Tech Confidential

Google's Adsense Down the Drain?

Google's main income source is at risk because it can't distinguish between a person and an automated fraudster. Adsense brings in about $6 Billion a year to Google.

I am sure all of you would have heard of Google's Adsense program by either seeing it on other sites or clicking on few of them. These are ads that are placed by Google on other network of sites. When a visitor click on those ads Google will pay the host site owner. Websites didn't have this sort of flexibility in making an income before Google introduced this sort of revenue stream for websites. As it sounds easy it is also easy for fraudsters to fraud the system to make easy money. Depending on the keywords or the contents in your site, Adsense will pay a lot more. Sometimes the revenue will be as high as 1o to 25 dollars per click. This is huge money for websites that was not making any money before. So with these perks comes the urge to fraud the system.

There are two kinds of fraudsters. One trying to beat the system to make money and other one is trying to beat the system to crash their competitor.

What do I mean by these two types? Well the first one is easy. As explained above, a host site owner will implement automated scripts or programs that will click on Adsense ads. This will help accumulate a decent revenue for the host site. Google does not make this easy for people to fraud their system but fraudsters are smart just like scammers. You upgrade your system and they upgrade their skill level to beat the system. So it is an ongoing problem for Google.

The second is when one of your competitors is trying to beat the system so that you end up paying for false clicks. If you are a customer for Google Adsense (Adwords) and your competitor finds out so he setup a fraud machine to click on your ads. It costs you every time it clicks on your ad. Soon you will go in debt and quit advertising. Google and you will loose on this one.

So Google is now looking at other ways of selling advertisements. One way is to imitate the famous "affiliate program" into a "cost-per-action" program. Yes Google is recently testing a new advertising model called the cost-per-action. It means Google will only charge you a click through actually ends up in a signup, posting, purchase or some sort of action on your site. You may be thinking that this sounds familiar. Yes damn right. This is the famous affiliate program that we all take part in. This is actually a better way for Google to get out of their fraud issue but will this save the consumer at the end of the day? Imagine you purchase cost-per-action ad from Google to have customer’s signup for a survey of some sort. All of a sudden you got 1000 surveys completed in no particular order. Google is happy that they sold 1000 survey postings for your site. They charge you and you pay them. Then you find out that these survey results are totally misleading. Well then you try to figure out what the heck people were smoking when they were filling out your survey. Well you could pretty much conclude that it was smoking off heat when it was filling out your surveys. It being an automated program...

Diggtatorship at Digg?

The first thing that I think of when thinking about my “missing” article that all people should see is, “What happened to the user driven concept of digg”?

Are we not able to question the viability of Digg without repercussion? My article is still on digg (Will Digg 3.0 bury the Digg effect) but when you search for it, it is nowhere to be found? It is neither in the upcoming stories nor the cloud view. It is neither part of the buried stories nor posted stories. However, the story at one point reached 28 votes. It was just about to make it to the front page!

I read an article the other day that brought some questions to my mind and for asking the questions digg censored my story and banned the member who posted the story to the digg website. I simply read an article that made me think and for that I have been displaced by an unknown and non transparent process.

With this type of diggtatorship (dictatorship) occurring what makes Digg any different than any other editorial driven news services? This was to be a site where your articles could be posted and viewed by all no matter what the content is, but it seems when something Digg does not like goes front page they have a way to burry it. I call on Digg to answer these questions and tell us how articles make the front page and then disappear from the face of the earth? If what I am claiming is not true then the digg users must be biased. Biased enough that they vote down anything that makes digg looks vulnerable. This exactly was one of my point on the previous article. Will digg members make digg go to the right or to the left?

During this time, I was following few discussions on a forum that had gone into deep discussion about "why digg should allow people to promote their stories that they've posted on digg".

You can find the thread here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=105564

Digg banned many of these users because they digged each others stories and asked others to digg their stories as well. Now, really what is wrong with asking other people to read your story and cast their vote? Didn't this voting system exist on the internet for over a decade now? I mean what were those entire "top site" ranking sites have been doing?

So digg decided to ban all these users who were self promoting their stories on forums and through other means. If you stop for a moment and ask yourself one question: Who is really the winner when users self promote their stories on digg? I think the biggest winner is digg. The user may get one or two votes but the user is advertising digg for free! If the story is bad then digg shouldn't be worried because its own dedicated users should be able to bury the story. Then why ban a self promoting user? I think this is a big loss for digg. They will be the loosers on a long term.

