THE KEY(WORDS) TO ADVERTISING

I have been interested in marketing and advertising business for a long time. You could read about a successful billboard campaign here. Here is a interesting example of a person who found a special niche and successfully targeted his customers. I wonder if his product could teach Monthy Python's "Norwegian Blue" parrot to talk...

Here is an excerpt from Jan Norman's article, Getting top billing: Keyword ads give companies edge in searches:

"Google wants to boost its revenue by partnering with Web sites that have content, too. So, it recently launched AdSense: A Web site with information can sign up to display Google's ads, whose relevance match the stories on a specific page."

It will be interesting to follow how Google's text robots crawl my blog in order to find matching ads. At the moment you could find ads for religious groups [Editor: I wonder if my readers will convert?], some kind of anti-terrorism organization, and a couple firms selling hot pepper sauces! I have picked the tower ad format (wide skyscraper, 160x600). It displays up to five ads on the blog. It will take some time before I could cash in something from the ads, but I am happy with the opportunity to have an extra monetary source as a way of keeping this blog going.

BusinessWeek's Alex Salkever is worried about Google's strong position in cyberspace. Read his article, Google's Ads -- and Minuses, and see if you could come to the conclusion if he is a supporter of capitalism or not. Google is not "muffling free speech" by rejecting a certain ad. I have the possibility to block certain ads (URLs) on my blog. These are examples of people that could be added to the filter list.

UPDATE 03/16/04:

Advertising on weblogs is catching on. Read Jeff Jarvis' post, You know it's business when it's in the Wall St. Journal. Stephen Hall (Adrants) writes about his experience with Google's AdSense and he sends out a question to the "search engine marketing experts." I wonder how Google will tackle competitors, e.g. Kanoodle and Revenue Science, in the future.

UPDATE 03/22/04:

Search on the name "Michael Anthony Bradley" (a.k.a. "CountScubula"?) and you will find a story about a guy who tried to parasite on Google's AdSense program. Here is an excerpt from Ryan Naraine's article, Feds Arrest Alleged Google Extortionist:

"The case centers around a program called "Google Clique," which was allegedly written by 32-year-old Michael Anthony Bradley to surf and click on Web ads displayed by the Google AdSense program.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Bradley met secretly with Google's engineers in early March and attempted to extort $100,000 by threatening to release the program for widespread use by spammers." (Internetnews.com, 03/22/04.)