l’m sure that after reading this book, you would be eager to try out many of the tweaks discussed in here — including some of your own.
Without an AdSense journal, it would be easy to undo your successes, or to repeat your failures. Remember the program that I mentioned earlier, AdSenseDesktop. This tool provides everything you need to keep an ongoing journal of your AdSense activity!
Every little tweak counts, but don’t try to do everything at once.
Take the step-by-step approach. Write your own AdSense plan for the first week. Log into your AdSense account once a day, to track your clickthroughs and earnings.
148
Don’t be rigid about your plan. Make room for inspiration. if you’ve got a great idea, write it down to impiement it later. Don’t impiement your ideas ail at once and DO give every idea some time to prove its mettie. You’ll find out within a day if you have thousands of visitors hitting your web pages. if that is not the case, give it a few days. Preferabiy one week!
Don’t be discouraged by minor, day-to-day fluctuations in your ciick-throughs and earnings. lt’s normal and probabiy has nothing to do with your iatest tweak.
Join an AdSense forum, severai if possible. Share your tips with other mem bers. Discuss what works and what doesn’t work for you. Every once in a whiie, a forum member might alert you to a possible violation of the AdSense TOS. it couid be just a faise aiarm, but I prefer to be safe than sorry!
When in doubt, dash an email to AdSense support, at: adsensesupport Google.com
Most emails are answered quickiy by a reai person. They won’t suspend your account for asking them, but they might if you don’t ask!
Read ail you can and jot down every good idea. it wiii keep your interest leveis high and give you something new to work on ail the time.
Every new ‘tweak’ is your stepping stone to AdSense success. Once you’ve reached a certain level, it’s easy to say ‘Cool! i’ve figured it ail out!’ But take it from me — Internet Marketing keeps changing and the ruies wiii change for you too.
Don’t be like the two iazy littie-peopie in “Who moved my cheese?” Keep looking for new ways to make money with AdSense. Replace ideas that no longer seem to work with new ideas and inspiration. Some peopie I know are stiil rubbing their backsides after the dot-com bust.
it’s aiways easier when you see it coming, than when it takes you by surprise!
Remember the story about ‘The Emperor’s New Ciothes’? There’s a lesson in it for ail of us Internet Marketers, and it’s this:
it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve made with AdSense or what the 1Q tests say about you: It ain’t working tili your stats say so!
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18.1 A Sam pie AdSense Journal
For example, lets say you have a website about Bonsai trees. You read this bock and you decide to start implementing the strategies that Ive been taiking about.
Your original stats might look something like this. You print these out and use them for comparison:
Clearly, your goal is going to be to lift up those CTRs, and by now you should have ail sorts of ideas about how you’re going to do that. You write down your first three:
• 3-Way Matching — Text color, background and text size.
• Layout — Moving ads above the fold where they’ll be most prominent.
• Targeting ads — Changing titles to improve relevancy and improving keywords.
You’re already using 336 x 280 ads se you decide te start with 3-Way Matching and change ail your ads 50 that they blend in with your page. You make the background color of the ads match the background color of your site and the size and color of the ad text the same as the size and color of your body text.
A week later, your stats look like this:
Date Page Clicks Page CTR Page eCPM Your
imressions earnin
150
Date Page
jfljressions
Clicks Page CTR Page eCPM
Your earninj!
5/1/07
8020
160
2.0%
5.04
40.04
5/2/07
8186
172
2.1%
5.53
45.27
5/3/07
8071
153
1.9%
4.92
39.76
5/4/07
7792 156
2.0%
5.50
42.89
5/5/07
6712
154
2.3%
5.76
38.65
5/6/07
6596
132
2.0%
5.70
37.65
5/7/07
7134
157
2.2%
5.81
41.45
5/8/07
8123
236
2.9%
5.08
41.27
5/9/07
8135
244.05
3.0%
6.02
48.97
5/1C/C7
8024
249
3.1%
5.90
48.65
5/11/C7
7926
238
3.0%
5.92
46.93
5/12/C7
7865
252
3.2%
5.62
44.26
5/13/07
6645
193
2.9%
6.10
40 52
5/14/07
7103
220
3.1%
6.06
43 05
Already your weekly incomes have risen from $285.71 to $313.65 and your average CTR has gone up by a full percentage point. That’s a good start, but you’ve still got a fair way to go.
