AOL has announced that its online advertising solution, Platform-A, will offer a guaranteed CPM to third party developers creating Bebo and Facebook applications. But the guarantee comes with a catch: it’s only good for the first three impressions for each unique U.S. visitor who visits an approved developer’s application.
Boasting one of the highest CPMs in the industry, AOL says the offer is part of WIDGNET™ publisher network launched earlier this year by Platform-A’s Advertising.com. WIDGNET brings advertisers and third party developers of widgets and social networking applications together.
“This announcement reinforces Platform-A’s commitment to helping developers generate revenue and monetize their Bebo and Facebook applications in the rapidly evolving social networking space. Advertiser interest in social networks is rising at a steady rate, and Platform-A is making an unprecedented flat-fee commitment to help application developers generate revenue and guarantee monetization of their applications,” said Dave Jacobs, Senior Vice President of Publisher Services, Platform-A Advertising.com Networks. “Platform-A views social networking applications as an area where we can add significant value by letting developers focus on expanding their install base, without worrying about monetization of applications.”
Earlier this year, AOL acquired Bebo for $850 million.

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Going where no man - or search engine - has gone before, Everyscape has launched an online mapping feature that allows people to go inside shops and restaurants.
Users can navigate through neighborhoods and tourist sites. A special icon next to a building invites users to enter and have a look around.
“While Google has focused their technology on building a better map, we wanted to do more and replicate the experience of actually being somewhere,” Everyscape chief executive Jim Schoonmaker told ABC News.
Everyscape employs independent contractors to operate specialized equipment. “Destination ambassadors” are assigned regions and are paid per mile to map. By getting locals involved, Schoonmaker hopes to “enable the world to build the world.”
On top of earning $10 for every street mile, destination ambassadors receive a commission whenever they convince a business to have its interiors photographed.
Joe Ryan, owner of the Press Box Sports Bar in Manhattan, was quickly sold on the idea when he was approached with an offer to lease his locale on the interactive map.
“It’s absolutely worth the price of the lease,” Ryan said. “We have a very nice private party room upstairs and whenever people call to see if they can have a party there, it was very hard for me to describe it. Now I just tell them to go to the site, and they can take a look around. It’s a big help.”
Everyscape has secured $7 million in investment from venture capital firms. Some experts say to cut into Google’s market, the company […] Read more »

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Matt Cutts is addressing the ever-present topic of spam again, only this time it’s on the Official Google Blog. Cutts wrote about coming across spam links in the search results. He says this doesn’t happen nearly as often as it used to, thanks to Google’s anti-spam metrics.
One of those metrics is data from search logs. Many have worried what Google does with the data collects, and Cutts assures that data such as IP and cookie information is used to help improve the search results.
“The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this–log data, IP addresses, and cookie information–makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.”
But Cutts is also aware that the war against spam continues on:
“If you think webspam is a solved problem, think again. Last year Google faced a rash of webspam on Chinese domains in our index. Some spammers were purchasing large amounts of cheap .cn domains and stuffing them with misspellings and porn phrases. Savvy users may remember reading a few blogs about it, but most regular users never even noticed. The reason that a typical searcher didn’t notice the odd results is that Google identified the .cn spam […] Read more »

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Over the last week I’ve run some Crazy Egg heat map tracking on two posts on Digital Photography School (both of which got to the front page of Digg and got a lot of traffic) that both highlight to me a very simple method of increasing the number of pages that people view when they visit your blog.
Let me illustrate with a screen capture of the heat map from my post - How to Avoid Camera Shake:

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Over the last two weeks I’ve been running a 10 part series here at ProBlogger on 10 ways that you can let your blog go and what you should do about them. The series is now complete with the following 10 methods to let your blog go.

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While the announcement of the Seth “Family Guy” McFarlane link to Google was not new, the way Google has announced it will distribute and monetize reflects a deeper reach for the online media behemoth. Google is going in to the content production space.

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A couple of weeks ago I had an email from Terry Ng from Kineda (a great fashion site) telling me about how they’d been using WordPress and bbPress together to create an innovative site. I asked Terry if she’d tell us what they’ve done and how they’ve done it. Here is her guest post on using bbPress and WordPress together.

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Today Yaro Starak from Entrepreneurs Journey and the Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program has written this post on Selling from your blog.
When I say the words “product launch” do you cringe and think of over-hyped Internet marketing product launches? Or maybe you have never been on the end of a barrage of emails sent out by countless affiliates during a big launch and to you a product launch is what it sounds like - creating and then selling a new product.
Whatever the case, more and more bloggers are realizing the potential of releasing a product from their blog as a way to make serious money. While a majority of bloggers continue to leverage advertising as the most significant source of revenue from their blog, there has definitely been a shift towards product creation as a sound blog monetization strategy.
Given successful blogging creates a fantastic platform for selling, it’s only natural as bloggers learn more about monetization that they consider releasing a product or series of products and use their blog as the launch pad.
Unfortunately many bloggers are not familiar with product launch principles - the marketing techniques you implement during a launch to increase sales - and as a result, experience less than stellar results.
Internet Marketing and Blogging
I’m a blogger immersed in the Internet marketing niche, which means I’m over exposed to the product launch process. I’ve been on the receiving end as a prospect for countless product launches, I’ve been an affiliate for big launches and conducted my own launches […] Read more »

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If you give Google a cookie it will probably want to store your search behavior and given the scope of its publishing network….

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Bill Slawski, of SEO by The Sea, has uncovered another patent filing. This time Yahoo is applying for a patent for meal search technology. Bill’s article gives a much better interpretation than I ever could and should be read.
The interesting parts include technology that ties photo recognition to meals and ingredients and places to buy either the meal or the ingredients to make them.
The details Bill gives shows the scope of what is planned and it definitely covers a lot of work for some of the Yahoo programmers in the near future.
With thinking outside the usual search box, Yahoo may have come across the best way to meet Google in the search arena. They are suggesting a whole new potential for search.
And yes I will have fried with that!

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