Your Own Advertising Network & Keep All Income

Of course, we badly need good alternatives to Google® and Yahoo!® with the best and possibly the only viable option at this time being selling ad space yourself via your our own in-house Advertising Network. A major benefit from running your own advertising network is you keep 100% of the revenue.

Frank Schilling had a very nice Advertising Network of his own running on his domain names but I believe it was deactivated last year for some odd reason. I can only guess as to why.

We would like to install an ad network almost exactly the way Frank’s network worked on all our sites but having lots of difficulty getting it programmed after considerable time and effort.

The problem is the programmers we were trying to hire for the work were simply not capable of doing the job. Therefore, we would really appreciate finding out who the programmer was who programmed Frank’s old advertising network? We have spent considerable time in search of Frank’s Ad Network programmer, including a number of posts about it on Twitter and Facebook but no success. Does anyone know the programmers name or contact information?

P.S. As an interesting side note to demonstrate the major players are trying to improve their own domains and traffic (as small site developers and domain owners are too) we just noticed Fabulous.com (who is a major player with the PPC firms) is both surprisingly and mysteriously using a competitors platform and ad feed on a domain (I imagine far more names than just the one we stumbled on today).

Fabulous is using WhyPark.com (at least with the domain name we noticed today) which is owned by an arch-rival of Fabulous named Parked.com. Isn’t it interesting that Fabulous would use a competitors program instead of their own system!

FYI, the Fabulous.com domain name we are reporting on (which as of today’s date was on the WhyPark.com platform) is registered to FABULOUS.COM PTY LTD.

Any comments you have about website advertising and ad serving networks will be appreciated. Thank you.

Are Yahoo Traffic Quality Scores Nonsensical?

Yahoo! is a major advertising feed provider for a few well known domain name parking firms. Domains which are not active websites are usually parked so the domain-name owner gets an opportunity to earn revenue from pay-per-click ads which appear on the pages which are parked.

One of the larger and best domain parking firms is Parked.com, who reports by way of a graphical line chart viewable on the clients dashboard page showing their web-page visitor traffic quality scoring.

Even since the Yahoo feed traffic scores were openly disclosed we have always thought the scores made little sense and seemed nonsensical since the scores fluctuate a lot even though the parked domains and their visitor traffic stays basically the same.

In the past (again with about the same quality traffic) our score has ranged from a very low 1 and all the way up to a consistent 9 or 10, with 10 being the highest possible score, and has held as a 9 or 10 for  long time periods. Here is our most recent quality score report according to Yahoo! which covers the last nine quality score iterations:

2.5 – 3.0 – 0 – 0 – 6.0 – 1.0 – 1.0 – 5.5 – 7.0

In our opinion, it appears to be virtually impossible for such wild fluctuations to take place. In fact, the visitor quality scores almost appear like random numbers, keeping in mind the parked domains and their combined traffic are basically the same for the entire reporting period. What do you think?

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is Shutting Down

Just received email from Yahoo announcing they are shutting down Yahoo Publisher Network by the end of April 2010.

Not really too surprising since it never did very well for many publishers compared to Google Adsense and never got out of Beta after several years in beta.

Some of their policies were also odd such as when they both emailed and called making us stop using the YPN Ad Targeting Tool where I was able to accurately target YPN ads to the right category based on both the domain name and site content.

The representative we spoke to said YPN did not like the way I was using it (but gave no real explanation after asking her for the reason many times) even though I was usng the ad targeting tool exactly as intended with 100% genuine ad targeting.

Funny thing is I always suspected YPN actually did not truly want completely accurate ad targeting since YPN allegedly had limited ad inventory in several important or niche categories. However, the ad targeting tool forced those ads where there may have been low inventory. Now I am thinking my guess about that was actually correct. LOL.

Coming Events Cast Shadows in Search-Terms

Our server has two excellent stats program running which tells us most everything possible about how visitors arrive at this website, including the search terms used in the search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo and others.

