Members of the AdSense team from all over the world say hello from Mountain View, CA!
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A Global Greeting
Browsing Posts tagged Google Adsense
Have you checked your AdSense email preferences lately? If not, you may be missing out on important information and special offers without realizing. Take a minute to log in and update your email preferences under the ‘My Account’ tab.
Want to be invited to upcoming events like AdSense In Your City? Make sure you check the box next to Special Offers when you edit your email preferences so you can stay up-to-date with giveaways and other special programs in your area.
Want tips from the AdSense team for how to earn more with your AdSense account? Check Customized help and performance suggestions and/or Newsletters so we can offer personalized guidance to improve performance and maximize your revenue.
Want to help us improve AdSense by testing out features like the new AdSense interface? Check Google Market Research and you’ll be able to share your valuable feedback with us through surveys and beta tests.
Want promotions and key updates for other Google products that can help you grow your AdSense business? Check Information about other Google products and services which may be of interest to you so we can send you news and coupons based on your potential needs.
We want to help you earn more with tips and promotions, invite you to in-person events, and gather your feedback so we can continue to improve AdSense. So log in, update your preferences, and take advantage of the opportunities coming your way from the AdSense team!
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AdSense email preferences: Get the most from your account and from Google
Attention all Bloggers! We know many of you use AdSense to monetize your blog, and we wanted to be sure you didn’t miss out on the invitation to Blogger’s 11th Birthday party. Using Meetup Everywhere, you can find a party in your area that will be filled with local bloggers like you. We hope you’ll take advantage of this great opportunity to swap stories about your readers, learn about some new sites, share tips about earning with AdSense, and get to know other passionate bloggers. Details are highlighted below, but check out the official Blogger post for more information.
- What: Blogger’s 11th birthday celebration!
- How: Sign up for a Meetup near you or get one going in your town.
- Where: Anywhere you are.
- Who: Everyone! You never know who might show up.
- When: Any time on Tuesday, August 31, 2010
- RSVP: www.meetup.com/bloggerfiesta
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In an effort to expand the availability of sensitive category blocking (also known as category filtering) worldwide, we’re happy to announce that sensitive category blocking has now officially launched in Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Portuguese. As you might know, this feature is also available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Arabic with testing being done for Russian.
With sensitive category blocking, you can prevent ads from up to 11 specific categories from appearing on your pages. Ads in these categories will be blocked if they’re in any of the supported languages, regardless of how they’ve been targeted to your pages.
If you’d like to set up sensitive category blocking, please sign in to your AdSense account and visit the Ad Review Center, located under the ‘AdSense Setup’ tab. Once you click ‘change,’ you’ll be able to view the full list of categories you can block. In addition, to help you understand the impact of applying these filters, we’ll show you the percentage of revenue and ad impressions you’ve been receiving from each category in the last 30 days.
For more information about sensitive category blocking, we encourage you to visit our Help Center.
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Sensitive category blocking now available for Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Portuguese
As city and state governments scramble to make up for growing budget shortfalls we’ve seen the passing of some fairly ludicrous legislation. From the Amazon Tax passed by New York, Rhode Island, and North Carolina to Colorado Governor Bill Ritter’s “Dirty Dozen” which included a tax on bull semen, we’ve seen a lot of ridiculous legislation in 2010.
Enter the city of Philadelphia whose government seems to think that blogging is the next big untapped treasure trove of tax revenue. Philadelphia has imposed a privilege license on all bloggers who reside in the city limits. Cost of the tax, $300.
According to tax attorney Michael Mandale as long as a blog is engaged in an “activity for profit” for example taking any advertisement including Google AdSense, the city of Philadelphia’s “blogging tax” applies to them. By such a definition blogs or sites on communities like Squidoo, Livejournal and platforms like WordPress and TypePad would be subject to such a tax.
The thing is a lot of people who blog do so as a hobby or a form of self expression. They may put up an occasional link to Amazon or to Fandango because of a book or movie they have seen but most are not making a living off of blogging. In fact both local bloggers interviewed by the Philadelphia City Paper made less than $50 over two years. But as Michael Mandale points out the law applies whether or not the blogger “earned a profit during the preceding year.”
Interestingly the way the law is written it would exempt most corporate blogs from being taxed separately because most corporations do not display advertising on their blog.
Now, I don’t fault the Philadelphia city government for searching for new tax revenue resources especially when faced with the crisis of a budget shortfall. In fact, I would classify myself as generally pro tax. But this law is just misguided for many reasons.
