There’s much AdSense news today, including a new affiliate program that lets AdSense publishers make money by referring folks into AdSense, and – surprise surprise – make a buck (literally) for everyone who might download and install Google’s Toolbar.
But what I find fascinating are the new AdSense Terms of Service, which I am just digging into (thanks Glenn). The industry seems focused on the new referral stuff, but it seems they have changed to redefine what Google finds competitive to their network – now that the company has image ads and site specific stuff, they need to start boxing out new kinds of competitors. Anyone out there fully grokked this? I plan to later this weekend….
Actually, the part that I found more interesting was the restriction on what languages you can place the ads on (see my blog entry that you referenced). I know there are some sites that depend on the ability to place ads on pages in other languages, and now they’ll have to figure out an alternative. For one of them, at least, it’s a definite blow to their business model.
Whats more interesting is they are paying a $1.00 for every user who switches to firefox/google toolbar. My friend has a toolbar install base of only a million and he makes $50,000/day this is big business and the next major war online.
About the need to “start boxing out new kinds of competitors…” This isn’t really new, is it? After all, as soon as Google announced personalized home pages it went head-to-head with Yahoo! in terms of becoming a portal. Same with its other services.
Not all of Google’s partners are pleased with the things it does, I’m sure. Google is big enough elephant now that just by breathing in a direction it can flatten a few nimble mice. And bigger beings. This toolbar promotion is putting it directly in conflict with A9, Amazon’s subsidiary, who already promotes a toolbar that can make referrers money through the Amazon Associates program. Yes, as the previous comment just stated, it looks like there is a toolbar war brewing.
What’s really ironic, though, is that toolbars are a business because the dominant browser is so bad. Firefox sans the Google Toolbar is arguably good enough when compared to IE with the Google Toolbar.
question: Are there any ad-firms/agencies actively working with Google Adsense to provide their non-online media clients some internet exposure? This sounds like a simplistic question and it could be one, but I am curious if there are ad agencies with the specific goal of increasing their client visibility by efficiently using Google ad sense. If so, who would they be? There are a lot of small businesses who can probably afford online focussed advertising better and cheaper if they had the technical know how but it would make sense for start up ad agencies to work on these smaller accounts and reap the rewards of the economies that the internet affords. As the percentage of spending on online advrtising is only gonna increase relative to other media, I would think someone nimble and smart could make it happen better than Madsion Avenue.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.