Worthy names changing hands privately

When you own a valuable domain name, the question of wether to use it for a given project, park it for future use, rent it to a third party or sell it eventually needs to be properly addressed.

Most domainers agree it’s best to launch a value-added and contextually-relevant web destination for every single domain name in their portfolio but with only 24h in a day, that might be hard to do with a more sizeable group of names.

So the next best option for busy domainers might be to use their domains as pay-per-click landers. DomainSponsor (for Google ads) and DotzUp (for Yahoo! ads) do a good job at that but it’s also possible to whip up your very own landing page. Like any kind of web design, it’s time consuming but if you do it right, the PPC revenues could be worth your while.

If landers aren’t bringing in enough money, you can always look to rent your domains to interested parties. For instance, any medical condition followed by a .com might be a worthy natural visitor generator for pharmaceutical companies. When such deals are inked, it’s usually for several years which bring you significant recurring revenues. And best of all, you remain the owner for the rented domain name!

In the last resort, domainers will look to sell their domain names. The most valuable ones stand to bring in the most revenue but from an emotional standpoint, they’re the hardest to part with.

Selling domain names you’ve owned for a while isn’t easy because evaluating the fair value can be tricky. Furthermore, some domains might become more valuable in the future, for all sorts of reasons so selling them early at a discounted price might sound good in the short term but prove to be a profoundly frustrating sell in the long term.

Newbie domainers like to evaluate past domain name transactions to put a price on their own but web sites such as DNJournal, DN Sale Price and Sold Names might not tell the whole story. They do a good job at keeping the score for publicly announced transactions but since most valuable domains change hand privately nowadays, it’s increasingly hard to know the real value “on the street” for domain names.

At the end of the day, many domainers simply go with their gut feeling to match a name with its fair price. Even if the price sounds right to the sellers’ ears, prospective buyers will always attempt to get the name for next to nothing, offering ridiculous amounts like 100$ or 1,000$ (depending on the name) and eventually settle closer to the fair price, which might be multiples higher than the initial offering.

Domainers with good negotiation skills, especially over the phone, will likely get more for their domains than those who attempt to hide and negotiate poorly. Domaining has become a business and selling names is just one more part of a bigger ensemble.

What smart domainers need to keep in mind is that once they sell a valuable domain, they might never have the money to buy it back as the new owner will likely develop it and therefore add significant value to it. As a rule of thumb, remember that if you sell a name, it’s because you -really- want to. There’s no “undo” in a domain name sale.

Finally, don’t be surprised if the buyer requests that you keep the transaction private, usually in exchange for a premium. That’s the way the most valuable domain name sales happen. It mainly has to do with rich companies not wanting to set precedents of paying top dollars for domains and then, having to pay even more for their next similar purchases. This logic might also extend to entire industries, like banking which is known to keep transaction details as private as possible.

Good luck with making the most of your domain name portfolio!

Tags: domain name monetization, make money with domains, selling domain names, sold domains, domain name sale, pay-per-click, ppc, monetization, landing pages, landers, parking pages, domainers, domaining, valuing domains, domain names worth, worthy domains

Details about the new extensions

The 26th of June, 2008 will probably be remembered as the day the ICANN, gathered in Paris, France, decided to allow for an unlimited number of domain name extensions to be created by registrars (not individuals).

Here’s what registrars need to create a new domain name extension, under the recently approved ICANN recommendation:

• A good idea for the extension (such as “.gaming” or anything else, really);
• Money, ranging from 150k$ to 500k$… or more;
• The networking resources to support the new extension’ management.

So that’s basically it — the ICANN will likely receive a considerable number of proposals by interested registrars, some of which might be industry leaders like Ebay looking to launch a .ebay for anything relating to online auctions. Such speculation might not last too long, though. The ICANN has said new domain name extensions might be approved as soon as early 2009 (there are talks about the second quarter of the year).

Technically, there will be a limited application period where any established entity from anywhere in the world can submit an application that will go through an evaluation process. It is already anticipated that there will be additional rounds relatively soon after the close of the first application round for those who will wait along the lines to see how the first round pans out.

Trademark lawyers might have a lot of work defending the established brands in these new extension spaces since they won’t be automatically reserved. There will, however, be an objection-based mechanism for trademark owners where their arguments for protection will be considered. Needless to say this will cost a lot in terms of time, energy and money.

