A standard screen resolution is 1028 pixels, but also the sum total horizontal room needed for the two most popular IAB ad units is 1028 pixels. If I want to maximize a website design for ad display that often involves using both 728 pixel wide leaderboards and 300 pixel wide rectangles.

So, it fits perfectly right? No, not quite. The obvious solution is to put the box ad somewhere on a left or right menu or side bar (and maybe a second one nested in a content paragraph), then to put a 728 ad above the content. But you have to account for pixels taken up by the browser scroll bar on the right side of the screen, and you need padding or spacing between page elements or it’ll look bad, so that 1028 resolution shrinks to something like, minimum, 970, and that just isn’t enough room.

So it has been a battle, trying to figure out an optimal ad layout while limiting resolution so that people on 1028 or smaller resolutions do not have to horizontal scroll.

On some sites I’ve done a hybrid situation where I park the 728 leaderboard over BOTH the content block, and the sidebar block, and that can work. That type of layout can even squeeze into an 800 wide resolution (which we should have all left by now, if not, do so, you’ll make more money). On other sites I’ve limited myself to a 250 pixel wide box ad. Then I get these emails from Google “You know if you changed this ad from 250 pixels to 300 pixels you’d make like $100 more per day?” I think “Great, okay Google, I’d love $36,500 more per year, but you tell me how I’m supposed to fit it in?”

The solution is to kick 1028 to the curb. 85% of browsers now use a resolution higher than 1028×768. So this past week I tweaked my garden blog settings to be bigger than 1028 so I could get a beefier sidebar without losing my 728 content ads. This site finally pushed me to do this because it uses a lot of big pictures in posts, and so I wanted to keep the large post space, and because I wanted to include a few new things like recent forum posts on the sidebar (so as to draw more traffic into the forum) and it really needed a wider column.

I plan to do this same thing with some of my other sites in the future (such as the site Google keeps telling me will earn more, but its bigger, and will take some time), and I tell you what, it feels good to be unchained from 1028 limitations. I settled on a width of 1050, which allows me to fit in what I wanted to fit in. It does mean approximately 15% of my users may have to horizontal scroll, slightly, but that is okay, maybe it’ll get them to upgrade their computer.

Personally, I love it.

I’ve been a member of Google’s Adsense program since it launched, and my how it has changed. Specifically in recent years it has gotten very very good at behavioral tracking. I’ll often find myself shopping with purpose, or maybe just browsing an ecommerce site, then I click back to one of my sites and see ads for the site I was just on.

I know my Adsense revenue has been getting stronger and I think the reason why is other people are being as targetted as I am. Yes, it can be creepy, but it is also very useful.

For instance, we have recently decided that a one day a week nanny would be a good thing to have for our kids. So, I went on this website called SitterCity.com and started looking around. They offered a free 7 day trial but most useful features (background checks, reviews, etc) cost money. The price was $140 a year. I did not sign up, but I thought about it.

So I go and then visit one of my sites, I see an ad for SitterCity half off. So I clicked it (yes, I clicked my own ad – but only because I was really interested in it, and I have the credit card bill to prove it). Now suddenly thanks to the discount tied to the ad click through URL, the price is only $70 a year. Open wallet, remove credit card.

This is the kind of advertising that really really works, and I’m glad its showing on my site. And now I have another story to tell when I explain to people that blocking cookies and tracking on your home PC really isn’t that necessary.

This is also why online advertising will continue to grow and eat away at TV and print.

Perhaps terminate is the wrong word, they’re basically going to end all existing Right Media services for small publishers, which is most of what the company offers.

Coming on the heels of their implosion of YPN I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. YPN, of course, no longer exists really, Yahoo is going to completely farm out all advertising to Microsoft in a recent deal.

Does anyone take Yahoo seriously as a company anymore? Let us look into the past and see how Yahoo has innovated and improved, or perhaps not.

1. Yahoo starts company as a web directory, the first, becomes one of the most popular websites on the Internet, directory is manually edited by humans.
2. Yahoo starts charging for directory submissions, makes a gold mine. Search results are based on on directory listings primarily, making directory listings important for ranking well, everyone buys one.
3. Yahoo deemphasizes directory listings in their search results, but still links to matching categories, less people buy them.
4. Yahoo stops even linking to directory categories in search results, “Directory” doesn’t even get a main tab. No one buys listings anymore, nearly impossible to justify the $300 yearly fee with the paltry traffic received, only the most profitable sites should do it.
5. Meanwhile, Yahoo purchases Inktomi, an early search pioneer, to power their search results. Yahoo eventually also absorbs Lycos, Fast (Alltheweb), and Altavista, all early pioneers, all at one time the most popular search engine on the Internet, Yahoo kills them all like so many wives of Henry the VIII.
6. Yahoo inks a deal with Microsoft for search, effectively exiting the search business, all the money spent on acquisitions could have been saved if they just partnered long ago.
7. Meanwhile, Yahoo had purchased Overture, formerly Goto.com, the original PPC search engine.
8. Despite buying the creator of PPC search, Yahoo allows itself to be out manuevered and out innovated by Google.
9. Google PPC ads get smarter, like Google’s search index. Google launches Adsense PPC ad syndication platform, eventually syndicated PPC ads account for something like 85% of Google’s ad dollars.
10. Yahoo plays catchup, launches YPN, perpetually in-beta ad network sputters along through mismanagement after mismanagerment. Yahoo lets in large publishers of spammy sites but doesn’t allow advertisers to opt-out, sites make good money, for a short period of time, but advertise ROI plummets, advertisers flee. Yahoo keeps crappy partners in network, but kicks out good ones for sending international traffic, which every other network on the Internet has no problem just filtering out. Network never leaves beta, network dies.

11. Yahoo buys Right Media, an innovator in small publisher advertising. Creator of an exchange to match up small publishers with small advertisers. Does some innovative things like allowing “R-Rated” sites (and labeling them as such), something most networks do not touch (but should, look at how much money R-rated movies can make). Eventually, Yahoo kills Right Media, reasons unknown.
12. Meanwhile, Yahoo inks deal with Microsoft to outsource all PPC advertising, effectively killing the original PPC search engine.

For all these reasons, I hereby crown Yahoo, the worst company on the Internet.

Over the past year I have been doing a lot with intellectual property, officially registering both trademarks and copyrights, and I’ve gotten quite a bit of junk mail telling me I needed to send these third party companies checks to protect my trademarks or copyrights.

It was this situation that caused me to discard various letters from The Copyright Clearance Center (copyright.com) asking me for my tax ID and various other information. Many of their letters I did not even open.

Now it is the season of tax forms, and all the 1099s from our various payees (though less than it used to be as my business is incorporated and you do not need to send a 1099 to corporations) are coming, and I received one the other day and opened it and it was from The Copyright Clearance Center. I immediately started looking for the fine print, something indicating it was not genuine, but it was genuine (or they had committed federal fraud), and apparently they had tried to pay me $2100 during the year.

So, I looked closer at them. Apparently many nations have standardized laws for the use of copyrighted materials, much like exists for radio stations and songs, where the station does not have to negotiate a set rate for each individual song with each individual copyright holder, but rather a standard fee is used. When the rights holder is in another country a centralized authority collects the fees and sends them for distribution to a domestic copyright clearance center, such as the one mentioned previous. I don’t necessarily like people being able to use my content without my permission, but it is legal through the laws of their country and they are, in the end, paying me. They could have just not paid me at all and I likely would have never known.

In my case apparently various Australian (or the same one repeatedly) school districts used some of my content. The information they had on the actual use was sketchy, being triple hearsay from across the world, but the money is real.

The Copyright Clearance Center in addition to handling these foreign repatriations, mainly functions as a clearing house for domestic based requires for the use of copyrighted content. You can register with them and provide and price your content for use and anyone can then come, pay the fee, and use it. Apparently there is a demand for my content, and I think I’ll set up an account to see if any money can be made. Sure, I could just wait until people contact me, negotiate with them, see about getting paid that way. But their setup is standardized, I get the impression many people go directly to them, and it adds legitimacy (which, lets admit, is often lacking on the Internet). If you’re a large business or content buyer (the type to actually provide a good deal of money) you’re probably more likely to go to such a central location to find content than to try to deal with small individual rights holders.

In the end, I see this as a good way to create another passive income stream for my business, and I already know it works, I have 2100 reasons to think so.

For instance, today I saw my first peel away ad, and I was very impressed. You should see one at the top right of this page.

The example one they provided for me here is a little obnoxious, I’ll admit, with the blinking “Check this Out” but others I’ve seen do not have such text, and otherwise give no indication of what is “underneath” except to show that actual corner of the “underneath” content.