You print out this week’s report and write next to it “3-Way Matching” so that you know exactly what you did to create those changes. Now you know how much 3-Way Matching is worth to your incomes.
Next, you move the ads that you have at the bottom of your pages to the areas above the fold and place them in prominent positions. A week later, you print out the following stats:
Again, your CTR has risen by another percentage point and your weekly income has gone up to $341.40. Next to this set of stats, you write “Layout” and you place them in your journal after your second set.
Now things are getting a little trickier. Your ads are blended onto the page and they’re in prominent positions. But you find that they aren’t always showing the most relevant ads. On your page on growing bonsai from cuttings for example, you find that you’re getting lots of ads about scrapbooking. A look at your server logs supports your hunch that these aren’t getting any clicks at ail.
You create a channel for that page original stats look like this:
and follow your stats for a week. The
151
Date Page
Impressions
5/15/07 8365
Clicks Page CTR Page eCPM
343 4.1% 5.93
Your earnings
49 65
5/16/07
8296
324
3.9%
6.04
50 09
5/17/07
8032
321
4.0%
6.42
51.59
5118/C7
7920
317
4.0%
6.30
49.93
5/19/07
7853
306
3.9%
6.20
48 67
5/20/07
6725
282
4.2%
6.68
44.92
5/21/07
7145
293
4.1%
6.51
46.55
Channel Ad Unit
Imressions
Clicks Ad Unit Ad Unit
CTR eCPM
Your earnin
Cuttings paçe
829
8
1.0%
1.44
1.20
Cuttings pape
764
9
1.2%
1.89
1.44
Cuttings paçe
801
7
0.9%
1.22
0.98
Cuttings page
712
7
1.0%
1.37
0.98
That’s pretty weak but as few 0f your u sers are likely to be interested in scrapbooking, it’s not toc surprising. So you change the titie cf the page from www.bonsai.com/cuttings.htm I to www.bonsai.com/tree_cuttings.htm I and turn the word “cuttings” into “tree-cuttings”, especially in the area beneath the ad box.
You upload, wait for the robot to index your page again and check that you’re now getting ads from gardening and horticulture sites.
After a week, you find that your stats for that page look like this:
Again, you’d want to print out this page and place it in your journal.
So far in the last three weeks, these simple tweaks would have already increased your weekly income by over $104.
And there’s stili plenty more you can do!
You can make sure that every page is optimized, you can look for higherpaying keywords and you can experiment with different colors and layouts, search boxes and multiple ads to increase your revenues.
And of course, you can create more pages and more sites.
152
Cuttings page
758
10
1.3%
1.85
1.40
Cuttings page
652
5
0.8%
1.07
0.70
Cuttings page
704
6
0.9%
1.19
0.84
Channel Ad Unit
jj2jJressions
Clicks Ad Unit Ad Unit
CTR eCPM
Your earnin
Cuttings page
1300
52
4.0%
6.40
8.32
Cuttings paçe
1423
58
4.1%
6.52
9.28
Cuttings paçe
1346
52
3.9%
6.18
8.32
Cuttings page
1256
50
3.9%
6.40
8.04
Cuttings paçe
1156
44
3.8%
6.09
7.04
Cuttings paçe
1098
45
4.0%
6.56
7.20
Cuttings page
1247
49
3.9%
6.29
7.84
Note that only in the Iast exam pie (when you changed the keywords, improving your position in the search engines) did any of the changes affect your impressions. These tweaks simpiy made the most of the traffic you aiready have!
0f course, if you add more traffic, you’ii make more money.
The important point to remember is that you shouid be recording everything you do and keeping a ciose eye on the resuits. Within a few weeks, you’ii have a compiete record of au the changes you’ve made and what they’re worth to your bottom une.
19. Other Contextual Advertising Programs And How To Use Them With AdSense
AdSense is probabiy the easiest way to generate revenue with your website
— i know it’s making me a fantastic amount of money — but it’s certainiy not the oniy way you can make money using contextuaiized advertising.
At the beginning of 2007, Googie changed its Terms of Service to aiiow pubiishers to piace other contextuaiized ad systems on the same pages as AdSense units. There’s just one restriction: those other systems’ ads can’t iook iike AdSense units.
