Month: October 2007

David Harper

Let's Meet Up at MobileCamps in LA, SF, or NY.

MobileCamps bring together mobile enthusiasts, explorers and professionals to share the current state and their visions for the future direction of mobility. Nokia Nseries is sponsoring. I’ll be at all three so…

…if you would like to meet up this would be a great opportunity. Email me if you like.

Follow the links below for venue and RSVP information.

October 28th
MobileCampLA
(Free In-N-Out Burgers will be served for lunch from 11:30-1!)

November 3rd
MobileCampSF

November 10th
MobileCampNYC2

Cheers,
David Harper
Founder, Winksite

David Harper

On Making Bank with Admob

Re: AdSense for Mobile: Google has competition, I’m making bank with AdMob

Russell writes:
“Wow! A few days ago I noticed my earnings from Google’s mobile ads were starting to taper off around $30 a day, so I decided to flip the switch and start showing AdMob ads again so I could compare what the results would be like with my recently increased traffic. I literally changed one line of code, and everywhere where I had been previously showing Google AdSense, I began showing AdMob ads. POW! I more than doubled my income per day – not only is the eCPM higher in general, but the click through rate is 7%…, which is crazy high. I’m not sure what exactly the difference is – but obviously Mowser users like AdMob ads better – either what they’re advertising, the targeting, how they’re formatted or something.”

Winksite’s take…
We were testing ads from both networks using Winksite’s advertising preferences (publishers can switch between displaying Google & AdMob ads with one click.) After staring at a great number of these ads we observed the following:

Google AdSense Ads

  • All text ads are separated from page content with horizontal lines before and after the ad.
  • All text ads show a URL after the ad copy.
  • All text ads display an “Ads by Google” tag.

AdMob Ads

  • WML-based text ads show [AD] at the beginning of each ad.
  • iPhone-based text ads shows “Ads by Admob”. Ad is placed within a box with curved corners.
  • XHTML-based text ads ONLY display ad copy. No defining box or lines. No “Ads by Admob” tagline.

Now unless I misread AdMob’s recently released Mobile Metrics Report it appears a good number of AdMob’s impressions are served to phones that display the XHTML-based text ads (based on Admob’s worldwide and regional “Top Ten Handset Models” list.) As these ads can be misinterpreted as a link on the page (unlike the other flavor ads across Google and Admob) it’s likely that this could account for the performance Russell is referring to above. I don’t know if this is intentional by design or an oversight. I also don’t know enough to comment on the differences as to what each network is advertising or how effective their targeting is. What I do know is that AdMob provides publishers with granular approval of the ads to be displayed. Nice.

(Disclaimer: We’re big fans of publisher-focused services.)

— David Harper

David Harper

How to Set Up Your Winksite Mobile Site & Community with Google AdSense or Admob Mobile Advertising.

Re: Winksite – Monetize Your Mobile Site with Advertising from Google AdSense or Admob.

GOOGLE: Setting Up Your Mobile Site to Display Ads From Google AdSense

Set-up at Google AdSense

  1. Log into Google AdSense ID at http://www.google.com/adsense and create an account if you do not already have one (can take 1-2 days after submitting your application to Google.)
  2. Click the ‘My Account’ tab near the top.
  3. Scroll down to the bottom of the ‘Account Settings’ page to the ‘Property Information’ section.
  4. Your Google AdSense ID is the alphanumeric code next to ‘AdSense for Mobile’ and typically starts with: ca-mb-pub-

Set-up at Winksite

  1. Enter the Google AdSense into your mobile site’s “Advertising Preferences” page accessible from your Account “Dashboard” or “Edit Site” Main Menu (see Monetize Your Site | Advertising Preferences).
  2. Select “Display Google AdSense Ads”
  3. Select ad position and placement on your site templates/pages.
  4. Hit the “Save” button at the bottom of the set-up form.

ADMOB: Setting Up Your Mobile Site to Display Ads From Admob

Set-up at AdMob

  1. Log into AdMob at http://www.admob.com and create an account if you do not already have one.
  2. Click the ‘My Sites’ tab near the top.
  3. If you have not set up a site for use with AdMob, click ‘Add Site’ and use the address of your site which is: http://winksite.com/username/foldername
  4. On the ‘Manage My Sites’ page, the alphanumeric AdMob Site ID is displayed.

Set-up at Winksite

  1. Enter the AdMob Site ID into your mobile site’s “Advertising Preferences” page accessible from your Account “Dashboard” or “Edit Site” Main Menu (see Monetize Your Site | Advertising Preferences).
  2. Select “Display AdMob Ads”
  3. Select ad position and placement on your site templates/pages.
  4. Hit the “Save” button at the bottom of the set-up form.

