tell you that movie “x” is playing in the cinema near you and you can just click buy to get your ticket!
• The ads are motion sensitive, thus more interactive! Steve jobs shows a Nike ad where it shows dunks progressing through the years. and you just need to shake your iPhone to get another dunk!

Jobs mentions that – “…in addition to ad agencies being able to make these things, there are hundreds of thousands of iPhone app devs who know how to make these things. Emotion plus interactivity. The ads keep you in your app, so you’re much more likely to click on then and explore.”

So now apple seems like a serious threat for Google. They pretty much dominate the mobile industry and now they seem to be getting comfortable in the mobile advertising space as well.

What do you think of iAd Platform? Share in comments!

More iAd Stories:

Apple Announces iAd Mobile Advertising Platform – Techcrunch

Apple Debuts Both Ad Platform and Ad Network: iAd – GigaOM

Mobile Advertising Is At A Turning Point, With Google, Apple And The FTC Determining The Future – Mobile Marketing Watch

Steve Jobs Says ‘Most Mobile Advertising Really Sucks,’ So Apple Is Introducing the iAd Platform – Business Insider

Apple iAd brings ads, cash money to third-party iPhone apps – Engadget

More discussions happening in Techmeme

(Hat off to Ryan Block of GDGT for the awesome coverage. See the full coverage of iPhone OS4 event here.)

He than briefly ran through Google’s three primary ad products:

Google Adsense: Adsense has definitely helped a lot of small-large publishers to monetize their traffic and earn advertising revenue against the content that they produce. In 2009, Google’s AdSense partners, comprising over a million large and small publishers, earned over $5.2 billion through AdSense. Everytime a adsense publisher’s page loads, Google automatically maximizes the revenue in real time by showing the most relevant ad from massive pool of advertisers.

Self Ad Serving System: For big publishers, Google also has systems in place where publishers can self serve the most valuable ad to the advertisers directory in order to maximize the revenue (e.g. Google Ad Manager, Doubleclick DFP)

DoubleClick Ad Exchange – a real-time auction marketplace for display ad space that includes ad networks on one side, and major online publishers on the other. Publishers get to choose which network they want to bid and what ads can appear on their sites and which ad space they make available etc. Google uses

The Ad Exchange puts a large number of ad networks (over 65 at last count, including more than half of the largest 20 networks in the US) into price competition with each other in a real-time auction, instead of using pricing assumptions based on historical data, or trying to negotiate prices upfront (usually at a discount). It chooses the highest value ad from these competing networks at each moment, impression by impression.

Google has also published a PDF file that sort of gives an overview of how it maximizes revenue for its publishers. Do read it if you feel like learning more about how each of the products operate. (But I got to tell you, it doesn’t really contain anything new).

My Two Cents

I really like it when a Googler comes out in the official google blog and tells the world how wonderful everything is. Well I think anybody can say with certainty that Google does everything in their power to maximize the advertising revenue (Duh!). That is exactly what their whole business is built upon. Did they find any other good source of revenue for the shareholders yet? (Nada!)

But I’m curious to know how much of that ‘maximized revenue‘ is actually going to the publisher’s pocket? Didn’t I hear somebody say that Google is going to publish the percentage cut for adsense? Well I certainly don’t see that figure in the blog post of Neal wrote. If a company is truly open (like Google), I think it should give some indication on how much out of the total they are paying their publishers. Don’t you think that the publisher has the right to know that they are getting X%? And they can get X + 2% if they reach a certain level of performance? I believe releasing that information will actually motivate the publishers to work harder and make google more money in the process.

But anyway if you are keen to find out how much that $5.2 billion is out of Google’s total ad revenue, you can just refer to Google’s quarterly reports – Q1 2009, Q2 2009, Q3 2009 & Q4 2009. Just make sure you have your calculator around .

Yesterday I was listening to my favorite Tech Podcast – TWIT (This Week in Tech) and Veronica Belmont of Tekzilla was one of the guest on that show along with Tom Merritt and few others.

Anyway Veronica was talking about a Internet Explorer 8 advertisement, where a lady vomits over and over again after watching an awful video(probably something like 2 girl and a cup) from her husband’s browser history. This ad was was basically made to promote the IE8 “Browser for the Better” campaign.