My advice to digg:

1) If you think a user is abusing your system then warn them before you ban them. You do have their e-mail address that you verify when they signup. Forgot?

2) If you bury a story then let users know why the story was wiped off the face of digg. You need to share who buried it and digged it. So people don't walk away wondering...

3) If you are going to use your staff as editors then be upfront with people. Change your slogan, "user driven with slight help of kevin rose and his people". Something like that would do.

4) Don’t ban people's IP address. If people are in a shared network, you may be loosing more than one person. Sometime hundreds!

5) Don’t ever forget that this site started off as a user driven site.

So what do you all think? Where is digg going and what happened to my story? Will they survive by banning people (you've read the forum posts)? Basically in this post I am asking digg to be more transparent with the people who love to use their site on a regular basis. Yes there are bad apples in every democratic world. If there aren't any then there wouldn't be a balance. 

Will Digg 3.0 bury the Digg effect?

Vishnu Mahmud a writer for CNet Asia has posted an interesting article with the heading "Will diversity drown digg?".

I have to agree with Vishnu. However, I would of had preferred a title that is something like "Will Digg 3.0 bury the Digg effect?" The reason that I say this is because now the site is so diversed, it does not have the same market as it had before for stories that reach to the front page. Before when stories makes it to the front page, we know it is going to get the real exposure that is should. Now in many different categories, users will have to go look for them to find the articles. Users themself are spread out instead of being in the tech sector. There were times when digg's front page stories used to get over 500 diggs. Now I see stories that are in the one hundreds. Is this due to the diversity?

Like Vishnu said, many of us tech people enjoyed the site before. That does not mean that we don't enjoy it now but it just that it doesn't feel like home anymore. The site does not cater only for tech news. What is the different between yahoo, man and google news and now digg 3.0?

To answer Vishnu's question on " But what happens if the demographics change?", I think just like any other democratic world, if the voters change then the representative changes. Here the representative being the news that makes it to the front page will significantly change. Imaging there are more sports or entertainment fans in the world and they all fall in love with digg! You will see more entertainment news than technology news. Even if there is a balance, then the won't be a fair balance for the real stories to stay on the front page for long. This will dilute the digg effect. There will no longer be a digg effect because the stories won't last long on the front page.

At this point we just have to wait and see. Like Vishnu said, will the entertainers, the conservatives or some organized group take over digg?

This Year's Power Lunch is Worth US $620,100.00

This year's power lunch is worth US $620,100.00.  It was sold on Ebay few hours ago. Warren Buffet has sold his 2006 annual auction to benefit the Glide Foundation! This is a lot higher than what David Einhorn paid in 2003. A sum of $250,100.

The auction began on June 22 and finished just few hours ago with a total of 29 bids. The winner, along with as many as seven other people, will get to share lunch and a private conversation with Buffett courtesy of upscale steakhouse chain Smith & Wollensky in New York. Smith& Wollensky will donate the lunch this year along with an additional $10,000 to charity.

Six years ago this power lunch started on a slightly smaller scale with a live auction.  Since then it has become an annual ritual. The proceeds will go to the Glide Foundation,  a San Franscisco nonprofit organization.

If you are a regular donor to charities then this is not a bad bet. Think about it, you donate and you get the fame. Last year's auction went for $351,100. It will be interesting to see who won this year's power lunch.

View this photo EBay Auction

Online threats outpacing law crackdowns and Email spams reach its highest

“Authorities are cracking down on phishing and botnets, but the threats are advancing instead of diminishing”, two law enforcement officials said.

The cyber crooks are coming up with advance tools to break into other people's computers to gain access to confidential information. As criminals are using more and more sophisticated tactics, it is becoming harder and harder for the authorities to gain an upper hand on this situation.

"We're seeing increasingly sophisticated groups online that are more indicative of crime groups," Jonathan Rusch, special counsel for fraud prevention at the Justice Department, said in a presentation. 

He also spoke about phishing, a prevalent type of online attachk which is a combination of e-mail spam and fradulent sites that are made to look like trustable websites. I am sure all of you run into many sites everyday and some you trust and some you don't. But what sort of guarantee are there to so say that site is trustable? I wish someone comes up with a rating system that will be placed on the site based on user feedback. