Google has announced its Website Optimizer, previously only available for their AdWords account holders to be offered to the public. Now if you have GMail account, and wanted to test the elements or design of your Website, you’re free to check out this service. This move can be viewed as an early step to capture the Web designer market, as Web designers finished their Web designs for their clients, they might be interested to know the implication of their designs, more specifically a Web page’s headline, graphic or image, how this lead to a successful pre-determine goal, lead or conversion rate.

According to the Website Optimizer team, there are two different versions of this product, one is available for the AdWords account holders, and the other one is a standalone product that a potential user could just sign-up through her GMail account. However, these two products are virtually the same, performing similar functionality regardless the approaches they’ve signed-up to this product.

Meanwhile, the Website Optimizer team also launched a blog to promote the latest news, testing methods of this newly public offered product.

Google is testing its beta version of AdSense for Mobile. Though it’s a limited beta testing, every Web publishers seem to be relatively interesting in this new product that to be launched by Google. It was a product quietly introduced by Google but catches most of our eyes. I wonder this AdSense for Mobile is designed to optimize the dot mobi Web sites. Not long ago, somewhere in last August Google launched Google Mobile Ads, now they want the developers/publishers to test out this sooner-or-later-gotta-launch product.

No doubt AdSense is Google’s core product on Internet advertisement market and their so-called core-competencies. They have rolled out the mobile advertising in the same way that they did on the Web, first by testing the market acceptance by released the mobile AdWords, later they will begin to have sponsored results on mobile search pages, and now they open the new arena for publishers to earn some revenues on the mobile Web industry.

Despite the fact that AdSense for mobile as well as the mobile advertising industry is heating up, the integration process seems not an easy task for most of the publishers. My sense is that mobile integration is not just simply cut and paste the javascript (AdSense code) like some of us did on their blogs, or on any Web pages.

Yahoo! has launched a new advertising (ads) platform called SmartAds, for more information, you can visit the “Demo” page. This is another project since Yahoo! has announced the release of the Panama Project in February this year. This is a refined advertising platform, not solely on new ranking system as Panama Project intended to be, but unveiled as a new platform that combines Yahoo’s demographic, geographic and behavioral targeting capabilities with a new patent-pending advertisement platform that based on Web surfer’s age, gender, location, online activities, and etc., according to this article.

This launched of new platform was indeed a quest for a template-based customized ads model, which they have patented this technology in spite of the “behavioral targeting” is not a buzzword in today’s technology arena. Some cyberpundits predicted that when Yahoo!’s acquisition of RightMedia is completed, they’ll be partner with RightMedia in rivaling Google’s AdWords system. However, the most credit given to this platform is their efforts in making this platform as the first available on Yahoo!’s owned and operated properties to travel industry advertisers in the U.S., according to their official press release. Unlike Google’s AdWords or other CPC paid listings and advertising platforms, I think publishers and advertisers will get more features in fulfilling the needs of the Web surfers, not a fully automated system that we expected it to be.

My concern for this system is how they successfully competing for the affiliate networks with other existing advertising platforms, the reliability of this system in ensuring the steady stream of income for those affiliates is still a big question for them right now. Central to this revenue sharing, of course the splits, how many percent this advertisement revenue paid to the affiliate networks? In the meantime, there are not much information that I can get from the Web at this moment. However, for now, I remain worried that the pitch is running ahead of this newly launched product.

Google’s new pricing model, as stated in the title, pay-per-action is now available worldwide, according to the latest blog entry of Google’s press center. This system was launched in March this year and still in beta mode, however, it should be consider as an indication that Google is working on their own way to fight the click fraud, given the estimation of invalid clicks is not the only solution that Google could provide to its publishers. I wondered the fundamental flaw in the process of research in discovering how third parties detect click fraud has helped reinvigorate Google’s pay-per-action model, as we all know that the goals of advertising business model shall not always correspondence to the quality services Google AdWord’s publishers expected.

Some publishers may agreed to this statement, “I don’t trust cost-per-thousand basis paid listings,” but I think now they should trust this pay-per-action program, at least at this moment.

Today Yahoo! News ran an interesting story that entitled, “Ad software maker OpenAds girds to take on Google,” and this story was on the potential growth opportunities of this open source advertisement maker. Openads, based in central London and started their open source advertisement project in year 1999, has growing to a stage that attracted the interests of a lot of venture capitalists recently. They have raised $5 million in a round A financing from Index Ventures, and joined by early-stage First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Currently they have more than 25,000 website publishers in more than 100 countries and 20 languages. The uniqueness is its global distribution whereby only 30 percent of its customers come from the United States.

There are few things that I like about their project: They are relatively small, as stated in Yahoo! News, Openads was a 10 man company and I always wondered small team can work the same productive and profitable way as a big corporate such as Google. Secondly, economic theory stated that if there were a demand for something, the marketplace would supply the means of achieving it. In this view, open source project was no longer termed as a “bungled attempt,” nonetheless we should realize of this fact by looking at a lot of open source projects that worked remarkable well, i.e. in term of revenue on the web nowadays. Thirdly, since this software is free and fully control by the users, we may see this is a better step to assure security and privacy. Perhaps the most interesting part is they planned to take on Google AdSense system in which both companies are striving for the lower-end market.