- Jurisdiction: The law is targeting the blogger who hopes to earn a profit through advertising. Fine. But what if a blogger living in Philly blogs on a third party site, say they setup a Squidoo Lens, but chooses not to run their own advertising. Let’s say the third part site then decides to run advertising triggered by the blogger’s content. Seems wrong that the small blogger would be taxed but the larger business (the site) would be allowed to make a profit untouched. Philadelphia having no jurisdiction over matters outside of its city limits could never impose the tax on a site outside of its city limits. Yet, in the scenario above it could not tax the site for the very same content and potential profits that it is trying to tax the blogger for.
- Enforcement:By the city’s own admission they do not keep track of how many bloggers reside in their city limits. In fact it might be an impossible task at least from a resource standpoint, not just for Philly but for any city, to actively enforce such a law. So the only people this law taxes (punishes) are those honest enough to come forward and pay it.
- What Content is Taxable?: The supposition here is that the blogger is seeking out advertisers and the revenue from ads should be taxed. But I’m sure that the city officials are thinking about traditional display style ads. What about in-text ads or outright advertorial? Are those taxable? If so, how will the city enforce? What about, as mentioned earlier, blog content from a large business or corporate entity? Such a blog isn’t likely to have advertising but essentially does serve a marketing/advertising purpose for the company that created it. Is that taxable? Will companies then be required to pay two taxes: one for their business license and one for the privilege of having a blog?
- Small Business Growth: In a city that is trying to encourage small business growth, as Philadelphia claims to, aren’t such tax measures a great way to hamper such growth? Bloggers who become successful enough through their writing will naturally evolve into businesses that bring in new tax revenue. Government should be cultivating business growth not burying it before it has a chance to flourish.
In Philadelphia there is already an effort to reform the current business privilege tax put forward by local City Council members Bill Green and Maria Quiñones-Sánchez so that the law wouldn’t apply to business that had not generated over $100,000 in revenue. While I applaud that effort, government tends to be a bit of “monkey see, monkey do.”
Among the repercussions of New York’s passing of the Amazon Tax, was that various states lined up to follow New York’s lead without really looking at the impact of the legislation. Don’t be surprised if a city near you follows in Philly’s footsteps.
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Blogging Tax Coming To A City Near You
This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You’ll be unable to log in to your AdSense account during this time, but we’ll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won’t be affected.
We’ve converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:
London – 6pm Saturday
Alexandria – 7pm Saturday
Hyderabad – 10:30pm Saturday
Jakarta – 12am Sunday
Perth – 1am Sunday
To learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.
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Site maintenance on Saturday, August 21
Last week I was given the opportunity to attend the Boston AdSense In Your City event. Though Boston technically isn’t my city (I’m a New Yorker by birth) I can see why so many of our fabulous publishers call it home.
Despite our varied interests (ranging from hot sauce to sheepdogs, ab workouts to online video games), every single person in that room was connected by their intense passion for their site’s subject, experience with AdSense, and desire to learn more.
We covered a lot in a single afternoon, and the Googlers learned a lot about your needs and concerns. Whether it was a feature request for the new user interface, a question about what Analytics report to check to help maximize ROI, a clarification about how to leverage DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business, or an optimization tip for the group, I was thrilled to see such lively discussion and engaged participation.
My favorite part of the day was getting some one-on-one time with a few publishers during the cocktail reception and individual optimization sessions. Regardless of site content or amount of product experience, everyone I spoke to shared a similar story: the money earned from AdSense has allowed them to spend more time doing the things they love. Some had more time to build great content for their users, others to quit their day job and blog about their favorite hobby. I was lucky enough to speak to two publishers who shared that AdSense not only allowed them to spend more time with their families, but even to put their kids through college.
Though Boston was the last stop of the AdSense In Your City roadshows, we hope to come visit more of you in the coming months. We’ve looked at all of the comments left so far, and will be sure to ask all of you before we decide where to go next. Make sure you’re opted in to receive special offers via email so we can invite you to events like this, and hopefully AdSense will get to see you in your city very soon!
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Getting to know you at AdSense In Your City: Boston
We wanted to give you all a heads up about a new Google blog that is focused on helping small businesses grow. Check out their first post below and visit googlesmb.blogspot.com to follow their future posts and updates. -ed.
Most every business, including ours, starts small. These days, technology is giving businesses even more ways to grow bigger… faster.
In our recent Small Business series on the Official Google Blog, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs have shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing Internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level. We’ve received fantastic feedback about these posts, and realized that there’s a healthy appetite among small- and medium-sized business owners who want to know all about the latest web tools and tricks. Fortunately, we have lots more to share with you, too!
That’s why we’re introducing the Google Small Business Blog, a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community. Rather than having to sleuth around in many different locations for details about templates for creating video ads on YouTube, tips for your employees using Gmail or how to respond to the business reviews on your Place Page, you can find all of this helpful information right here in one place.