Note: For either Ad Network option you do not need to insert any code on your Winksite mobile site. You ONLY need your Google AdSense ID or your AdMob Site ID.

David Harper

Winksite – Monetize Your Mobile Site with Advertising from Google AdSense or Admob.

Winksite drives a lot of mobile pages views. Over the years, most every ad network on the planet has approached Winksite about monetizing our mobile traffic. We always played with the idea of signing up, but we don’t view Winksite’s traffic as “ours” alone. As we see it, publishers who trust their content and communities to Winksite’s care provide Winksite with great value just by showing up. The traffic and impressions are mostly there because of the efforts of our 25 thousand publishers and the audience they attract.

We can’t unilaterally profit from that traffic like the other feed mobilizers and site building tools. They have it wrong and are ripping off the publishers. At best their share of the revenue share is too high — at worst — they take it all.

It took a while for us to figure out the obvious — make it drop dead simple for a publisher to insert either Google Mobile AdSense or AdMobs ads into their mobilized feeds, mobile Websites, and communities at Winksite — and take NO revenue share.

All a publisher needs do is:

  1. Register and create a mobile site.
  2. Enter their Google AdSense ID or AdMob Site ID.
  3. Select ad position and placement on their site templates.

What would you like next?

David Harper

Tutorials for Creating a Mobile Website at Winksite

Thank you Nik for putting together some great tutorials on how to use Winksite.

Creating a mobile phone website by Nik Peachey

Here’s a movie showing what my site should look like on a mobile phone.
Winksite demo

Here’s another movie showing how to create your own site
Tutorial movie 1

An this movie shows how you edit and change the site
Tutorial movie 2

You can try the live site on your PC
Interact with the live Winksite

Sign Up to build your mobile Website.

David Harper

Integral by the Pet Shop Boys – QR Codes & Campaigning Against the Erosion of Our Personal Freedom

For all of you who dig QR Codes this is for you.
(Scott forgive me.)

Watch the Pet Shop Boys Video in Wide Format: http://www.petshopboys.co.uk/splash.html

The video sets out to amplify the message of the song. The piece was conceived and created by The Rumpus Room as a multi platform project, having versions of the film for small hand held devices as well as large resolution screens. It is both a traditional piece of film and an interactive portal to online information and campaigns.

The video has over 100 QR Codes that are subliminal when watched in real time, but accessible to interact with if you navigate through the film using time controllers. The QR Code links in the video are a catalogue of online content about issues of civil liberties, as well as links that will give you the opportunity to get involved in campaigning against the erosion of our personal freedom.

I think we found our theme song for MobileCamps.

David Harper

Yahoo! Are You Listening?

Dear Yahoo!

When will you honor the request for our domain to be placed on the Yahoo! oneSearch service “White List”?

When will Yahoo!’s oneSearch service respect the “Cache-Control” of “no-transform”?

When will Yahoo! provide transparency to the oneSearch implementation of this Novarra transcoding madness so everyone who needs to can OPT OUT?

(Note: We also have rel=”alternate” media=”handheld” implemented as Google suggests.)

If this is news to you…

I refer you to, “The New Walled Garden?”

Sorting out an off-portal publishing system to deliver mobile device-specific 100% W3C mobileOK and .mobi standards-compliant templates was apparently not enough. Now it seems I have to take on everyone in the world who is bastardizing us with their freaking Novarra “web transformation” engines and poor customer service (i.e. whitelisting.)

and…

Yahoo!’s oneSearch service clearly distinguishes mobile and web results. They are returning both PC and desktop links to Winksite. Links in the PC section goes to the transcoder, while links in the Mobile Web section goes direct.

So why do I have a problem with this? Let me explain…

When someone visits Winksite or a mobile site published at Winksite we send that visitor to a version appropriate to their device. We asked to be White Listed because a mobile phone should never end up at a transcoded version of our broadband site. If Yahoo! respected that ALL the links in the results would pass to us directly where we could then do the job that people count on us to do.

Instead our routing is intercepted and adapted content NOT our content or the content of our publishers as it was intended to be distributed is sent. This cripples our site and renders our community features unusable.

I question Yahoo!’s (and anyone else’s) right to do that…

…and without permission to create a derivative work that violates our copyright AND hinders our ability to provide a service that took years of hard work to build.

Cheers,
David Harper
Founder, Winksite