adsense

Is Bidvertiser a good alternative to Google Adsense?

For the past 3 years, our online income came primarily from Google Adsense. But with so many not-so-good things going on with both Google and its Adsense program — PageRank penalties, new rules regarding ad units, and declining Adsense earnings, to name just a few — we thought now might be a good time to try other Adsense alternatives.

There are a lot of Adsense competitors around such as Yahoo! Publisher Network, AdBrite, and Bidvertiser. In our first attempt searching for a good Adsense alternative, we tried out Bidvertiser.

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Google’s April Fool’s joke: Adsense for Conversations

Google does have a funny side and it shows every year in its collection of April Fool’s Day hoaxes.

In the past, it offered TISP, a free broadband service that would make use of a standard toilet and sewage lines to provide free Internet connectivity.

It also launched Google Romance, an online dating service which uses “Soulmate Search” to get back search results that could, in theory, include the love of one’s life.

Google started venturing into food and beverage too by introducing Google Gulp, a line of “smart drinks” designed to maximize people’s surfing efficiency by making them more intelligent, and less thirsty.

Adsense for Conversations

This year, Google took the contextual advertising power of Adsense further by offering Adsense for Conversations.

Adsense for what? That’s Adsense for real and actual conversations, where people talking will “begin displaying ads that are relevant to the topics you’re discussing — in an unobtrusive screen above your head.” (see image)

How does it work? Read on.

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How to receive Adsense earnings via Western Union

We reported a few weeks ago that starting November 2007, Google Adsense publishers can receive their earnings through the Western Union Quick Cash option.

This week I will try to encash my Adsense earnings using Western Union (WU) and will report my experience here.

Here’s a guide for those opting to use the WU payout method.

How to pick up a Western Union Quick Cash payment

1. Locate a Western Union agent that offers the Quick Cash service from the site .

2. Prepare the following before visiting the WU branch.

  • The amount of your payment
  • The Money Transfer Control Number (MTCN) for this payment
  • Your government issued ID (Passport, Driver’s License, TIN ID, SSS ID, etc)
  • Sender’s information:

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
USA

The payment amount and MTCN can be found by clicking on the ‘details’ link next to the Payment Issued line on My Account > Payment History in your Google Adsense account (see screenshot).

3. Go to the WU agent, show them the information in #2, and inform them you would like to pick up a Quick Cash payment.

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WidgetBucks is banned in Google and they know why

Google is at war again.

Yesterday, it slapped a lot of websites with a PageRank (PR) downgrade to send a signal that it hates paid text link ads. Now, it has been discovered that Google is also against WidgetBucks, a recently launched widget advertising program, apparently because of hidden text links.

Go to Google.com and try searching for “WidgetBucks” or “widgetbucks.com”. Chances are you won’t see its official site (www.widgetbucks.com) on the first page of the results. In fact, you won’t see it even on the next 10 pages.

Why?

Because Google has banned the site from appearing in the search results.

But why?

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