The same kind of logic applies to offensive names that’ll be subject to an objection-based process based on public morality and order. This process will be conducted by an international arbitration body utilizing criteria drawing on provisions in a number of international treaties. The ICANN will not be the decision maker on these objections.

This proposal has been in the works for a while and as such, the ICANN has a multi-stakeholder policy development process that served as the foundation for the process design. It involved consultation with domain name industry, trade mark attorneys, the business sector, users, governments and technicians. There might be a few adjustments here and there, along the way but the basic idea of opening up the number of domain name extension is set to change the domaining landscape in still unforeseen ways.

The potential is huge for almost everybody. Those who play the new domain name game with the most flair stand to win the most. If you missed out on the big .com landrush back in 1995, 1996 and 1997, the launch of new domain name extensions in 2009 will probably be your second chance and nailing the hottest domains online, when they become available.

One might even say that the potential is downright exponential. Take the case of the already discussed extension for New York City dubbed .nyc, there will be people looking to register the word “tourism” in every popular language, followed by .nyc, such as tourism.nyc, tourisme.nyc and turismo.nyc, to name just a few.

All domainers should immediately make plans to profit from this new extension multiplication era. Hopefully, you’ll be part of those who come out on top when the dust settles!

Tags: icann, new extension recommendation, domain names, domains, extensions, dot anything, .nyc, new york city, paris, france, domaining, domainers, legal names, offensive names, trademarked names, branded names, trademark lawyers

Huge growth expected for new extensions

There nothing like bad debt to force non-profits, like the ICANN, into dubious decisions which are, in the end, motivated almost entirely by greed, whatever the risks to “the rest” of the business model.

The ICANN has announced its plans to greatly expand the domain name extension market, way beyond .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .name and such, to include just about anything a registrar is ready to pay between 150k$ to 500k$ for.

So we might assist to a giant IT business like IBM, for instance, paying the ICANN to establish a new domain name extension labeled “.ibm” which could then be resold to anyone interested in paying the yearly registration fee, which would be likely left entirely to the discretion of the registrar.

Imagine an online web where almost anything of any significance has its own domain name extension — it could get very confusing, very fast. As soon as early 2009, actually since that’s when the ICANN plans to fast track the approval for such extensions. The astute domainer should therefore understand that the ICANN needs lots of new money, fast.

Name extensions like .london, .melbourne, .islands, .vehicles, .loveable, .unbelievable and just about anything out there are expected to pop up faster than we can count them, changing the online landscape forever.

The ICANN believes in “choice and opportunity” as the two main lines of thought behind their move but the idea of letting registrars expand the domain name extension pool ad infinitum also holds great risks of overly diluting the current domain name extension momentum.

Individuals won’t be allowed to establish new domain name extensions as only companies with very deep pockets and the resources to operate such a service will be fast tracked through the approval process. Under these conditions, it’s obvious that Network Solutions and GoDaddy, to name only those, will be well positioned to launch a slew of domain name extensions.

Forget the principle of fairness in the creation of these extensions. The ICANN has decided to unilaterally favor the rich registrars because this, for all useful purposes, is a huge money grab for the folks at ICANN who will surely vote themselves a nice salary increase to cover for the added workload of managing this new mess. If university students want to study a case where a non-profit corporation ditches coherence in favor of sheer greed, this is it.

From a legal standpoint, if you have a brand that you need to protect in the digital realm, expect to be financially fleeced out by the seemingly never-ending multiplication of domain name extensions, in the years to come. Keep in mind that the ICANN has no “overall” rule that’ll protect your brand within all domain name extensions since every single registrar may rule over their extension as they please. So unless you want to be sending nasty cease and desist letters all the time, paying your lawyer premium fees to do so, you’ll probably end up buying out your brand name in all of these extensions — in both cases, the ICANN has setup a system where almost everybody has to become paranoid about protecting their brand.

Examples abound. Think of Apple Computer. They have their “apple.just-about-anything” brand established worldwide but what happens when .london pops up. They’ll probably want to buy apple.london. And then, what if 250 more popular european cities pop up. Apple will almost certainly want to buy apple.paris, apple.lyon, apple.rome (or apple.roma, for the locals) and if certain cities don’t see their extension purchased by such industry heavyweights, will they turn their back on them? For instance, if Apple chooses not to buy apple.prague, will the people living in Prague see this as an offensive gesture?