Of course, we’ll continue to post relevant news about individual services such as AdWords, Apps, Google Places and YouTube on their respective “home” blogs, but feel free to visit or subscribe to the Google Small Business Blog to get everything relating to your small business needs. We’re starting small today, but who knows what tomorrow will have in store!
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Introducing the Google Small Business Blog
We’re excited to announce a revamped design of three of our AdSense for content ad units! After analyzing publisher site layouts and reviewing requests around the world, we decided to make our formats more space-efficient and visually pleasing by changing the layout of the text. We spent a lot of time experimenting with different possibilities, and we’re starting with changes to the following ad units:
- Leaderboard (728×90): the title, description, and URL are now arranged in rows instead of columns (except in the case when only one ad is showing)
- Medium and large rectangles (300×250, 336×280): the URL is now in the same line as the title
In certain cases, you’ll also see a few minor adjustments to the font size. For example, the font size for the leaderboard with four ads is much more readable. Please note that these changes will roll out over the next few weeks.
During testing, the redesigned ads performed extremely well. We’ll continue to experiment and innovate on our formats to help you monetize your content, and we encourage you to submit ideas in the comments below.
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A new look for AdSense for content ad units
You may have noticed a few posts from me recently, so I wanted to introduce myself to all of you, our fantastic publishers and Inside AdSense blog readers. I’ve spent the last few years in AdWords (for those of you who are also advertisers, you may remember my name from posts to the Inside AdWords blog) and am very excited to join the AdSense team!
I’m really looking forward to meeting some of you in person at our AdSense in Your City events and engaging with you through our other social media channels. If you don’t already, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and leave us some comments so we know what you’d like to hear more about. We want to make sure that you’re getting the information you need, and will do our best to provide you with whatever content you find most interesting and useful. To start things off, we’re giving the blog a little makeover so it’s easier to read and navigate. You should notice the new background soon, and we’d love to hear what you think!
For any technical or account questions, check out the Help Forum, where you can interact with AdSense employees, Top Contributors (expert AdSense users vetted by the AdSense team), and a vibrant community of online publishers ready and willing to answer your toughest questions.
No matter which channel you choose, we look forward to interacting with you. See you in cyberspace!
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Inside AdSense – Meet Katrina
Over the last two years, the AdSense team has offered the powerful Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) product as an improvement over the original AdSense for search. After some recent improvements, we’re now ready to retire the older version of AdSense for search. If the Google logo on your search results page reads “Powered by Google” instead of the newer “Google Custom Search” then you haven’t yet upgraded to the newer version. The new AdSense for search with CSE is available in your account, and we encourage you to make the switch by updating your code as soon as possible.
AdSense for search with CSE gives you more control over your search results without changing how you earn money showing AdSense for search ads. For example, with the new version, you’ll have access to advanced features like refinements and promotions. Our team has developed a number of updates and improvements during the past few months, and you can access more advanced features at www.google.com/cse.
Your existing AdSense for search box will continue to work normally for a few more months, and we’ll be sure to update you when we retire this version. To take advantage of the benefits offered by the new version of AdSense for search and ensure you don’t miss any revenue during the transition, we encourage you to update your code now. You’ll just need to regenerate your AdSense for search code by signing in to your account and following these instructions:
- Visit your “AdSense Setup” tab and select “AdSense for Search.”
- Select the sites you’d like your users to be able to search across (Learn More).
- Customize the look and feel of your search engine results.
- Update the code on your website.
For more information about AdSense for search with CSE, please visit our Help Center.
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Switch to the new version of AdSense for search
In the last video of this series, Evanne, a member of the Partner Development team, talks about her favorite Google perk, her obsession with music, and an important tip she’d like to share with all of you.
We hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about what goes on behind the scenes in AdSense. If you have feedback on this series, or ideas for future series, we’d love to hear them so please leave us a comment!
Over the last few months, we held a number of webinars to help you further optimize your site:
- Optimization Best Practices
- AdSense for Search
- AdSense Top Tech Tips
If you haven’t seen one yet, you can view the recordings of these events whenever it’s convenient for you!
Over the last few months, we held a number of webinars to help you further optimize your site:
- Optimization Best Practices
- AdSense for Search
- AdSense Top Tech Tips
If you haven’t seen one yet, you can view the recordings of these events whenever it’s convenient for you!
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Watch our latest webinar recordings!
In the next part of our video series, Alton, our Optimization specialist, shares with us his experience working with publishers, his favorite meal at Google, and some recommendations on summer reading.
For more videos, please visit our YouTube channel.
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AdSense: Behind the Scenes – Meet Alton
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