Category Archives: Google AdSense

More hits than from Google…

Posted on Thursday, May 10, 2012 by No comments yet

#VT – Gotta love it!  Click local!  From a new FPF advertiser today…

We are getting more hits to our website from Front Porch Forum than from Google at this point!

Learn more and contact FPF to get your ads running in Vermont.

Man in the Google Glasses inhabiting comfortable, full-service cage?

Posted on Monday, April 16, 2012 by No comments yet

Ross Douthat took on Google Glasses in yesterday’s New York Times

The Man in the Google Glasses can find his way effortlessly through the mazes of Manhattan; he can photograph anything he sees; he can make an impulse purchase from any corner of the world.

But the video also captures the sense of isolation that coexists with our technological mastery. The Man in the Google Glasses lives alone, in a drab, impersonal apartment. He meets a friend for coffee, but the video cuts away from this live interaction, leaping ahead to the moment when he snaps a photo of some “cool” graffiti and shares it online. He has a significant other, but she’s far enough away that when sunset arrives, he climbs up on a roof and shares it with her via video, while she grins from a window at the bottom of his field of vision.

He is, in other words, a characteristic 21st-century American, more electronically networked but more personally isolated than ever before.

We may be a couple years away from implanting newborns with chips… Google Glasses will seem as quaint as a horse and buggy.

Check out Google’s video… and then take a look at some of the parodies.

Local businesses and online advertising

Posted on Monday, February 16, 2009 by No comments yet

From Google disiple, Jeff Jarvis

The promise of local ad support for news will come only if a new population of very small businesses can be served in new and effective ways – before Google beats everybody else to it. That’s apparent in the results of Webvisible and Nielsen surveys reported by MediaPost (via Marketeting Pilgrim and Frank Thinking), which show that local marketers are leaving newspapers and the yellow pages but are still dissatisfied with – and don’t pay enough attention to – internet marketing. Factoids:

* 42 percent of small businesses say they use the local paper less and 23 percent use yellow pages less – while 43 percent use search engines more.
* “Though 63% of consumers and small business owners turn to the internet first for information about local companies and 82% use search engines to do so, only 44% of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online.”
* “Only 9% are satisfied with their online marketing efforts.”
* Mediapost found a disconnect in how small-business owners act as business people and marketers vs. how they act as consumers. That is, as consumers, they use and are satisfied with the internet and search to find other local businesses, but as marketers themselves, they use online less.

The more creative and forward-thinking local small businesses keep finding Front Porch Forum in our pilot area.  Most buy ads and report back remarkable results.

Hate online ads? How much?

Posted on Monday, December 8, 2008 by No comments yet

Mike Vorhaus blogged today at Advertising Age…

Consumers might “hate ads,” but not enough to pay even as little as a few cents a day to avoid them.

He reported on a survey…

When we asked consumers if they would pay $39.99 a year, which comes out to less than $4 a month, for an ad-free version of one of their favorite sites, only 2.4% said definitely yes, they would be likely to do so. And only 3.5% said they’d be very likely. In fact, 84% of the people said they’d be unlikely or not at all likely.

At the lower price of $29.99 a year, or less than $3 a month, only another 1.9% of consumers said they would be very likely to pay for an ad-free version.

Limiting Ad Inventory and Banning Ad Networks

Posted on Monday, October 13, 2008 by No comments yet

Thanks to Daniel for the link to this New York Times piece about newspapers’ online ad sales.  Some points…

After 17 quarters of ballooning growth, online revenue at newspaper sites is falling. In the second quarter, it was down 2.4 percent compared with last year, to $777 million…

Overall online advertising, however, is strong. Display advertising, the graphics-rich ads that newspaper sites carry, grew 7.6 percent in the second quarter…

Unique readers in August were 17 percent higher than a year earlier, at 69.3 million…

Large papers… can sell premium ad space… for $15 to $50 for every thousand impressions. But these and other papers of all sizes have increasingly relied on middlemen — known as ad networks — to sell less desirable space, typically for around $1 for every thousand impressions…

There are now more than 300 networks, most offering custom ads, and they are popular venture-capital investments and acquisition targets…

Some sites unaffiliated with newspapers have also limited inventory and banned ad networks, and many report good results…

Front Porch Forum works with a limited ad inventory and we do not use ad networks.

Google-hosted Boot Camp comes to Burlington, VT

Posted on Wednesday, June 11, 2008 by No comments yet

Cool local success, Epik, is hosting an Online Marketing (OM) Boot Camp in Burlington, VT, June 17-20. These are good folks who do great work, so I recommend it. Google and Champlain College are also co-hosting. They’re even offering some grants to cut the cost for select Vermont businesses. I’d be there if I wasn’t already booked… I’ll be co-leading a workshop about building online community at the American Press Institute based on our work with Front Porch Forum.

[Disclosure: Epik is a sponsor of Front Porch Forum.]

Google AdSense can really pick ’em

Posted on Sunday, March 2, 2008 by No comments yet

This blog is about neighborhood-level community building and our work with Front Porch Forum. To your right (if you’re reading this via a web browser on our blog), you’ll see some Google AdSense ads.

Far be it from me to question the mighty GOOG, but some of the ads that its magic algorithm selects to go with our blog postings leaves me smiling.

And sometimes I’m left just scratching my head. E.g, just now the top ad was for a law firm asking… “Need help beating the death penalty?” or something to that effect. Do people on death row have internet access? But more to the point, how did Google decide that that ad would appeal to our readers?