This is just one example among countless others that’ll make domaining a new, uncharted world of utter confusion, frustration and exploding costs.

Some domainers might get their hands on interesting domain names, like gamers.london or visiting.london but overall, there’s no guarantee these new extensions will draw natural visitors. The mainline .com will likely remain “king of the hill” for many years to come -but- seeing the failure of the much hyped .biz might send a chill down the back of those registrars who feel they can push any extension down potential domain owners’ throats.

It’s already expected that some of these new domain name extensions will be more attractive —and expensive— than others but if the ICANN allows for a seemingly uncontrolled expansion of the extension pool, it’ll almost certainly backfire and the internet, as a relatively healthy entity, could be hardly hit.

Let’s hope for the best with this latest ICANN move but at the same time, let’s also (discreetly) brace for a bumpy ride.

Tags: icann, new domain name extensions, new extensions, registrars, domain names, domains, domainers, domaining, rich registrars, expensive extensions, greed, internet, naming system, root dns, new names approval

Revisiting the CIRA’s TBR lists

If you had a very good “.ca” domain name, chances are you’d never let it go but life being what it is, stuff happens and as such, very good domain names pop up here and there in the CIRA’s wildly popular TBR list, every Wednesday.

TBR means “to be released” so when you spot a domain name in that list, you’re more than welcome to watch it be returned to the “available” domains on Wednesday, from 3 PM up to around 9 PM.

The trouble is, you may not be the only one looking to get your hands on the best domains, namely the shortest, those why match generic terms and those with special contextual value. Those “superstar domains” are being heavily fought over so you’re chance of registering it “manually” when it becomes available is non-existent — unless you can query the name every 1/60th of a second for hours on end.

So how do you get those “soon to be available” domain names with significant street value? You bid on them, just like everybody else. Bare Metal offers an excellent TBR monitoring service which will work for you to get the domain names you want. You only pay if they get the name on your behalf so pretty much anybody can “play the TBR game”, with Bare Metal.

Of course, if Bare Metal scores your domain name and more than one potential registrant has requested it (at Bare Metal, specifically), then if goes into an auction that can quickly bump up the price for a domain name in the tens of thousands.

As such, CIRA has allowed for Canadian registrars to offer the names they “catch” through auctions and although this system makes sense for the richer domainers, it’s a total nonsense for the average Canadian attemting to buy a relatively good “.ca” domain name — this is becoming a real problem as most of the very good names are being concentrated in the same hands, creating huge portfolios of “parked” names.

So while the CIRA presents the TBR lists as a fair way for Canadians to grab domains which aren’t required anymore by their previous owners, the reality of the TBR is more a matter of money than fairness.

If you intend to win at the TBR monitoring game (and it can happen, from time to time), you better keep in mind that the system is being predated by rich domainers who will likely have an unfair advantage of you, the average Canadian looking for a good name.

To make matters even trickier, a handful of very rich domainers also own their registrar licence so they can buy up a domain, try it for seven (7) days and if it performs well, they can keep it and if it doesn’t, they just file for a full refund and return it to be “released” again. Since these domainers (who also happen to be registrars) are free to check the performance of as many domains as they want, with this scheme, almost all good TBRed names are likely to be grabbed before the average Canadian even has a chance to get to them.

So the Canadian TBR system isn’t fair.

It’s a nice try but it’s profoundly broken in the sense that money will almost always win over “a fair chance for everyone”. But that shouldn’t stop you from monitoring TBR names, especially if you’re seasoned in a specialty niche, because even rich domainers may miss “niched names”, once in a while.

For instance, on this very day, the following names are scheduled to be released:

• achiever.ca
• artdigest.ca
• ato.ca
• biofruit.ca
• bruise.ca
• canclassified.ca
• ccanada.ca

Several more quality names, out the thousands being released, might turn out being excellent buys. You have to look at the list by yourself to locate those which relate with your areas of interest.

Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily need to grab the hottest domains because sometimes, a niche portfolio will do just fine to bring you that much closer to financial freedom.

Tags: cira, tbr, to be released, soon to be made available, domain names, domains, domainers, registrars, canada, dot ca, ca, dropped domains, expiring domain names, expired domains

Magento Commerce for your e-store

Are you aware that e-commerce sales will double, by 2012? If you are, will you be part of the lucky ones benefiting from it or will your business model be wiped out, by it?

