Adsense For Games Are Looking For Beta Publisher
25% of all internett users, or 200 million people are playing online games. For a long time it has been hard to monetize games. Sure, you could put ads on the site where the game are, but the game could still be ripped of the site, and then displayed on another site.
The last couple of years there have been growing up a couple good in-game advertising companies such as “Mochiads” and “GameJacket”. These companies are only focusing on in-game ads, and have been a hit in the industry.
Say hello to Google In-Game Advertising
So, Google wants to be a part of about everything on the Internet, and finally they have started to look at the online game industry. Now they are searching after beta publishers for their new Adsense for Games program. This program makes it easy to display ads in placements you define, such as before a game, after a level, or when the game is over. The Adwords sales persons will sell the in-game ads directly to brand advertisers such as McDonalds and Sony, and there will also be contextually targeted text and image ads based on content and demographic information.
Only for the big guys
As usual only the big boys are eligible to join the beta program. Publishers must have a minimum of 500,000 game plays and have 80% of their traffic from the U.S. or the U.K. Thats a really high percent of US and UK traffic on an arcade site!
A couple of highlighted publishers are Armorgames, ArcadeTown and HeavyGames. All of these sites got an alexa below 5.000 and probably well over 100.000 uniques each day.
Read more about Adsene for Games
Couple videos
Google have made a couple videos to better understand how in-game ads work. Take a look below:
Are you in the online games industry?
Entrecard.com is For Sale on Sitepoint!
So, on my daily round to see if there is some cools sites for sale over at Sitepoint I found a familiar name, Entrecard.com.
It appears that the owner Graham Langdon are selling his baby. The starting bid is $100.000 and he says in a comment that he got a reserve that is just under a million dollar.
If you have been blogging the last year, you got to have heard about Entrecard. But if you haven’t it’s basically an simple banner exchange for blogs. You display 125×125 banners on your site, and you get your banner on other sites.
The Lift Of
The service got really popular after a couple of the big shots in the industry put them on their blogs. This included Shoemoney, John Chow and Problogger. Hey, even I put them on my site for a while. But, after some time a lot of bloggers found out the most of the traffic was crap, and took the widget of their site. Non of the big bloggers got the widget on their site anymore, and neither do I.
Alexa Tells The Truth?
If you are a fan of Alexa you might notice that the stats are going down for Entrecard. At least for the site itself.
In my world, this chart actually tells me what I have been thinking, that Entrecard flopped. The funny thing is though, when reading the auction description it looks like Entrecard actually did the opposite thing. Here is what Graham start the description with:
OUR AD NETWORK DELIVERS:
80 MILLION IMPRESSIONS PER MONTH
3 MILLION CLICKS PER MONTH
GROWING AT 16% MONTH-OVER-MONTH without any marketing
Thats pretty impressive stats, and doesn’t fit really well into my “flop” theory.
I launched Entrecard ad network 11 months ago, and in that time is has spread to 20,000 blogs delivering 80 million impressions per month. We’re growing fast, and in the next year alone we’re on track to sign up between 40,000 to 80,000 more blogs
Ok, so Entrecard got 20.000 blogs in their network now, and are calculating with up to 80.000 blogs within 2009. Graham says that around 100 new blogs sign up each day, which are 3000 each month and 36.000 each year. Pretty impressive. But how can the network grow and grow, but fewer and fewer big blogs are getting on board. Hey, most of them are actually jumping over board.
If we get back to the falling Alexa stats he explains the falling in traffic on the site with the launch of the Entrecard toolbar. He says that the toolbar is used by 7.000 bloggers, and that they don’t need to go on the site, because they can do everything with the toolbar. I guess thats make sense. But It’s still strange that the traffic is falling that dramatically. But then again I just got alexa stats, I don’t got the server stats, so it might not be that accurate. 