The popularity of the beautiful Alexis DelChiaro (photo above) as far as search results coming from our server stats program is quite surprising. Upon checking our statistics today we see Alexis DelChiaro is the most searched term. Making that more surprising is the fact most of the searches relate to the possibility of Alexis and husband (Chicago Cubs pitcher) Sean Marshall being separated or divorced, with 15 of 20 looking for information about Alexis and 12 of 15 regarding separation or divorce.

Here are the top-20 search terms (non-Alexis search terms are not shown):

alexis delchiaro divorced
alexis delchiaro
alexis delchiaro separated
alexis del chiaro separated
is alexis del chiaro divorced
sean marshall divorced
is sean marshall divorced
is alexis delchiaro divorced
alexis delchiaro age
alexis delchiaro divorce from sean marshall
alexis delchiaro sean marshall separated
did alexis delchiaro get divorced
alexis del chiaro
alexis del chiaro fox news separated from sean
alexis delchiaro and divorced

As discussed before in this blog, “coming events cast their shadows” which indicates to me it’s very likely Alexis is at a bare minimum having problems with her marriage and separation or divorce is likely. After all, why would these search terms be so common unless there was some truth to it?

As a side note, there was a popular old article with a series of comments published here about Alexis Delchiato which I believe are indexed in the search engines so I am sure that is at least one of the reasons some of the separaton or divorce search-terms end up being referred to this blog.

Please note, personally I am not interested in this or care about this subject at all, and only reporting about this as far as my strong interest goes in search engines, web site traffic and search term statistics.

Next Big Thing in Your Cell Phone, PC & The Web

Regarding the next big thing on the near horizon, in my opinion I feel that Live Apps are going to be a real big wave.

I thought I would post about Live Apps and Apple Computer. There are also several other large live app corporate players in addition to Apple.

There are already over 100,000 Live Apps with more than 65,000 worldwide Live App developers and programmers.

Apple now owns Appstore.com which domain registration information appears to have changed last month (it seems the domain name was previously owned by SalesForce.com)

Click for AppStore.com Domain Name Whois

Click for Live App Store Google results

Click for Apps Store Google results

Click for App Store Google (an amazing 34 million search results)

More Website Visits by Updating Page & DNS

A member of one of the forums has posted about how her website traffic and revenue spiked-up without obvious reason. There has been talk on that board about that subject and conjecture by the members where they believe changes to web site content and also possibly changing the nameservers may be responsible for a sudden and unexplained traffic/revenue spike.

The jury is out on that issue however assuming it’s valid it seems like someone could develop a script which automatically substitutes the index page on a regular basis (i.e. weekly schedule)? It appears that could be accomplished based on two different home-page versions with diverse content in the folder (i.e. index1.html & index2.html) and proceeds to rename one or the other index.html. In addition, the proposed script could also access the domain registration account and modify the nameservers on the same schedule (i.e. alternating between NS1. Example1.com & NS1.Example2.com).

Every ‘X’ number of days (i.e. weekly) the script could rename the index pages on a rotating schedule. Next it automatically goes into the domain registration account and change the nameservers too on the same rotating schedule. It would seem like a fairly easy script to have programmed and implemented.

Do Regular Changes to a Website Improve Traffic?

A member of one of the forums has posted about how her traffic and revenue had recently spiked-up without obvious reason. There has been talk on that board about that subject and conjecture by the members where they believe changes to website content and possibly changing the nameservers too may be responsible for sudden and unexplained traffic/revenue spikes.

The jury is out on that issue however assuming that is valid it would seem like someone could develop a script which automatically substitutes the index page on a regular basis (i.e. weekly schedule)? It appears that could be accomplished based on two different home-page versions with diverse content in the folder (i.e. index1.html & index2.html) and proceeds to rename one or the other index.html. In addition, the script could access the domain registration account and modify the nameservers on the same schedule (i.e. alternating between NS1. Example1.com & NS1.Example2.com).