Any smart merchant wants to be on the winning side but in the not-so-distant past, it’s been a bit hard to establish a credible e-commerce storefront since money, complexity and a general lack of flexibility were major issues.

Many prospective online merchants started with PayPal and had some level of success with it but the venerable service is, for all useful purposes, limited to the payment processing so it’s not a full blown e-commerce store. Then came the tryout of OSCommerce, the open source pioneer to establish a PHP & MySQL-based online store. It’s free, functional, extensible and can be dressed up very nicely but nevertheless, there seems to be missing a little something.

Meet Magento Commerce.

By all means, this is a surprising open source, PHP & MySQL, script — it looks like a million bucks with pull-down menus and all, offers an extensive number of core features and is supported by a huge community of e-commerce experts and fans.

This open source project has been evolving under the radar for many merchants and some are just discovering it and without any surprise, adopting it.

Here’s a short overview of what you can expect from Magento Commerce:

• Analytics and reporting
  • Integrated with Google Analytics
  • Admin dashboard for report overview
  • RSS feed for new order
  • Tax reporting
• Catalog browsing
  • Layered / faceted navigation for filtering of products
  • Product comparisons
  • Product reviews
  • Popular search terms cloud
• Catalog management
  • Inventory management with backordered items, minimum and maximum quantities
  • Batch import and export of catalog
  • Advanced pricing rules and support for special prices
  • Search results rewrites and redirects
  • RSS feed for low inventory alerts
• Product browsing
  • Multiple images per product
  • Product image zoom-in capability
  • Multi-tier pricing upsell
  • Add to wishlist
  • Send to a friend with email
• Customer accounts
  • Order status and history
  • Re-orders from account
  • Recently ordered items
  • Newsletter subscription management
  • Amazingly complete account dashboard
• Customer service
  • Contact Us form
  • Feature-rich customer accounts
  • Customizable order emails
  • Create and edit orders from the admin panel
• Order management
  • View, edit, create and fulfill orders from admin panel
  • Print invoices and packing slips
  • Create re-orders for customers from administration panel
• Shipping
  • Integrated for real-time shipping rates from UPS, UPS XML (account rates), FedEx (account rates), USPS and DHL
  • Shipping to multiple addresses in one order
  • On-site order tracking from customer accounts
  • Table rates for weight and destination
  • Table rates for product sub-totals and destination
  • Table rates for number of items and destination
• Checkout
  • One-page checkout
  • SSL security support for orders on both front-end and back-end
  • Option to create account at beginning of checkout
  • Accept gift messages per order and per item
  • Saved Shopping Carts with configurable expiration time
• Payment
  • Configurable to authorize and charge, or authorize only and charge on creation of invoices
  • Integrated with multiple PayPal gateways
  • Saved Credit Card method for offline payments
  • Accept Checks/Money Orders
  • Accept Purchase Orders
• Search engine optimization
  • 100% Search Engine Friendly
  • Google Site Map
  • URL Rewrites give full control of URL’s
  • Meta-information for products and categories
  • Auto-generated popular search terms page
• International support
  • Multi-lingual
  • Support for multiple currencies
  • Tax rate support
  • Localization
• Marketing promotion and tools
  • Flexible coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products and categories
  • Catalog promotional pricing by percentage or fixed amount with ability to restrict to stores, categories and products
  • Landing page tool for campaigns
  • Up-sells in shopping cart
  • Cross-sells on product pages
  • Polls and newsletter management
• Site management
  • Control multiple websites and stores from one administration panel with ability to share as much or as little information as needed
  • Administration permission system roles and users
  • One-click upgrades
  • Content management system (CMS) for informational pages

Impressive, right?

In the unlikely event this isn’t enough to convince you Magento Commerce is ready to propel even the smallest shops into the big leagues, take their demo store for a spin and see for yourself how professional it all looks.

The current roadmap has a lot more “in store” for you, though. How about banner management, bundles, gift registries, customer balances, RMA support, full support for backorders, cost management, warranties, subscription management, required items, recommended items, gift wrap option, limited catalog access per user group, membership management and further performance enhacements? Well, that’s all being phased into the upcoming versions of Magento Commerce so with the one-click upgrade process, the online merchants using this open source script to sell their products and / or services will effortlessly be up-to-speed with the finest e-commerce sites out there.