Anyway but it seems like that the vomiting scene was so gross that Microsoft received several complaints about the video and eventually took it down. However that really didn’t stop people from spreading it on the social video sharing sites like – Youtube.

Visible Measures, a reputed video measurement firm reports that, even after the O.M.G.I.G.P (Oh My God, I’m Gonna Puke) ad was taken off by Microsoft, that video, just one part of the much larger campaign, accounted for 57% of the entire campaign’s video views!

Yeah I agree that the video is pretty gross, but Visible Measures suggests that this may have been Microsoft’s plan from the beginning.

They writes:

We’re left to wonder whether or not this was part of the plan all along: publish a controversial though on-message ad, create some heated dialogue, apologize for offending customers, take it down, and drive big viewership numbers … from online video audiences copying and reposting the spot. Might this be the best result for Microsoft in the end?

Watch the video at your own risk:

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land explains that this will give advertisers the ability to show graphic ads to users based on their previous search history. Advertisers will also be able to target those graphic ads based based on what other web sites that user visited and their actions on those web sites.

As the economy continues to put pressure on advertising budgets, marketers are looking for increased accountability for every dollar they spend. Yahoo!’s new targeting products significantly improve the ability for search and display advertisers to reach their target audience, providing increased efficiency and accountability,” said Michael Walrath, senior vice president, Advertising Marketplaces Group, Yahoo!. “Yahoo! remains incredibly well positioned to meet the growing advertiser demand for performance marketing offerings, and no other company can provide marketers with such scale and expertise across search and display advertising.

The new Ad products include:

Search Retargeting - This will give advertisers the ability to target display advertising based on user search activities and past search history.

Enhanced Retargeting - This feature will allows advertisers to deliver dynamically generated display ads across the Yahoo! network based on user activity on an advertiser’s site.

Enhanced Targeting - This feature will give Advertisers more capability to manage their search advertising campaign, including ad scheduling and demographic targeting within search etc.

You can get more coverage on the Yahoo’s New ad products at Techmeme.

The ads can basically redirect to a desktop landing pages so you don’t need to create individual mobile landing pages or special ads in mobile formats. The ads will have many of the same benefits as Google’s standard mobile ads. For instance it will continue to deliver mobile-specific calls-to-action and reach mobile users that are searching with their phones more than ever — especially during the holiday season.

Watch the following video to learn more about Google Mobile Ads, or read what others have to say.

More discussion at Techmeme.

What is Technorati Engage?

Technorati Engage is a Advertising Network owned by Technorati that matches bloggers and social media creators with advertisers who want to reach their audiences. Technorati was founded back in 2003 as the first blog search engine and since then they have manged to gather enormous amount of popularity in the blogosphere. As of June 2008, Technorati indexes 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

Who will benefit from Technorati Engage?

Basically bloggers who are actively participating in the blogosphere will find this service great as it provides another source of monetization.

Advertisers who are looking to promote their Online or Off-line Businesses will find this service pretty lubricative, as Technorati Engage Marketplace will connect advertisers to the top notch high profile bloggers to the raising star bloggers of the blogosphere.

What are the Notable Features of Technorati Engage?

• Multiple Types of Ads: Technorati Engage Ad Network offers different kinds of ads of different size. Current Ad Formats are 125 x 125 ad units, plain text ads and also a new type of ad called “PhoText” – which can nicely combine text & image together. They come in four sizes (25, 50, 100, and 200 pixels in width).



• Flexibility: The blogger can decide how much they want to charge the advertisers. They can also choose what categories of advertisers that they wish to be shown on their blog.
• Moderation: The blogger can approve or reject an Advertisement before it goes live in the blog.
• Alternative Monetization Option: If Technorati can’t serve an ad and there’s an empty ad unit Technorati will serve CPC ads to the ad position.
• Automatic Ad-Rotation: Technorati has built in ‘ad rotation’ feature where you can serve ads from a variety of advertisers in a single ad box.
• Easy Payment Technorati currently offers payment to publishers is via PayPal, Check or Wire Transfer.
• Big Revenue Share: Whatever money that your blog earns, Technorati will share it in 60:40 ratio. Thus you can keep 60% of the ad sales.

So if you are a publisher, don’t wait up – Signup with Technorati Engage now! If you wish to learn more about their service, read the Publisher FAQ section.

