Web Blog of Greg Mathews

And what effect will it have on Adsense publishers?

I am sure this question has been asked many times over. I did come accross a report at http://www.vnunet.com/ that quotes :

IDC’s report found that Google continued to extend its lead in the US internet advertising market in the first quarter. The company’s estimated net US advertising market share was 24.8 per cent in 1Q08, up from 23.1 per cent in 1Q07.

This is generally great news for publishers but how long can it go on for? Will the number of companies that can afford to continue to advertising drop, especially the smaller advertisers that may be struggling with lower sales as a result of the credit crunch themselves being forced to cut back on their costs.

Will this result in publishers seeing more and more PSA’s (public service ads) as the competition for the online real estate reduces?

Will Google be forced to let less desirable sites such as MFA’s back into Adwords advertising to boost their advertising income?

Will Google get stricter in their criteria for publishers? this in theory could be a good thing but when criteria has been tightened up in the past you have seen good honest publishers who have had their adsense account disabled without any warning or reason for it

I’ve been browsing through a few blogs that are members of EntreCard and this made me think about the best position of the Entrecard widget.

Top – above the fold so the visitor does not need to scroll down the page. This is the best position in respects of attracting other blogs to advertise on your blog via the Entrecard widget as it is one of the first things a visitor would see. However if other Entrecard members are just interested in earning credits they are going to see the widget straight away and more than likely just drop their entrecard on your blog and leave, never reading a word that you wrote.

Bottom or below the fold – this is not the way to attract advertising blogs, it is common knowledge that site visitors will read what they see and then and only then scroll down the page if they are impressed with the content, this means that unless you have a really good blog only a small percentage of visitors will ever see the entrecard widget and the ad displayed. On the other hand, it does mean that entrecard members that are just out to earn credits need to scroll down your blog and are therefor more likey read what you have written.

I must admit I prefer the top option but I would be interested in what others think.

As I registered with Entrecard to advertise my blog on other blogs I wanted to ensure that drops could not be automated.

There are already sites out there that will load a number of blogs in seperate browser windows so the user can then drop on each of them but the user does have to view the blog and from talking to others and from my own experience this does mean that a number of those will actually read your blog so personally I don’t have a problem with it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have just today joined Entrecard.com to help promote my blog.

Entrecard is a site that allows you to basically drop a link to your site into the inbox of another entrecard user who can recipricate by visiting your blog and dropping their card. The more times you drop your card or someone drops their card on your blog, you earn a credit (EC).

You can then use your credits for advertising on other blogs and/or buying services such as blog reviews etc from other Entrecard members. You can also earn credits from advertising that is purchased using EC’s by other members, the more advertisers queuing to advertise on your blog the higher the cost of advertising on your blog becomes, all charged in EC’s.

EC’s can be sold for hard $$ to other members using the sites forum if you are earning more than you are selling.

It is early days yet but it looks like a good system.

I am afraid to anounce that both YzooBlog and YzooMail services have been withdrawn and the sites have been taken down.

It is hoped that both could be relaunched in the future with a more robust system or maybe we can partner with someone who is able to develop and manage one or both of the sites.

In the meantime we are concentrating on YzooSearch and other projects such as Six Degrees From you which require less manpower to maintain.

OK the blog has been transferred to another of our servers.

This was done because we are shutting down the YzooBlog and YzooMail services due to the spam they both received. It has not been viable to keep them both running and free from spam as the income earned from them did not cover the cost of the dedicated server that hosted them let alone to pay someone to keep them free of the junk that appeared on them.

As we are closing YzooBlog.com down due to the amount of spam sites I am in the process of moving my blog to another of our servers. Just my luck my ISP didn’t update their DNS until late tonight so I’ve not had a chance to copy the blog content to the new server.

Updates should be complete over the next few days

Greg

As I mentioned in my last post Google did reindex YzooSearch but the pages where old and fairly out of date.

Well over a month later the number of pages showing as being indexed by Google remains the same and the old pages  are showing in the results. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful that Google has reindexed the site but I am concerned that the index is not updating. Google is now referring just 5% of the traffic compared to 90% a few months ago. Read the rest of this entry »

I must appologise for the fact I haven’t posted for the past month, I was away for about 2 and a half weeks and been busy the rest of the time.

At the end of July I sent a reinclusion request to Google as they had totally dropped Yzoosearch from their index. Well while I was away during August they showed signs of including it back in their index but it is strange. The pages indexed are not recent and none of the urls in my sitemap are indexed at all. Webmaster tools even states it has not visited the sites index since June 5th 2008. I do hope this changes.

Over the past week or so we have been do some work on Six Degrees from you to try to make it more interactive for members. A few changes made are :

Instant Messaging, the first time you log into the site an Instant Messaging account is created for you and the person who invited you is added to your roster so you can chat to them in real time. Each time you invite a friend to join, the first time they log in they will added to your roster. This means that you can now chat with anyone on your first degree. This is of course in addition to the existing forum.

Things are slow on the site at the moment, just 22 members but hey its getting there slowly. Feel free to sign up and take part.