Wether you plan to sell just a few things or a whole boat load of them, Magento Commerce should be one of the scripted alternatives you evaluate. Be ready to work hard setting up your e-shop but in the end, if you work your magic right, the final result for your customers should help you ring lots of sales.

Tags: magento, magento commerce, e-commerce, e-sales, e-store, e-shop, online shop, online store, paypal, oscommerce, php commerce, mysql commerce, merchants, web store, web storefronts

Firefox 3 rocks the web

Upgrading your web browser should be a cause for celebration, this time around.

Firefox 3 comes with around 14,000 fixes, adjustments and upgrades but if you’re moving up from Firefox 2, you’ll enjoy a very smooth transition and here’s a quick overview of what’s in store for you with this amazing new upgrade.

• Password Manager - Remember site passwords without ever seeing a pop-up.
• One-Click Bookmarking - Bookmark, search and organize Web sites quickly and easily.
• Improved Performance - View Web pages faster, using less of your computer’s memory.
• Smart Location Bar - Find the sites you love in seconds — enter a term for instant matches that make sense.
• Instant Web Site ID - Avoid online scams, unsafe transactions and forgeries with simple site identity.
• Full Zoom - See any part of a Web page, up close and readable, in seconds.
• Platform-Native Look & Feel - Browse with a Firefox that’s integrated into your computer’s operating system.

Even if that’s already worthy of a primary digit upgrade, 3, in this case, there’s more.

Consider the very web 2.0-like ability to add tags to bookmarks, just like in blogs and wikis. This means that above and beyond the usual bookmark categories you create and manage, the tags can add a significant level of precision regarding the content available in your bookmarked pages.

Oh! And you can bookmark links with one click by clicking on the little blue star nested in the smart location bar that’ll make you navigation easier than ever by suggesting web sites you may want to visit, as you type the name in the location field, live.

Furthermore, Firefox 3 protects you from viruses, worms, trojan horses and spyware. Not bad for a browser — Microsoft should take notes! Attack sites will have a much harder time defrauding ususpecting web users now that Firefox 3 integrates these anti-malware features. In other words, in your clueless aunt Mimi still finds herself being the victim of fraudsters, go to her place and install Firefox 3 on her machine so her misery will stop, once and for all.

There would be many more features to review and talk about but the real story with Firefox 3 is how much more advanced it is, compared to the current market leader, Internet Explorer 6. Even if Microsoft acts tough and maintain that their browser is still number one, the online crowd can move quickly and the place they would like go is deep into Mozilla territory, thanks to Firefox 3.

To this day, 19,882,507 web users have downloaded Firefox 3 and that number is going up, all the time.

Tags: firefox 3, mozilla, web browser, web page navigation, ie6, microsoft, open source, free software, anti-malware, best browser

Is Internet2 a modern day Trojan Horse?

Do you remember the Trojan Horse war tactic?

It’s pretty straightforward. You provide a gift to your ennemy who doesn’t suspect it’s a poisoned one to be rejected outright. As the gift is naively accepted, the deception can occur much more easily than if it had to come down to an all-encompassing war.

Have you ever wondered if such a Trojan Horse is being built, for use against the internet as we know it today?

Think about it.

The telco oligarchy is desperate to jack up the connectivity prices, slash the transfer allowances and basically monitor every user to the point where privacy is just a distant souvenir. Add many Fortune 500 transnationals who lust on the prospect on keeping over a billion daily net users captive to their products and services instead of opening up the commercial possibilities to everyone, therefore fostering unlimited competition — and you start to see what’s in store for us, internet users, in the not-so-distant future.

The current internet has done more to redistribute wealth than any other modern media because its expansion is driven by anyone adding their knowledge, intelligence and resources to the ever-expanding cloud that makes up the most complete information source (and commercial marketplace) that mankind has ever built.

In other words, the current internet is working so well that the biggest companies are feeling the heat from all sides — and they don’t like it, however positively their PR departments try to spin it for the general public.

For instance, do you think major US-based soap manufacturers like it when web users, of all walks of life, start buying African soap (which is much better for their health, anyway) instead of mindlessly purchasing “the ususal brands”? Of course not! It’s driving them mad and they’re desperate to find a way to shift people into a more tightly managed realm.

Nobody knows, for sure, what the world elite is doing to lure us into a more manageable network but it seems many observers believe Internet2, the much celebrated academic network, could be just that.