My Two Cents

This is indeed a great news for bloggers, and I’ll definitely try them out. So what do you think about Technorati Engage? Share in comments!

Microsoft Advertising Insights is basically a new show for Online advertisers (The first episode was released on 7th November), where the host Jason Yormark along with some other people from the Microsoft Advertising community team cover all things related to digital advertising, primarily focusing on search marketing. He talks about the current state of the industry, what’s happening behind the scenes with Microsoft Advertising (adCenter in particular), and delivers some useful information that can help you with your search campaigns.

In the latest Thanksgiving edition of Microsoft Advertising Insights, Jason got hold of Matt Van Wagner, President of Findmefaster.com at SMX East. Matt shares a very interesting story of a new advertiser in PPC and how that advertiser was able to grow her small business, discover a new market & ideas by simply being visible in the Search Engine.

Its just a 10 mins+ podcast but has some really useful information for the new advertisers who are thinking of trying out PPC in this holiday season.

In the podcast, Matt also shares some bonus tips for managing small PPC campaigns & also refers to a very interesting Keyword research tool called – Microsoft adCenter Add-in Beta for Excel 2007.

This tool has been there for quite a while and it is very easy to use and can really contribute to your keyword research effort. Its a 100% free tool from Microsoft Advertising and as long as you have Microsoft Excel present in your system, you should be able to run it without any problem.

So Listen to this week’s Microsoft Advertising Podcast, if you are interested to learn more about how following some simple steps has helped a small business to grow its customer base & also expand its target market.

Direct download: http://www.adcentercommunity.com/podcasts/11_25_08.mp3

Or Just head over to Microsoft Advertising: Insights for details.

Basically the first video talks about ad sizes, and Google recommends them to be big. They think that “bigger is often better”. They suggest using the following sizes:

• 300×250 medium rectangle
• 728×90 leaderboard
• 160×600 skyscraper

Mel Ann Chan of the AdSense Australia Optimisation Team makes it very clear that the suggested ad units have delivered proven in the past and proved to be profitable for both publishers and advertisers. Advertisers usually favour these formats, and if you’ve receiving all ad types, you’ll find that advertisers will specifically target your sites more often.

Chan says that, If a publisher can position his ad units well, the users will be more likely to see these ad formats and find an ad that they are truely interested in.

She suggests that if a publisher displays at least one of these ad formats on their page it can increase the AdSense earnings of that publisher substantially.

I completely agree with Chan as I myself have seen many websites that has really poor design and ad placement. I think Ad placement is purely an art rather than a science. You really need to test different kinds of ads and see what works and converts best for you.

And I think the primary reason why Google recommends large sized ad blocks, because those ads are more likely to catch the eye, but if they are placed poorly and blended within the site’s design, It may result in a lot of ‘accidental clicks’ which doesn’t convert well for the advertisers.

Some other tips for Optimizing your Google Adsense ads:

In the Inside Adsense blog, Google Adsense team has also shared some other tips that can benefit Adsense publishers.

Competitive Ad Filter

Adsense Publishers can restrict contextually-targeted and placement-targeted ads from appearing on your pages by adding the URL of each ad to your Competitive Ad Filter. To access this filter simply login in to your Adsense account, click the AdSense Setup tab and visit the ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ page. You can also find full instructions and tips for entering in specific URLs in Google Adsense Help Center. Why is this filter useful? Well, if your site is about dogs and you are selling a particular type of dog food on your site, you wouldn’t want your visitors to see an ad of your close competitor who is selling a different brand, right? So with this competitive ad filter, you can easily filter out your competitors so that their ads don’t show up in your website. This tool is also proven useful, if you want to filter out ads that’s pays really is low and doesn’t convert well for you.

Ad Review Center

The Ad Review Center is a very useful addition in Google Adsense that gives publishers additional control over the placement-targeted ads that may appear on their pages. Using the Ad Review Center, a publisher can review specific ad groups and advertisers before they start appearing on their pages. This will also allow publisher to block certain types of ads from showing up. You’ll need to opt in to the Ad Review Center at the top of your Competitive Ad Filter page, and then you can begin reviewing ads instantly. This is particularly useful for those publishers who has a lot of traffic and gets a lot of advertisers who site target their ads.

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