Free Rs. 1,000 voucher for Adwords

Google is offering new Adwords advertisers in India Rs.1,000 in free vouchers.

Interestingly, I saw an ad for this promo in the print edition of Businessworld magazine.

Google AdSense for RSS feeds

Google has extended its AdSense Program for RSS feeds to a few select bloggers. Going by what I've seen on Brad Feld's blog, I'm quite impressed by how Google is able to throw up a reasonably relevant ad for each posting. I look forward to incorporating AdSense into the RSS feeds for my blogs as and when Google opens out the program.

"Google ignoring its core"

Fred Wilson is unhappy with Google.

Adsense doesn't perform very well for publishers. So much so that many publishers are turning back to banners. And Google is also turning to banners. It's back to the future. That's not innovation.

Google could acknowledge the limitations of its current contextual ad system and improve it. Or they could invest in new targeting systems like behavioral and beyond. But they are turning to serving bannners like Doubleclick did almost ten years ago. Why? I don't know.

I don't either.

Google allows payments in Indian Rupees

Google has started to allow advertisers in India to denominate the "maximum CPC", "daily budget" and other payment parameters in their Adwords accounts in Indian Rupees.

Way to go, Google.

Google is winning thanks to its user-friendly interface

Almost everyone knows that Google did not invent keyword advertising. Overture did. And it has a few patents to prove that.

Why then does Google have a (increasingly) higher market share?

Yes, Google owns the world's most popular search engine. But the reasons for Google's victory goes beyond that. The Google Adwords user (read "advertiser") interface is much, much more user-friendly and its sign-up process much, much, much more easier than Overture and other competitors like Kanoodle, Findwhat, etc. (Overture and Kanoodle actually want to check on you via a phone call before they will "permit" you to become a customer! Also with Overture, you have to create a different account/campaign for each country that you plan to target! How cumbersome.)

Keep up the great work, Google guys. The others, please wake up. At least now. Before people (read "advertisers") like me just forget about you.

Google sues AdSense publisher for click fraud

From ClickZ:

Google has filed its first click fraud lawsuit, charging a Texas-based Web site and its owners generated fraudulent clicks on ads in its AdSense program, causing Google to pay them for useless traffic to its advertisers.

The lawsuit, filed last week in a California Superior Court, alleges that, beginning in August 2003, Auction Experts International and its founders Sergio Morfin and Alexei Leonov clicked on AdSense ads on the Auction Experts site and paid up to 50 unidentified individuals to do the same.

I assume these guys were outsourcing their "clicking activity" to home-based entrepreneurs in India, Russia or China. I remember reading an Economic Times report about such activity being a sunrise outsourcing activity in India.

Amazing what con games people can think of. And apparently offshoring can improve the margins to the con business as well!

Rediff launches own pay-per-click service

After enhancing Rediffmail storage to 1 GB (an obvious reaction to the Gmail launch), Rediff has now dumped Google Adsense and gone in for its own pay-per-click ad network at http://pay4clicks.rediff.com.

It will be interesting to track how this works out for Rediff (especially since Google hands out a lion's share of its content-targeted ad revenues to the content web sites) and whether IndiaTimes will follow suit.

Outlook joins Google network

Outlook magazine's web site is the latest addition to the ever expanding Google Adsense network in India.