That stiii ieaves you a huge range of possibiiities.
in this chapter, i’m going to iook at some of the other programs that you couid use — either instead of AdSense or as weii as AdSense. i ‘ii expiain how they work and how you can make them work with AdSense.
19.1 Kontera — Making Your Words Pay
Kontera (Kontera.com) is a great way to make extra revenue. instead of putting ad units on your site, iike AdSense does, Kontera highiights particuiar keywords in your text and brings up an ad when the user mouses over them.
The words are marked out from reguiar iinks by an underiine and a second dotted e, and you can change the coiors of the text and the iinks. For
153
some of the biggest publishers, the ad inventory even includes some very high-earning video ads.
Fig. 19.1 Mousing over to bring up ads with Kontera at JoelComm.com.
I use Kontera on my personal blog at JoelComm.com and Ive been pretty impressed with the resuits. The ads are fun to bring up, they’re relevant and they’re totally unobtrusive.
But like AdSense, you will need to play with them to maximize your revenues. There are so many different factors that affect your incomes with Kontera, such as which keywords you want highlighted, where you want those words to appear on the page and which colors to choose for the best results, that it took me some time to figure out ail of the best com binations.
It also took me a few phone calls directly to the people who’d created it to get an idea of what happens behind the scenes of the program so that I can maximize my income.
The key issues are the number of Iinks you should place on your Web pages, the color of the Iinks and how those Iinks are distributed.
The first issue is pretty simple. Kontera lets you place up to six ad links on each page and recommends that you take ail of them.
I don’t see any reason to argue with that. In general, your best strategy when building a website that earns income through advertising is to keep the pages relatively short and focused on just one topic. That will keep your ads relevant. If you’re following that strategy, then it’s unlikely that your page is going to look overstuffed with Kontera’s ads. You’ll probably find no more than three or four on a page, and because they only appear as links they won’t distract the user.
Joel.
I really love to read your blog You are the best adsense ‘Guw’ on the Net
Regards
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Uche Nma Cho.ce
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154
The color of the links is a tougher question. Usually, it’s best to choose a different color to the one you’ve used for your AdSense units. That’s because Google and Kontera tend to pick up on different keywords. Offering different links in different colors helps to emphasize that variety and lets Kontera’s links stand out.
If you’re thinking that the goal of optimization is to blend the ads into your site, you’re right. But these links are going to be embedded in your content. They’re also going to be double-underlined so that they’ll look different anyway. You want people to see them and to place their mouse over them.
You could try using blue as your link color if you want. I use them sometimes on my blog. But I suspect that if you tested different colors, you might well find that a tone that matches your site’s design will give you better results. Testing is going to be key.
Making sure that the ads appear in the best locations on the page is easy to do but might require a little work. For the most part, Kontera’s software should distribute the ads fairly evenly across the page. But if you want to make sure that you don’t get any ads in particular places on the page, you can use Zone Tags. These simply telI Kontera: “No ads here please.”
To define certain text areas as off-limit simply add the line:
before the text, and the tag:
at the end.
If that sounds to you like AdSense’s Section Targeting, you’re on the right track. But Kontera’s filters aren’t exactly the same as Section Targeting. Placing these filter tags won’t prevent Kontera’s contextualization engine from checking that section for keywords. The contents of that section will still be used to assess the meaning of the Web page. Kontera just won’t place ads on any keywords it finds there.
While that’s useful for keeping ads away from the bottom of the page, the sidebars or spots right next to AdSense units, you can also use the tags to control which terms are highlighted.
Kontera doesn’t let you choose which terms and phrases you want turned into ads. But it does recommend that you make the phrases you use as
155
specific as possible. Talking about the “Nokia 5300 XpressMusic myFaves Black Phone” from T-Mobile is likely to get you better ads and more clicks than talking about “mobile phones.”
There are a lot of different strategies that you can use with Kontera. Far too many for me to describe in detail here. That’s why I put them together in a short book that lets other publishers can shorten their learning curve. You can find that book at www.konterasecrets.com.
If you’re going to put Kontera on your site in addition to AdSense — and I can’t think of a single reason why you shouldn’t — you will need that book to shoot straight to the high revenues.