What do I like about these? Well, they’re engaging without being intrusive. But mostly I like them for some of the same reasons I like interstitials. They really don’t take up any screen real estate (how many of us have something important in a corner?) and they’re harder to block with ad blockers.

Really what gets me excited is the screen real estate thing. This is a great way to add new advertisements to your site without actually messing with your layout at all. You could use it to promote a third party ad or an affiliate offer, or even use it to promote content within your own site such as subscription tier or a newsletter. Ecommerce sites could use it to promote current sales or clearance products. The possibilities are endless… and, integration is a snap. No matter what kind of software you use on your site, it is just a javascript include, so it is as easy to ad as Google Analytics tracking code.

I honestly just saw this for the first time about an hour ago (maybe I’m a little behind, in Googling around I see it is at least 1 year old) and I can’t stop thinking of ways to use this on almost all of my existing sites.

I’ve Googled around and noticed that a few places sell scripts that do this, I’m linking to the most popular and one of the cheaper versions (one was like $300). If the example ad on this page isn’t working for you, this text link will. They have one of those obtuse sales pages that I loathe, but they’re selling an unlimited use license of the script for $37, which seems like a good deal. Buy it once and use it on all your sites.

If you think of a good way to implement these, please come back and post a comment or a reply to the forum post here on this topic. I think it’ll be nice to see how others are using them and do a little group brainstorming in that way.

I think, with that definition, having a deep site means having a site with many pages. Since having many pages is directly related to your SEO success, specifically what I call brute force SEO (making so many pages, so much content, that you can’t help but get traffic), having a deep site is directly related to your SEO success.

So, since we’ve established a deep site is good, how do we make your site deeper? Well, there are a couple techniques that I want to call content lengtheners that will do it for you, easily, with almost the flip of a switch.

Scenario 1.

Say you have a directory, any topic or type will do. Typically the deepest level on a directory is the category level. You start at the top, and browse down from general categories until more specific categories. Adding more content means adding more categories. DMOZ is like this, Yahoo is like this, most directory scripts are like this. It is very common.

What if you could double your content in an instant? Well, you can, you just add one more level of depth, at the very bottom. You make site profiles the lowest level of depth on your site. So now you start with general categories, browse down until the most specific category, and then click on a listing to get the listing page, which has additional details and perhaps user comments or reviews on that listing.

You have now added 1 page to your site, a page targeted to a specific listing (good keywords there if someone searches for that business/product/thing whatever your directory is of), for each listing in your directory. If your directory had 10,000 listings, you’ve now added 10,000 new pages to your site, nice huh?

Scenario 2.

Say you run a system for user feedback/comments. That is a great idea, allowing user comments such as in blogs is a great way to get free content for your site. However, why not take it a step further and promote discussions?

Let people reply to comments posted by other people, make those replies, and the original comment, a thread, let the thread be shown on a separate page.

Now, instead of just having all user submitted content be on the one page of your site, you’re letting user submitted content become new pages on your site (like a forum of course) which is even better.

Scenario 3.

Combine the first two. With your directory go down one more level to the site level. Then allow threaded comments so that each comment that gets a reply generates a new page on your site. If again you have 10,000 listings and each listing gets an average of 3 comments that is an additional 30,000 pages of content from your comment system, on top of the additional 10,000 pages from your lengthening of the depth of your directory.

The overall point of this concept is to get the most possible content pages out of your databases. More content equals more traffic, more traffic equals more money. When I recently did this, scenario 1 only, I doubled the traffic of the directory.

This, I think, has mostly been overblown, and really, is a good thing, not a bad thing.

I’m taking my wife to Vegas this Spring and these past two weeks I’ve been booking our trip and shopping for clothes. The evil ad company has profiled me, undoubtedly with the help of the evil travel website, and now on many sites I’m getting ads for… Las Vegas coupons and hotel deals! The nerve of those people to give me special offers and more targeted advertising just because they know I’m going to Vegas. I’m so offended!

Seriously though, they don’t know that I, Chris Beasley, tall goateed man, is going to Vegas. They know that user 897987 or user with ip of 333.444.555.666 is going to Vegas, and so, they’re showing this anonymous user appropriate ads. Sure, the travel website I booked with knows my personal information, but they don’t (and more importantly, don’t need to) share it with their ad partners. They just need to share a cookie, a small anonymous marker, and or my IP.