The Reason
The reason of why he is selling of Entrecard is actually quite good, I’ll just copy/paste what he wrote:
I am selling because I have come to a stalemate. Entrecard is growing fast, but I do not have the
resources to put behind it. I recently met extensively with Venture Capitalists who were going to make a 700k seed investment and a 2-5m follow on Series A investment in 6 months. The deal fell through in the 11th hour, right before the terms sheet, because they lost faith in my ability to execute the plan after a series of tests in which I did not know I was being tested. The valuation we were discussing was 8 million. We were going to open a headquarters, hire 10 people, and go straight to the top. Then it fell apart, and after getting my hopes up, I just haven’t been able to get back on my feet. I’m a wreck and feeling like a failure to come so close only to drop it due to my idiocy.
Strange reason, but it might be legit. I don’t know Graham in personal, so I can’t be the judge.
12x Montly Revenue Right?
The ongoing price for sites these days are around 12 times monthly revenue. I know Entrecard don’t fit well into this, but I find it strange that Graham haven’t monetized the site better then making around $2.000 per month. Hes bragging about ideas that easily could shoot the earnings up to $30.000 per month. The question I got in my head is; Why haven’t Graham implemented this ideas himself?
Final Words
I think Graham are trying to sell a sinking ship. Thats my personal opinion. Next year Entrecard will be a service that are almost dead. I have quoted Graham some times in this post, and I guess we have room for one last quote:
Whoever buys this site, if you develop it and hold onto it for a year or two, will sell it for 20 million + easily.
Right, that brings me back to the monthly income issue. Why don’t you just keep the site yourself for a year or two and cash in 20+ million dollars “easy”. :0/
Do you still have the Entrecard widget on your blog?
Google AdSense for Feeds
So, now the Adsense for Feeds are finally out. It has been available within the Feedburner system before, but now you can set it all up in your adsense account.
As all of you know, Google have bought Feedburner some months back, and thats way this service is integrated in the Feedburner system.
The Options
On the setup page you got a couple options on how you want your ad to be. Here are all of them:
Ad type
Choose if you want to display text and image ads or just one of those types.
Frequency
This is a nice option. Here you can choose how often you should show an ad.
Post Length
How long should your post be to allow ads in it? This can be a good option if you don’t want to disply ads on short posts.
Position
You got two options on where you want to display the ad. On the top of the post, or on the bottom.
Colors
As an regular AdSense unit you can choose what color your ad should have. There is also an interesting option to let AdSense to optimize the color. I haven’t tried this myself, but if you have I would love to hear if it works!
Feeds
The last thing you have to choose is which feed this ad should appear in. If you have an Feedburner account you can migrate that account with your AdSense account. (Follow the link) If you don’t have an Feedburner account/feed you can make one with the link provided.
The migration process is for now manual and what you need to do is the following:
Send an mail to adsense-support-aff@google.com and provide the following information:
- Your FeedBurner account username
- The Google Account email address you use to sign in to AdSense
So, how many of you guys monetize your feeds?
I’ll Show You How to Get $250 Advertising Money For Free On Facebook
Alright – just got a great tip for you guys. With this tip you will gain $350 $250 in your facebook account that you can spend on advertising. It took me literally 30 seconds. Just some simple copy/paste.
Thing is though, I’m building up my newsletter base, so I thought this could be a great way to gain a couple subscribers.
What to do
All you have to do to get the free tip is to fill in your first name and email below. You will then get an confirmation email. You will then totally automatic receive an email with the tips inside.
(If you are using RSS and can’t fill in the form, please come to the blog)
Enjoy the free cash, and spend them well.
Want To Be On TV? – Google Launches Adwords TV Ads
So, then it’s official. Google launched today their brand new advertising option. Google TV Ads. Long story short this will allows smaller budget advertisers to put their ads on TV.
How does it work?
Ok, the thing is, first, you’ll need a TV commercial. If you don’t have one yet, you do have the Ad Creation Marketplace, where you can connect with professionals who provide script writing, editing, production, and voice-over. This is a fairly costy thing, since it’s not cheap to make an commercial. AS I can see from the intro video the prices ranges from $800-$25.000. The rule “you get what you pay for” does of course count here. The good thing is thought, to celebrate their launch, for a limited time Google will cover the cost of creating your TV ad through our Ad Creation Marketplace, up to $2,000.