Furthermore, Kontera typically doesn’t allow publishers in their program unless they display at least 500,000 page views per month.
However, I have made a special arrangement with the nice people at Kontera
50 that my readers can get a Kontera account regardless of how much traffic
they receive! Simply click this link and be sure to put down “friend of Joel
Comm” in the appropriate referral field. They will take good care of you. ©
19.2 Intellitxt’s Eye-Catching Ads
Fig. 19.2 lntellitxt’s video ads grab your attention.
lntellitxt isa direct rival to Kontera. The company’s system works in a similar way: by picking keywords, turning them into links and producing floating ads when users mouse over.
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156
pict19.jpg
When Kontera was first rolled it was probably fair to say that I ntellitxt was at Ieast as good, if not better. Their ads Iooked great (Kontera’s were a bit bland initially) and they turned up some very good ads.
These days 1m not so sure. The people at Kontera have put so much work into improving their contextualization engine that lntellitxt certainly doesn’t have an edge there. I n fact, you can often find that the ads will match the keyword but the keywords won’t be the most relevant terms on the page.
Nor can you define the link color, which is stuck on green or be certain that an ad will contain an image, the most attractive part of these sorts of floating ads.
What you might get though is a movie. And those movies are great. Unlike Google’s video ads, these start automatically and they’re impossible to miss.
If you do have lots of users though — or think you will soon — those video ads might have been a good reason to choose lntellitxt over Kontera, but Kontera has now produced its own line of rich media ads. (Although again you need to be big to benefit from them.)
The same placement and keyword strategies that work with Kontera should work with lntellitxt too but Id always turn to Kontera first. lt’s the system that I use on my blog.
19.3 ContextCASH —Affiliate Revenue The Easy Way
If you don’t like either of those though, you could also look at ContextCASH. This system looks pretty similar to Kontera and lntellitxt but it works in a very different way. You still get the highlighted words that appear in your text but instead of bringing up an ad when you mouse over, these links lead directly to affiliate sites.
Again, the links are unobtrusive, they don’t clash with your ad units and they’re compatible with AdSense.
And they can also bring in good money too... provided you get the sales that win the commissions.
Remem ber, with ContextCash, you get nothing if users click out of curiosity. You only get paid if they buy. While that will give you more money than the small amounts you’d get on a CPC basis, you have to make the sales.
157
The factor that is likely to have the greatest influence over whether or not you get sales is the context of the page and — like any affiliate system — whether or not you’ve recommended the products.
And with ContextCash can be a problem. Usually, the best way to generate incorne with affiliate products is to choose them carefully and talk them up in your content. ContextCash’s affiliate ads though could change constantly SO it will be difficult to recommend them.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t good though. Far from it. If the ads are contextual enough, the sites reputable enough and your content geared towards buyers you could see sorne great rewards.
And you do have sorne control over ail these elernents. Not only can you optirnize your links in ail sorts of ways making them easy to blend in, you can also pick the keywords yourself, filter the source of your ads (rnost corne frorn Arnazon or Clickbank), view the list of ads that would fit your site and choose which ones to place on your page.
In short, if you’re thinking cf using affiliate ads on your site, this is a pretty unique way to do it. I think it’s worth testing them on one site and seeing how you get on.
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158
19.4 Chitika —Ail Mails, More Money
Kontera, lntellitxt and ContextCash ail fit so neatly into your site, you’ll hardly notice the difference to your page.
You will notice the difference in your revenues though.
Chitika’s eMiniMalls are more intrusive than text links but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of their greatest advantages is that they are just 50 eye-catching and attractive.
Fig. 19.4 Chitika’s eMiniMalls. Smile!
The eMiniMalls are product ads that corne with a nurnber of different tabs. Those tabs include a list of Best Deals (with paid links to advertisers), a description of the product, reviews and a search box that draws on Chitika’s catalog. The tabs bring up different content when they’re moused over and each ad also cornes with a picture of the irnage.
Although you can let Chitika serve you contextualized ads, you can also turn off the contextualization engine and choose the ads you serve yourself.
That’s a huge benefit: no more messing around with keywords or playing with text. You can just do a search, find an ad you like and start presenting it to your users.
