The Big Adsventure

The AdSense team has launched a new service: AdSense Video Units. With this new service you can place a Video Unit on your website and Google will figure out which videos would be best to show to your visitors. This is done by checking the content of your website, much like AdSense finds the right ads to show on your site based on its content. The Video Unit has targeted ads incorporated in the player.

It looks like the Video Units are only available to US publishers at this time, so I can’t try them out and give you a review. You can find out more about the new AdSense Video Units at:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/10/introducing-video-units.html

Today I heard about a new ad project which lets you display ads from various ad networks on your website. Based on your content, type of site and demographics of your visitors, the best performing ads will be selected to be displayed on your site. The service is not available yet, but looking at the 4 minute demo video on the Rubicon Project website, I think this is a very interesting way to manage your ad space.

Looking at the team behind the Rubicon Project plus the $6 million in funding that they have secured, this has to be a winner!

Ever had a look at Google Answers? Many people have never heard of it, even though it has been running for a little over 4 years. The idea was to let people ask questions and have them answered by the answer crew. To get high quality answers the answer crew gets paid for answering questions. The money to pay them comes from the people asking the questions.

I think the big problem here is that people don’t want to pay to get a question answered when they can get free answers on forums… Another problem must have been the promotion of the service (or lack thereof) after 4 years most people have never even heard of Google Answers. But that is changing now, being one of the first Google services to be shut down, because it just didn’t work out as planned, you will see a lot on this subject all over the web over the next few days. Very soon everybody will know about Google Answers.

Maybe the shutting down of the service is to get the word out so they can do a re-launch soon. If they do, they should get a new source of funding to pay the answer crew, first thing to pop into mind would be ads…

While checking for backlinks to the 43Ads website today I noticed a mention of the site in Chris’ SEO blog. It turns out that the site has been awarded the ‘site of the month’ award for October. This monthly award is given to a website listed in the 100 lists directory In order to be eligible for the award, one main point is that the site should pass the W3C validation and use a valid CSS file. With this being my first site designed with CSS, I’m extra proud of the award!

Olaf just passed the magical mark of rank 100,000 at technorati. Looks like the blogotition is over and I lost big time…

Well actually I am the biggest winner if you look at the details, sure I’m only ranked at position 220,000 and a bit, but considering our starting positions my blog has gained the most (almost 900,000) so I lost $10 to this bet, but got my blog noticed I think!

After YouTube and Google Video we’ll soon have another place we can go to, to be amazed at how many weirdo’s this planet inhabits: MSN-Soapbox. Looks like uncle Bill wants a piece of the amateur video pie. The MSN Soapbox site has been launched but is currently ‘by invitation only’ (where did they come up with that idea…) The new video sharing will be integrated with the MSN messenger application so pritty soon we’ll have more to piss us off than those freakin’ animated smilies…