Daily Tidbits: Make money off parked sites and go mobile with Visa

Anyone with an unused, parked site can now make some cash by using Google's new AdSense for Domains, the company said Friday.

"AdSense for domains allows publishers with undeveloped domains to help users by providing relevant information including ads, links and search results," Google said.

The company is opening AdSense for Domains up to "English-language AdSense publishers located in North America" first, but it will eventually expand the service to other regions. When that happens, the new program will also support other languages.

Credit card giant Visa said Friday it has launched its Visa Mobile Application, which has become the first financial app for Android-based mobile phones. According to the company, the app alerts users to account activity and provides them with special offers from merchants. Once received, those offers will work with the Android phone's GPS functionality to map where those offers can be redeemed. The app is available now in the Android App Store.

According to a survey conducted by research firm eROI, which asked 283 high school and college students about their online lives, 25 percent of respondents claim they signed up for their first e-mail address so they could shop online. A whopping 81 percent of respondents said they got their first e-mail address to communicate with family, and 52 percent said they did it to chat with friends. eROI also asked the students which e-mail service they preferred. Google won with 32 percent saying they use Gmail. Yahoo took the second spot with 19 percent adoption, followed closely by Microsoft's MSN with 18 percent.

ReadWriteWeb is reporting that Google has removed a slew of sections from its Chrome browser's end user license agreement. According to the report, the new agreement has removed Chrome's age restriction policy and its requirement for personal information. It also no longer bans automated access. Google has yet to comment on the changes.

Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts atThe Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

Google AdSense Improvises

By: Navneet Kaushal 


AdSense was blamed for showing political ads in a lot of websites! No one was happy with them. But now they are planning to improve AdFilter and Blocking Ads. 

According to the Official AdSense Blog, they will very soon improve the speed of the AdSense Ad filter and at the same time enhance the blocking abilities of the Ad Review Center.

We also received questions about why political ads are able to run on Google and AdSense sites. The Google advertising program is managed by a set of editorial policies that we have developed based on various factors, including user and customer experience. While Google or its executives and employees may express opinions about specific political issues and candidates, Google's advertising system does not favor one political position over another. Our network provides advertisers with a way to reach their audience, whether they are companies selling products or political campaigns promoting candidates or issues. Just as Google's advertising system does not favor one car manufacturer's ads over a competitor's in our auction, we also allow ads regardless of the particular political position they represent.

We'll also continue improving the Ad Review Center, giving you ways to block entire categories of ads in addition to individual ads -AdSense

These changes are expected to be implemented over the next couple weeks.

AdSense Ads In Google Finance

By: Aaron Wall 


Google added an ugly AdSense block to Google Finance. It looks poorly integrated and noisy. They didn't look to take a page out of Yahoo!'s book on this front. 

Yahoo!'s ads offer more in the lines of branding, and they also sell custom research reports (likely on a CPA model).

Anyone who thinks Google has fully tapped out its revenue potential needs to be reminded that Google and YouTube are leading downstream destinations from Google.

Did you know that when a company ranks #1 on a Google Map with 10 results and #1 in the organic search results that the organic result only gets 60% more traffic? But there are 10 links in the onebox...which means that as a whole they probably get more traffic than the top organically ranked site does, especially on smaller browsers.

One interesting fact is that the majority of the users who got to the site via the natural link had resolution above 1024-768 and the majority of users who visited via the Onebox result had resoultion of 1024-768 or under. This makes sense because the lower the resolution of the screen the more real estate the Onebox listing gets above the fold.

Many of these onebox and universal search destinations (Finance, maps/local, product search, real estate, movies, travel, video, lyrics, books) can be monetized at much higher rates than whatever AdSense is yielding, and Google sees all the AdWords data, so they can tackle any new vertical they want (employment? education? healthcare? finance? ) and compete based on under-monetizing themselves in the short term, aggressive launch-time public relations, and giving themselves free traffic from the search results.

Google will take a leadership position in new markets like voice and video chat and voice search.

As long as Google does not destroy their brand, punt on user privacy, raise anti-trust concerns, or lose a major copyright battle they have lots of upside left. Google defines the new digital economy.

Kyte Gets Google AdSense, Fresh New Mobile Sites

On Monday night video-broadcasting platform Kyte is launching several new ways to make money with its service. Included are two new ad servers from AdTech Helios IQ and Lightningcast, as well as a new option to pick up Google AdSense (for video) which includes pre-roll, graphic display ads, and endcap text ads. These join Kyte's internal ad manager, and help fill out any ad inventory depending on how popular your shows are.

It's worth noting all of this is still only for pre-recorded content, and as such can't be used for monetizing live streaming shows. I'm told this is something on Kyte's road map, which when implemented would give publishers a new way to pull in revenue from live broadcasts besides relying on ads outside of the Kyte player.

The new mobile pages (click to enlarge)

(Credit: Kyte.tv)

Alongside the new ad partners, Kyte is launching branded mobile pages that let artists or other content providers organize all their work into a single mobile-friendly page.

This is going live with two Interscope Records artists: Lady GaGa and theAll-American Rejects. Here users can watch content streams that are optimized for their device (3GP for Nokia users and QuickTime streams for iPhoners), and interact with other users like they'd do on the normal Kyte service. This includes live chat and an in-line comment system.

Mobile pages can be saved to your mobile device like you'd save a bookmark. In the iPhone's case it's nothing more than a home screen shortcut which brings you right to the artist page.

Channel owners are able to customize both the layout and the style of these mobile pages to their taste, as well as pick out any ad units that can go on the bottom or top of the page. For now it's a manual process that involves a little hand holding with Kyte staff, but in the future publishers will be able to use a simple dashboard tool to update and make changes on the fly.

While these changes may seem trivial to the casual user, providing additional ways to monetize mobile online video is a big deal. It's not quite there for live streaming, but Kyte's very close. In the meantime, the current system is set up to let publishers big and small add advertising that can be tacked on to all content--both old and new.