Friday, July 27, 2012

Google Plus Ramping Up

Image representing Google Buzz as depicted in ...
Image via CrunchBase
They tried with Buzz, they made an attempt with Wave. Finally they nailed it with Google Plus. So much so that I think Facebook should go into search. Imagine a search engine that only delivers you search results from pages and sites liked by your friends, and friends of friends.

Google+ traffic soars: 66 percent increase in nine months
110.7 million international visitors in June. In the US, traffic increased from 15.2 million to 27.7 million visitors over the same period
These numbers are going to get better. And I expect Google to keep enriching the product.
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The Olympics: On YouTube

English: 1985 International Olympic Committee ...
English: 1985 International Olympic Committee postage stamp of the German Democratic Republic (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
For a guy who has never owned a television, YouTube will do the trick.

London 2012
NBCOlympics.com

Streaming the Olympics: How YouTube and NBC do it
3,500 hours of live coverage from the event on the web and through native apps .... A partnership with the IOC put YouTube in charge of the online video feeds for 64 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, including India, Singapore, Kenya, Ghana and Malaysia. ...... “We are using the backbone of a pretty scalable video delivery network”
The Olympic Games are quite a celebration of humanity. I want the next World Cup on YouTube as well, live as well as archived. .
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Anand Shimpi

12 million unique visitors per month is a lot.

Far from Silicon Valley, tech industry finds an oracle
His website, AnandTech.com ..... At age 30, Shimpi is courted by technology executives and followed by Wall Street analysts keen to hear his well-informed product views. He briefs Intel executives, dines with Asian PC executives and commands a loyal following of tech enthusiasts, with AnandTech.com drawing 12 million unique visitors per month. ...... His workbench at his home in Raleigh is cluttered with high-end storage drives, laptops and recently released tablets, one of them playing a Harry Potter movie in an endless loop. A storage room is filled with hundreds of other products shipped to him over the years, and he says UPS drops more gear off almost every day. ..... benchmark reviews, focusing strictly on performance data ..... Shimpi's data, painstakingly collected using proprietary tests he has developed over the years. .... "We have known Anand for a long time," Jonney Shih, chairman of the big Taiwanese computer-maker Asus .... the chips, touch screens and batteries in the latest tablets and smarpthones ...... a large, specialized audience of cutting edge techies ...... The Harry Potter movie playing over and over on a Google Nexus 7 tablet was part of a test to document its battery life. ..... carries out measurements several times for each device, with the results feeding spreadsheets with thousands of data points ..... Chip executives .. ship them samples of their new products, often ahead of their release ...... frequent travels .... standard tests established over a decade ago .... Soon after his start in high school building PCs for students and faculty at Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh, where his father taught computer science, Shimpi created a website and started writing about components. He quickly gained a following with a rapidly growing niche of PC enthusiasts. .... deliberately maintains a distance between his personal life and the tech world, even if that means frequent, long flights to Silicon Valley to visit chip execs. .... He takes phone calls from investors who pay him for his advice and spends more and more time hunkered down with design engineers. But Shimpi says his main focus will remain AnandTech's readers - the sort of tech fans who spend hours reading up on new products before deciding which to buy.


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Facebook At $25: This Is Not A Glitch

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
Despite hitting its earning projections, Facebook stock falls to a new low at $25
UPDATE: Currently, the stock sits at $24.43, down 9% in after hours trading.
LinkedIn's earnings have doubled every quarter since it went IPO, and so its lofty valuation has held ground. Facebook's IPO was a nosedive, and part of it was blamed on some kind of a technical glitch, but that could not have been the full story.

For the size of its user base Facebook has lukewarm revenues, and there are no plans/signs of robust growth there. The revenue trajectory feels like a plateau, and hence the hammering.

This is what I said on May 23.

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More From AdSense

Image representing Google Custom Search as dep...
Image via CrunchBase
Simple Changes Doubled My Adsense Revenue
the 336 x 280 Large Rectangle is the most effective Adsense unit. It typically offers four ads and they are likely to be very related to the topic based on the position between the post title and body ..... Placing your Adsense unit above the fold is imperative for success. This makes sense to me for one reason. ..... The concept is really simple; make one large, well positioned ad do all the work. This will make your page look cleaner and it’s likely to improve your revenue immediately.
Split Testing: How To Increase Your Adsense Earnings 94% Overnight
Maybe the left aligned ad looks more like it’s actual content instead of an ad. .... the text ads were paying more per click. .... Winner: text ads
Improving your Adsense Revenue – An In Depth Guide
In the last year, over half of the Adsense income I have received has not come from new ads or new traffic, it has been from tweaking my current ad placements. ..... Everyone knows that exercise is good for them, but it doesn’t mean they are actually doing it...... The difference between making more money and not making more money is actually doing things. ..... Until you try both, you do not know what works best for your particular webpage. ..... Each webpage is different, some will do well with image ads, some will do well with text ads, some will do about the same. .... wider ad formats tend to outperform their taller counterparts, due to their reader-friendly format ...... bigger ads provide bigger results, but I have also found that sticking a big ad in a small place where it looks weird does not do well. ..... Ads above the fold tend to work well ..... Ads within the content tend to work well. ...... Above the fold did best as did ads within the content. ..... I think most people can probably increase their income significantly by just optimizing, even if they are having the same traffic levels. ...... Adsense for search, also known as Google custom search. It is the Adsense product that has made me the most money. It is not well understood and not widely used. When it is used, it is not used well. ..... The click through rate of Adsense for search is very often around 25 percent...... If there is one Adsense tool I recommend over all others, it is Adsense for search. ...... create a custom search engine that searched all the great resources you know of, and not include all the crappy ones.
AdSense tips
Find your keywords .... Improve your keywords
7 AdSense Tricks that Will Increase Your Income
You can use Spyfu.com to find high-paying keywords related to your niche. It will help you to display ads with high CPC. Therefore, you will get higher commission when people click on your ads. Finding high-paying keywords is important if you want to boost your AdSense revenue.
Google Custom Search with Adsense for Blogger or WordPress Blogs
[I have seen Adsense Search performing much better (in terms of CTR and revenue) after switching from the standand Adsense for Search to the more customizable Google Custom Search.]
How To Monetize Adsense For Search On Your Blog
Adsense for Search is another brilliant way to earn money from your Google Adsense Account. It’s implemented by putting an individually-coded search panel to your blog.
Top 9 Google AdSense Alternatives
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