One has to read through the countless pages of documentation published by the Internet2 group to see just how conveniently vague their positions are. It’s also very hard to reconcile their approach of only providing faster networks to academic researchers while not openly sharing these alleged advances with everyone else — why keep the whole world at bay, like that?

Established in 1996, Internet2 is a US-based, not-for-profit, networking consortium.

This consortium comprises more than 200 US universities that cooperate with 70 leading corporations, 45 government agencies, labs and other institutions of higher learning. There are also 50 international partner organizations thrown into the mix, for good measure.

So the whole Internet2 consortium is akin to an elite club where participation is heavily regulated.

One could observe that while internet 1.0, the current network, resembles a modern-day democracy, the Internet2 consortium looks like a gated community. Perhaps at some point, Internet2 will allow for more digital settlers to establish their new home within their gated community (proverbially speaking, of course) but is that going to be a losing proposition for those who don’t control this heavily tariffed, closed and monitored place?

You see, a gated community is like a reverse-prison in the sense that it’s designed for outsiders to have a hard time getting in but in the end, it’s still a prison. Internet2 has all the traits of a gated community and that’s why joining it is risky business because while others can’t get in, your own freedom might someday be taken away from you because some Board of Trustees thinks you’re pushing the limits of the community a bit too far.

In this light, if the Internet2 consortium comes to be presented as a “general public alternative” to access the internet, it could be considered the ultimate Trojan Horse that’ll end up costing a lot more to us all, mere mortals using the web, while making way with the freedoms we currently enjoy, online.

At a time when oligopolistic telcos have kept from properly upgrading the current network infrastructure to slowly strangle the traffic flows to a crawl in order, among other things, to facilitate the upcoming switch to some other network (maybe Internet2) for the general public, it’s important to discuss these kinds of issues because there might never be another opportunity, in our short life, to recreate another internet as free, democratic and open as this one.

While many arguments put forward here are supported by leading industry observers, some of them remain speculative. This being said, web users should pressure telcos into investing more to upgrade the current network while lifting the unacceptable limitations that are being gradually implemented.

If we don’t protect our current internet infrastructure from Trojan Horses, who will?

Tags: internet2, internet 2.0, internet 1.0, current internet, networking, fast academic networks, universities, academia, industry, governements, us-based, trojan horse, limitations, oligarchy, telcos, democratic network, speculation, war tactics

New features in AdSense for search

Over time, the Google Adsense service has grown into the biggest online advertising service in the world and this isn’t stopping them from innovating, which is all for the best.

The latest round of innovation is making the AdSense for search service even more flexible for the publishers while delivering a more satisfying search results experience for the users.

For those who are not yet too familiar with the AdSense for search service, it’s the “keyword search box” where users are free to enter any query they like, from within the web publisher’s site. It’s a great feature especially since the pay-per-click ads appearing on a given web page may not cover all that a user may be looking for.

As a web publisher, here’s a quick overview of what new tricks AdSense for search can do for you:

• Selection of the ad location — You can now decide where to place the ads on the search results page (displayed from Google’s own servers). Choose top, bottom or right side of each page, according to your preferences;
• Refining searches with keywords — Depending on the context, search terms can have different meanings but now, you can tune your search results and ads to what your users are interested in;
• Improved indexing of your pages — Google indexing technology has recently been improved so AdSense for search will now index even more pages of your site (as long as they can be crawled) so your users will see more results from them, in the AdSense for search results;
• Site Search — If you’re concerned about the users leaving your site through “web search”, you can now choose to provide just “site search” so your users can find what they’re looking… in -your- site. You can even host the search results on your pages so your users won’t leave your site when they perform a search;
• Vertical Search — You may also allow your users to search across multiple sites. Searches may therefore be performed in your “network of sites” or other related sites that you think your users might find useful.

Those who already have their Google AdSense for publishers account set up can get started right away with these new features, by selecting the “AdSense Setup” tab and then choosing “AdSense for search” as the desired product.

Just like with regular PPC ads and referral units, your ad settings will be saved within your account when you create a new search engine. You can then go back at a later time and instantly make any updates that you like to your search settings.

Once you’ve set up your search box, you may wish to explore more advanced features such as site exclusion, labels and collaboration which may both help your users find what they’re looking for while boosting your revenues by laser targeting the returned search results.