Every ‘X’ number of days (i.e. weekly) the script could rename the index pages on a rotating basis.  Next the script automatically goes into the domain registration account and change the nameservers too on the same rotating schedule. It would seem like a fairly easy script to have programmed and implemented but who knows for sure? The end-results would certainly be interesting and the search engine and traffic improvement theory may or may not be proven valid and could turn-out to be little more than urban legend.

Why Technical Support May Not Understand Issues

Have you ever called an internet-based company for technical support only to have the tech support person be unable to resolve the issue as a result of being unable to personally duplicate the probem you are encountering?

More often than you would think a reason the technical support dept has trouble personally duplicating the problem you are seeing is because they are either not actually using the program on the web like you are or else are using a different operating system, browser or even using a Mac computer instead of the PC compatible you are likely using.

For example, instead of the same program as used by most customers being installed or running on the technicians computer they often use a different setup. Such as an internal, proprietary or server-based setup, which is sometimes working from an admin control panel instead of how you use and run the program.

At other times, the technician may be using a less commonly used internet browser such as Firefox, instead of using the much more popular and much more commonly used Microsoft Internet Explorer Browser. Since the functionality, appearance, setups, screens, compatibility, memory use and potential browser bugs could be diverse the problems you are having may not be experienced by the technical support person you are talking to.

As an example, here is a saved live chat session I had today with the technical support department of a web development program I am using to semi-automatically generate multi-page websites. The company and persons name is not given in the chat log

Me: Hi, whenever I go to a 3rd party web site which has an RSS Feed my IE 7 or IE 8 RSS Feed icon turns orange color to let me know the web site has an RSS feed running on it but with all my sites with you that does not happen?

Technician: Hmm, can you clarify a bit? There is an Orange button? That sounds like RSS syndication. Such as in this example.com website, which has the RSS syndication actve…

Me: Right, exactly like your example, my IE bar has an RSS Icon which is always grayed out even though my sites are using your platform and do in-fact have my RSS Feedburner code installed (which by the way is working well). Why does the RSS icon not turn orange color as it does with 3rd party sites which have RSS activated?

Technician: What version of Internet Explorer are you running?

Me: With both IE7 and IE8 the icon does not turn orange color as it should.

Technician: So for the example site I just showed you, it’s grey?

Me: Right, the IE bar icon (found next to home page button) stays grey with or without RSS running on the site. However, it’s always orange colored icon on 3rd party sites with RSS activated.

Technician: I am not sure why, I would need to look further into the situation, but it may be because the sites are using the platform, and there are some limitations.

Me: OK but look at your own Internet Explore Toolbar which RSS icon is located next to your IE home-page icon (at least there on my screen) to see what I mean.

Technician: I don’t use Internet Explorer. I’m on a Mac, so IE doesn’t work.

Me: You using a Mac is indeed an issue alright. Since the overwhelming majority of the public uses Internet Explorer and most do not have or even heard of Firefox, and is exactly why I only use Internet Explorer. In my opinion anyone in tech supt should also be using IE since that is what the vast majority of the the public is using so by using the same typical setup you can give better client support that way. Sorry if you do not like me saying this but you really should use what most of your customers are using, IMO.

Technician: Most of our team is using a PC platform.

Me: Not sure what that means?

Technician: I don’t do any developing so it is a non-issue for me. I can look further into your situation with our development team. Would you like me to email you an update?

Me: Was not referring to developing as this issue is about surfing the web and looking at the IE Toolbar which most people have installed having absolutely nothing to do with development so I have no idea why you are talking about development but thanks anyway for your time.

Technician: OK, I do like Firefox, you should try it. Thanks for your notification on this issue. Bye for now.

Me: No thanks. Bye.

P.S. After all that discussion and time spent on it the issue was not resolved, in large part because tech support did not see or able to duplicate the same problem on their screen. Isn’t that ridiculous!