Again, there are ail sorts of factors involved in rnaking eMiniMalls work at their best, frorn deciding which tabs to display (you can choose those too!) to choosing the right ad forrnat for your page to figuring out how to use the ads together with AdSense ad units. There are sorne great ways to rnake thern work together.
One of the biggest issues though is where on the page to place your eMiniMalls units. For the most part, what’s true for AdSense is true for
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Chitika too. Ads above the fold get more clicks. Ads embedded into articles do well toc.
You could, for example, create an eMiniMalls shopping zone at the top of your page or slip a horizontal unit at the bottom of each article. But that might mean that your ads are going to be competing against each other for the same spots. Although you can test each type of ad to see which earns you more, you can often combine the two and increase your earnings. Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography Blog for example, is the perfect model to follow.
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Fig. 19.5 Darren Rowse’s photography blog shows the way f0 mix AdSense with eMiniMalls.
In general, you can expect to find that eMiniMalls do particularly well on sites that focus on products. But Darren has put the picture of the product in the center of the page, blended an AdSense unit next to it and complemented the review with eMiniMalls ad.
Chitika’s eMiniMalls are an excellent product. l’ve used them at my site DealofDay.com and been very pleased with the result. But Chitika has some other products that are very attractive too.
If you have a blog that focuses on products and has a lot of traffic, you should certainly take a look at their ShopLincs program. This lets you create an online store stuffed with products for users of your blog to purchase.
160
If you dont qualify though—and Chitika’s restrictions are tight enough to make sure that few people will—you can stili put their ShopCloud$ units on your pages.
These let users search for products, see results on your page... and earn you a commission when they click.
Ive spent a lot of time playing around with Chitikas ads as well, come up with some very effective strategies and written them up as another book. You can find that book at www.chitikasecrets.com.
Fig. 19.6 Chitika’s ShopCloud$ offer a new way of earning for clicks.
Ail of these programs work with AdSense. I think it’s pretty unlikely that they’ll give you more money than AdSense but they can be very useful ways to bring in a little extra income.
To sign up with Chitika, click here.
Let’s talk now about programs that aren’t compatible with AdSense...
19.5 Yahoo! Publisher Network
Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) (http://publisher.yahoo.com/) is probably the number one competitor to Google. In fact, they pretty much copied what AdSense had done... but didn’t do it quite as well.
On the plus-side, their ad formats are largely the same. So if you need to switch from AdSense to YPN, you should be able to keep the exact same optimization, at least as regards how the ads look (although YPN doesn’t have Ad Links or Search, 50 you’d lose those.)
They also have ads in RSS which could bring in some extra revenues if you’re using that on your site.
As to which ads you get served though, that’s a whole other bail game. One of the biggest problems with YPN is that the first ads they serve are often
161
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Run-Of-The-Network (RON) ads, Yahoo!’s answer to public service ads. These are just ads for companies that seem to have struck a special deal with YPN.
They pay well, when you get a click out of them, but they’re not contextualized so you don’t get many clicks. They occur much more frequently than public service ads and they’re much harder to get rid 0f.
And there are no CPM ads on Yahoo!, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the size of your site and your experience.
Most publishers find that they get better results with AdSense than they do with YPN... although we ail keep a close eye on YPN to see if they improve enough to attract us.
19.6 AdBrite
Google’s big thing is serving contextual ads. Their program checks the content of your site and delivers ads that they think your users will like. AdBrite is much simpler.
The idea behind AdBrite is that people tend to ask popular sites to advertise their links. You’ve probably had that happen to you. lnstead of asking for a link in return though, you could ask for money.
AdBrite is a clearing house for sites that want to selI advertising space on their pages and for advertisers who want to choose where they want to place their ads.
For advertisers, the advantage over Google is that they know exactly where their ads are appearing and for exactly how much money each time.
Publishers — like you — get to set your own ad rates, and you have the right to approve or reject every ad before it’s placed on your site. That gives you the power to choose your ads and your price instead of relying on whatever Google gives you.
Those are the advantages. The disadvantages are that it’s just flot in the same league as AdSense... or YPN.
You can learn more about AdBrite at wwwadbritecom.
