Fake Businesses

Today I came across an AdWords ad for an automated ebook business model website. Their screenshot highlighting their Paypal account was:

• hosted on another site
• named powersell_paypal2.jpg
• did not show payments but showed withdrawals

Fake Business Statistics

A lot of (mis)marketing techniques are more covert though, through the use of

Scott Karp kicked off the new year with a good post called Five Guiding Principles For The Transformation Of Media Companies.

It’s a good post that needs to be read by every executive at major media companies today, and in many ways a lot of it seems like common sense to those who have been watching the transformation occur and understand what’s going on.

Specifically though I wanted to address Scott’s final principle:

The Wall Street Journal would have to increase traffic to their site by 12x to make up for the lost subscription revenue. WSJ.com is going from paid subscriptions to free online access.

A report from Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang made the prediction based on advertising rates for banner ads.

There were two interesting things–among many–that I learned from attending Leo Laporte and Justine Ezarik’s session at BlogWorld.

First, from Justine, I discovered a new video player from Viddler that has the cool feature of allowing you to tag and comment on segments of a video.

Okay people, enough is enough.  I can’t go through a day anymore without reading some article or other about how Google has been seduced by the power of the dark side.  It’s debunking time. 

AdWords introduced a new bidding option called "preferred cost bidding," an alternative to setting a maximum cost-per-click (CPC). In essence, for the advertiser with less time and/or fewer resources, the option puts AdWords management on Google’s shoulders.

If they want to reach the right person with the right message at the right time, 2008 presidential candidates should consider site behavioral retargeting. Think of it as continuous online rehandshaking.

Google has agreed to acquire Adscape, a company that puts ads inside of video games, for $23 million. Google had missed out on Massive, a company Microsoft picked up for $200-400 million about a year ago, and is going to have to settle for the much smaller Adscape, which it will have to build into a bigger player. Judging by Google’s great success with dMarc, I’d assume nothing at this point.

Darren Rowse points to a post by John Chow that reveals details of an ad network that Google uses for Fortune 1000 companies.

Site publishers with questions about how CPC and CPM advertising work will benefit from Google’s clarifications on the two ad formats.

A site in Belarus looks like the Google homepage displaying advertising in Belarusian, but the site is not owned by Google.

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas may feature an entrant in the new gadget arena with a big G on the side of the box; we’re guessing CPM ads will be a feature in the Google Box too.

Apparently, CPM rates aren’t what they used to be, especially on crap sites. To recap: Google came out with the new Site Targeting content targeting option, allowing advertisers to show ads on specific sites.

Search engine-based PPC advertising is probably the hottest technique of advertising in the marketing available, largely because it is the most employed method on the Internet. With an estimated 40% of online advertising revenue being spent on search engine ad, the numbers bear this out.

In the coming weeks, Google will be rolling out a significant change to the content targeting side of its AdWords program. These changes do not affect “search” ads on Google and other search network partners.