Ask.com seems to be moving towards launching contextual ads to compete with Adsense. The initial launch will be limited to only a few websites, but this may open up to more websites in the future. I’m not sure whether it will be auduquately able to compete, but hopefully something will start. Adsense has too much power at the moment on the web. While I love adsense and earn some decent money from the program, a little competition will be good. Yahoo and MSN have been working towards their own contextual programs for a while, but the are still not really off the ground. As it stands now Google just has too much power over a lot of webmasters as a lot of site’s income is derived from Adsense and that alone gives Google a very powerful position in shaping the web.

Google adsense has not really helped the web with the millions of made for adsense sites that have sprung up every where. Lately Google has been attempting to address some of these issues, but it does not really seem to be getting better. There are still MFA sites springing up every day and click fraud is still rampant. Perhaps as more competitors come into this market these types of items will have ot be addressed for Google to continue to compete in the contextual advertising market. We’ll just have to wait and see if Ask.com is successful in their endeavor.

[tags]adsense, contextual advertising, ppc, ask.com[/tags]

Shoemoney is hosting a Google Adsense rep on his radio show this week. Right now he is taking questions to ask the representative. There are already quite a few great questions listed on his blog so you may want to go over and get your burning question on the list. Should be a good show so don’t miss it.

I wrote a post on some observations I made about the Adsense clicking habits of females in my office a few weeks ago. Basically I noticed that the females I obeserved tend to click the ads on the search engines more than males. Ana Bryce picked up the post in her psychology of Adsense post and hypothesized that females may tend to do this and that she thought females may be more apt to click on ads at the end of an article where males may tend to click during the middle of the article or even before. Now none of this is meant to offend either sex as I could care who performs an Adsense click as long as they make one. I’m just trying to understand the triggers that may entice one group of people to perform a certain action over another group.

This was a very interesting observation and one I thought may have some merit, so as an internet marketer I decided to test out Ana’s theory. I have a couple of sites that do okay and attract a majority of female visitors, so I went ahead and set up channels for each location in the site. I should have done that before this test, but I was acting lazy and taking shortcuts again so I had only used the URL channel for both of these sites. [Read more...]