Well, I don’t know how far this company can go, but certainly most of us are penchant for the ambitious projects.

According to Bloomberg, Google has agreed to buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, almost double the amount that they bought YouTube last year. In my previous post, I talked about the desired for Google in maintaining the market leadership for whatever acquisition. But it clearly showed that the acquisition of DoubleClick will mark as the Google’s largest acquisition ever. $3.1 billion was in fact a significant valuation and the San Francisco-based private-equity firm, i.e. Hellman & Friedman that bought DoubleClick for $1.1 billion in 2005 had strike the “cash” windfall by Google while the iron is hot now. However, I didn’t quite understand why Microsoft did not raised the price of bidding in order to acquire DoubleClick, is this mean DoubleClick is not worth that $3.1 billion?

In the meantime, the above acquisition will make Google the front runner in all the competition of online-advertising market throughout the world. The combination of Google and DoubleClick will offer superior tools for targeting, serving and analyzing online advertisement of all types, significantly benefiting the users, online publishers, as well as agencies and advertisers, as told by Hellman & Friedman.

ByIndia.com, a search engine in India has planned to launch a “Google AdWords-Like” system in the middle of this month. On their Advertising web page, they stated this program be supposed to start-off in January this year, but somehow they have delayed to the 15th of this month. ByIndia, owned by Web2 Corp, seemed to be very optimistic about this incoming program, “We will be able to gain significant market share in India quickly, because we’re the first serious contender in their social media market. This is crucial both for ByIndia and for advertisers because early movers will have the opportunity to get a large share of the average Indian web user’s mindshare quickly and at a tiny fraction of the price of advertising in more developed markets. Ads.ByIndia.com is looking to get more than just Indian advertisers, though, and will accept payment in INR rupees, GBR Pounds, US Dollars, and Canadian dollars.” According to this article.

On the ByIndia home page, you’ll notice that they have stated so far they have able to search 21,164,863 pages, and much of them related to the Indians’ favorite hobby and lifestyle such as Bollywood, cricket, local news, and etc. As I compare their search engine with another one in India, i.e. guruji.com, with the keyword “Shah Rukh Khan“, a famous actor in India, ByIndia returned 379 total matching pages whereas guruji returned 72,533 pages. Therefore, I believe that guruji, funded by Sequoia Capital India is a much better search engine in terms of contents in India.

No doubt technology has enabled people to make more productive and profitable use of the resources nowadays. As an Asian, I saw many examples of the extreme contrast between the rich and the poor, I’m interesting to know how an Advertising program/search engine will help the small businesses in India to reach the outside world, and thus, bridge the gap between the rich and the poor. The Advertising program should served as one of the tools to meet the aforesaid purpose. However, the details of ByIndia Advertising program is still unknown to the public at this moment.

Google has officially integrated the projected Audio Ads (Advertisements) into their money making machine, i.e. Google AdWords. This is a plan for Google to projected itself into the traditional media such as radio, video, and the predicted TV. I’m still tend to believed that this audio ads is still operated as a limited test and as usual, you would easily find the pros and cons of this tactical move by Google. When a company is such big, many analysts, consulting firms, or blogs are keeping their eyes on it. One thing for sure, this audio ads is very much different when compared to the Internet ads, one player must always ensure it has the adequate airtime and the radio advertising inventory in order for the advertisers to test or use the services. Maybe this audio ads is attributed as a limited test, the official blog of Google AdWords never had a word on this until this moment.

Here you may wonder how an advertiser place an order for this audio ads, and what must be taking care in order to place the audio ads as well. In matter of fact, the audio ads is still operated as an auction-based advertising buying model by Google and there are some strict guidelines must adhere to for the advertisers. Some excerpts from an article of Google:

Ad Length and Time Use:

* Ad length cannot exceed 30 seconds.
* Ad cannot contain lengths of silence. The ad content must take up the full length of the ad.
* One company may promote multiple products during an ad spot, but multiple businesses can not advertise within the same ad spot (i.e. no time segmentation).

Sound Volume and Quality:

* Audio must be encoded at volume less than or equal to +4 dB.
* Your sound quality must be clear and words must be understandable.

No Non-Commercial Ads:

* Ads must advertise a product or service. We do not allow ads that are not commercial in nature.

To know further of the editorial guidelines for this audio ads, you can click here for the complete guidelines.

My view is the audio ads is not the playground for Google. It is not easy for Google to create a competitive advantage there, albeit the money Google has in hands. I believed the rivalry in radio advertising is also fierce, and the advertisers are typically sensitive to the role of Google in the traditional media and thus, when people don’t buy you, they don’t buy your services.

Update: I deleted the above sentence. I feel it’s not appropriate to describe the Google’s situation in marketing the service of audio ads. Sorry for any inconvenient caused.