What does it cost?
You pay based on a CPM price. Basically it will work the same way as you used to, where you have to get the highest bid for your ad to show. So if there are some popular spots the CPM bid will be higher then on less popular spots. In the video the ads have a CPM of $2-$4. Which means you pay $2 or $4 per 1000 people viewing your ad. Not bad if it’s possible to get TV spots for that price. I contacted a TV station here in Norway and they charged around $40 CPM. Of course it’s probably possible to get that price down, but still.
Watch a video domenstration the system.
So – let me know if any of you are running an TV ad! 
Google Introducing the Ad Review Center
This is really a cool improvement on Adsense from Google. As you might already know, people using Adwords to advertise can target spesific sites where they want to advertise. Before you didn’t know if you had any advertiser targeting your site, and even more important, you didn’t have any authority to disable/enable such ads. This have changed.
Introducing the Ad Review Center.
The Ad Review Center is a new publisher tool which enables you to allow or block specific placement-targeted ads, giving you more transparency and control over the placement-targeted ads appearing on your sites. You can choose to allow or block individual ad groups and advertisers, as well as filter ads by type.
As you can se on the image above, you can hold ads for 24 hours so you can review them befor they go live. If you don’t review them within 24 hours though, they will go live.
I think the new review center is a great improvement on Adsense, and it will be cool to see if anyone is targeting any of my sites.
Remember, the more ads you disable, the less money you might earn.
What do you think?
Entrecard bugs – 262144ec for One Day!
Just a quick post today. I logged into my Entrecard account today, and was kinda shocked to see that it costed 2048ec/day to advertise on VikingBlogger. Usually the price is around 15ec. (I don’t drop anymore)
I guessed it had to be a bug, so I checked the marketplace, and saw some nice figures. The most expensive one costed 262144ec per day!
How much is the price for a spot on your blog at the moment? (Talking Entrecard here…)
Update 9. april 2008: It looks like it aren’t a bug, sort of. Since Entrecard is introducing a new pricing system these day, the price of ads are effected by that. Thanks for the guys commenting on this.
VikingBlogger Going Social
I haven’t tried to get traffic from social sites like twitter, pownce etc before. But yesterday I finally made a profile on some social sites, and are going to update them with news about my posting on VikingBlogger. I’m not sure what to expect, but it could be fun to see if I get any traffic from this.
So far I have made a profile on 4 sites. They are as follows:
If you got a profile on any of these sites, I would be really happy if you added me as a friend/ followed me:)
Add posts to all of them with one click
I found a post at BlueVerse, where he recommended a service called hellotxt. Short described you can send updates to your profile on different social sites with one click. You just provide them with the username and password, then write the post, and
click send. hellotxt will then automatic update your profile with the new post. I have tried their service with the four above sites, and it works like a
charm. In additional they support the following sites:
Do you get any traffic from social sites like these?
Get $20 for FREE From AdToll
AdToll are running a promo for a limited time. Sign up today and get $20 which you can use to advertise on other sites with. That way you could get more traffic to your site. I’m using AdToll myself to advertise my sites, and if you look good you could find some gems in there.
Get Out of Here Spottt!
Alright, I have tried Spottt for a week now, and I’m not impressed. The exchange are not going to work for sites with low traffic, period. The only sites I can see this service work for is big sites with loads of views. That way they get an big amount of credits just for the views, but most certain they aren’t giving a good CTR. The only way such a service will work is either A: It’s based on clicks, not views. You send 2 clicks get 1 back. B: A more powerful category system, where your sites gets placed in a category with similar sites with similar CTR.
Free Credits
One day when I logged in I suddenly had over 4k credits. I’m not sure what it was, but thats the only reason that I got a couple clicks back to my site. Anyway, I think it was a mistake, and before I got around and used all the credits they have taken it away from me. Hehe.
My statistic page
Anyway, the service is not getting my premium location, and I’m taking them of. Most probably not going to put them up again.
Have you used or are using Spottt on your blog/site? How are that working out for you?