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19.7 Kanoodle— BrightAds
The same criticism can be made cf Kanoodle’s BrightAds :C 14A - service, which is similar to Google’s. lt’s a search engine
h that delivers contextual ads to publishers’ websites.
The contextualizing isn’t quite as accu rate as Google’s but BrightAds does offer a number of options that Google doesn’t offer — or at least flot yet. Its RSS advertising program has been around for a while, it has a focus on local sites which might be attractive to busin esses with local markets (or sites with content of local interest) and it also serves ads related to previous user behavior. If a user visits a lot of real estate sites, for example he could continue to receive ads about real estate even if he’s on a site about sport. That means your site could be displaying ads that have nothing to do with your content.
That’s ail creative stuff and it’s nice to see new ideas. It would be nicer though to see revenues that compete with Google’s and I haven’t heard of anyone earning more with BrightAds than they can earn with Google.
BrightAds might be worth looking at if you want to make money with your RSS feed but I ‘m not convinced they’re going to give Google or Yahoo! any worries.
Learn more about Kanoodle’s BrightAds at
http://www.kanoodle.com/about/brightads.cool
19.8 Searchfeed
Searchfeed is slightly better, especially for international publishers. It also supplies contextualized ads to advertisers but offers geotargeting services
which gives them a wide global reach,
useful if you’re based outside the
feecl United
You can integrate the ads smoothly
into your site, either by cutting and pasting the HTML from their site or even by asking their own specialists to help you increase your CTR. And they have a good reputation for paying on time.
Whether they’ll give you more money than Google is a different question though. The only way to find that out is to try it but if you find that you’re doing well with Google, then why would you bother?
163
If, for some reason, you dont want to use Google — or can’t use Google — and YPN isn’t your cup of tea either, then you might find Searchfeed a good alternative.
You can learn more about Searchfeed at www.searchfeed.com
19.9 The Big Boys: eBay And Microsoft
One of the great things about contextualized advertising is that outside of Google and Yahoo!, the best competitors are ail start-ups. Or should that be u p-st art s?
A couple of big boys though have begun to muscle in on the market.
Fig. 19.7 eBay’s ad selections.
eBay now has its own contextualized affiliate system. The system scans publishers’ Web pages, identifies keywords and serves related ads drawn from its online auctions. Publishers receive between 40 and 70 percent of eBay’s commission on the sale.
Unlike ContextCash though, these ads aren’t embedded into text. They appear in units, like AdSense ads. And like AdSense ads, you’re free to change the color scheme and ad size, and place the code wherever you want.
But they’re always going to look like ads. When the most eyecatching part of the ad is the price, there’s no hiding the fact that any user who clicks is heading to a sales page and not to a site that will give him information.
And because the ads will change with the auctions, unless you’re writing specifically about a product that someone is always selling at eBay, you’d probably do better promoting new goods with an Amazon affiliate ad.
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That’s especially true as long as eBay make it difficult for people to join the program. The system is currently only available to eBay’s affiliates. But you can become an affiliate at www.affiliates.ebay.com and check out the ad program at http://affiliates.ebay.com/adsIadcontext/index.html.
The other big company stepping into the filed is Microsoft. They’d been talking about rolling out a contextualized ad system for a long time but only really got going in 2006.
They’re still far behind.
There’s nowhere for publishers to sign up at the moment (it’s
invitation only), the ads are only running on MSN’s own network and the inventory looks pretty limited.
Although we know that the system is going to use demographic and geo-targeting to keep the ads close to users, that advertisers can choose keywords and will pay per click, we know nothing about how the contextualization system is actually going to work. Some of the results turning up on some of MSN’s sites are way off.
What we do know though is that the ad units are going to look a lot like AdSense units.
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Fund data provided by Morningstar, Inc. 2005. AIl nghts resei StockScouter data provided by Gradient Anaybcs, Inc. Quotes supphed by Comstock, an Interaclve Data company. MSN Moneys editorial goal s to provide a forum for personal fin board posts and other features should flot be construed as inve endorsement by Microsoft of any speafic security or frading sb individual arcumstances,
Fig. 19.8 Acontextualized ad unit at the bottom of moneycentral.msn.com.
If Microsoft can build up advertisers and iron out the bugs, they could be a good alternative to Google and YPN. Until then though, it’s still AdSense plus text links and affiliate ads.
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