I’ve also been shopping on Bluefly.com for hot dresses for when I take my wife out at night. So what do I see on some sites now? Ads for 10% off my next purchase at Bluefly. The horror! Again, sure, Bluefly knows my personal information, but they don’t need to share it for this tracking to work, they just need to set a cookie or give my IP to the ad network.

As a consumer, I like this personalization and customization of the ads I see. I’d much rather see an ad for 10% off a store I might buy actually from, rather than an ad to download a smiley screensaver. I don’t feel creeped out about tracking because I know I’m just an arbitrary number to them, like just another box in that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

As a website publisher, this kind of advertising excites me and makes me feel good about the future of online advertising. In the February 18th issue of Fortune there was an article about one of the largest ad buyers in the world and how he is both impressed with and encouraged by the tracking ability of the web (and so spending more money on Internet advertising) as well as how he wants to port that same type of targeting to TV, if possible. So, really, this kind of tracking and targeting of advertising is what brings the big money to play on the Internet, making it important for every publisher.

Unfortunately, public perception of the negativity of such advertising persists, we all need to do our part to help our industry by educating, friends, family, and customers, as to the true value of these tracking systems.

Honestly, I don’t understand this move.

Yahoo sucks. Their search engine sucks, their advertising service sucks. Who here doesn’t think Microsoft Adcenter is better than Yahoo Search Marketing? I believe until just very recently YSM didn’t even allow you to opt out of their syndicated results, so to advertise on their search results you had to deal with a ton of spammy clickfraud like clicks.

Personally, MSN traffic converts better for me than any other search engine, I think their Adcenter program is well run, and I also think their search is better than Yahoo’s.

Granted, Yahoo has many other properties (Rightmedia, Flickr, etc), and Yahoo’s horrible performance over the past few years has hammered that stock and made it very cheap, but still, I feel MS had turned a corner as far as catching up goes and they could have had all of Yahoo’s market position without paying for it.

This is big for our industry of course. It would mean that those hoping MS would be able to offer an alternative to Adsense (in every way) will be disappointed since undoubtedly they’ll keep that comedy of errors that is YPN (read more about the joke that is YPN.)

Also, consider history. Yahoo gobbled up Overture, Inktomi, AllTheWeb, and AltaVista. Supposedly combining the best features of all of those sites (results to be determined), and now Microsoft wants to gobble up it all.

This will mean one less bit of diversity in our businesses, both in advertising and in SEO, and that I dislike. Additionally, what kind of pressure is this going to put on ASK.com? That will be interesting to see.

I get really decent eCPMs from Adsense with it, especially this time of year, because there are a lot of outdoor retailers who do typical Christmas advertising. Yesterday was one of the best normal days ever for Adsense with it in fact, I saw normal days because abnormal days when I was on the frontpage of Digg or in USA Today, etc, were of course so high in traffic that earnings were way up.

I’ve had this site since 2001 and one of the main draws on it, responsible for getting me tons of links and media mentions like the aforementioned ones above, is the quiz. It features 21 questions and a snarky Sergeant who insults the quiz takers both before, during, and after the quiz. One of the main reasons I made this quiz was to increase pageviews per visitor by making everyone who takes the quiz generate atleast an additional 21 page views. It works beautifully for that purpose and so makes up half of all pages view on the site (not counting the forum).

However, here is the dumb thing, I’ve only ever run 1 banner ad on the page, despite it being such a large portion of my page views. Since 2001, just 1 banner ad. How much money have I left on the table? Who knows, but I did just now add a new footer Adsense ad. It’ll be interesting to see how much this ad position makes me, but I’d guess it could almost do as much as $1000 per month. Wish I had thought to do that sooner.

Let this be a lesson for those of you like me with many different sites, be constantly reviewing them for better ways to monetize them.

I do not like this change. The thing is, Google created this type of advertising, they have been the standard, and surfers are probably used to their ads to the point where now they know they don’t need to click on the title or URL, just on the ad itself. This would only then confuse surfers.

Oh I agree that maybe reducing accidental clicks will increase advertisers value and raise rates, but that is a very long process to deal with and it doesn’t tackle the real problem sucking down advertiser value, MFA sites. In the meantime we’ll all have to tighten our belts I think.

A reasonable compromise would be to make all the text of an ad clickable and merely leave the whitespace (which is currently clickable) non-functional. That way users can click on the title, the text under it, or the URL, and be taking to the advertiser’s website.