Now that you’re “in the know”, have fun with these new AdSense for search features!

Tags: google adsense, adsense for search, search results, keyword search, customization, features, targeting, pay-per-click, ppc, web publishers, web publishing, monetization, make money with adsense

Are social networks useful?

At a time when everybody can easily set up a full blown blog (think WordPress), including revenue generating advertising, why would so many people be wasting their time posting quality content in (other people’s) social networks?

If you look at the member count at MySpace, Gather, Orkut, Facebook and Hi5, to name only those, it’s clear that being there has a lot to do with connecting family, friends and co-workers. While a minority of members actually take the time to post large amounts of content (of varying usefulness), most people just click around rather aimlessly — akin to wasting time in the local mall, on a rainy day.

So it seems that while a proverbial handful of people are there to obtain some form of visibility for their content, the bulk of these social network members are pretty clueless about “what else” they could be doing, other than surfing away their free time.

In today’s most popular networks, there’s a lot to do such as dressing up the profile, posting articles, images, videos, comments (in response to other people’s articles, blog-style), adding up friends and joining groups. So why are people so uninterested by all these features? It could be many things but it basically comes down to each member’s perception of the service. Said differently, to participate, the member has to find that posting content in a social network is useful… for him or her!

Social networks are allegedly bringing in large amounts of advertising money (pay-per-click or otherwise) for their owners but the members are always treated as “those who freely provide the content” so that pretty much insures that they’ll never get rich “networking” in other people’s (rather tightly controlled) web properties.

Maybe some musical artists on MySpace Music will convince a few more fans to listen to their music along the way but for most artists, it’s not the fastest route to financial independance. Similarly, some web marketers have tried peddling all sorts of things to all sorts of crowds, namely through groups, although eventually, they’re caught “abusing” the social network and either get their account downgraded or banned.

So we’re down to seeing social networks as big (and sometimes huge), ongoing, garden cocktail parties where everyone’s basically free to join but more likely uninterested enough to eventually forget they even have a working membership. Social networks therefore try to muster members’ attention with special events, promotions and features. It seems to be having very uneven levels of success, depending on the perceived value for the user, if any.

The Frankenstein-like privacy policy nightmares related to these social networks will be the main theme for an upcoming article but suffice it to say that trusting these particular “third-party” web services with information you hold dear, like your entire identity, might turn out to be a very, very bad idea.

So should bloggers also have their “spin marketing” account in each of these social networks to generate theme-specific unique visits to their blogs? It depends. If no other alternative exists, social networks might be better than nothing but that’s about it. For instance, a blogger’s not likely to hit Google‘s top search spot because he cross-posted lead-generating content in his MySpace or Orkut account. It might help (over the very long run) but it’s not going to make a significant impact.

It’s a gradual process, really.

Most people get sucked into these networks to “become (online) friends” to their offline counterparts. Once in a while, they get a message from their friends, through the social network. At this point, most people wonder if the whole social networking thing is really worth it but deleting their account is made so ridiculously difficult (or tricky) that they just keep it as is until things hopefully become less entangled.

So even though social networks are said to be handling hundreds of millions of member profiles, one has to wonder if the members are really getting a valuable payoff, at their end of the deal. After all, (1) they’re actively or passively censored, (2) they can’t (legally) make any money with (pay-per-click) advertising, (3) they instantly lose full property of their content the moment they post it and (4) in the case their profile is abused, they’re legally bound by contract to fully indemnify the social network operator — even if those operators happen to be the culprits!

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg because in most networks, members have very little control over what other members say about them and that could lead down a very slippery slope, online and off.

So at this point, most members might be scratching their heads as to why they’re sticking with these rather insidious networking platforms anyway.

If you’re one of these members, you’re not alone since a lot of people are now backing away from freely giving away their personal information and going back to creating their very own blog in why they control all aspects of the content while remaining the owners of what they create… and getting a bit richer (with PPC ads), in the process.

While most people will continue to use one form or another of social networks, chances are that until the operators come clean, from legal and ethical standpoints, more and more people will see more use in staying away from these networks than joining them.

After all, giving away -everything- you think up can’t be that useful for you although, in the global scheme of things, it’ll make total strangers (the social network owners) that much richer!

Tags: social networks, usefulness, networking, people, myspace, gather, orkut, facebook, hi5, legal, ethical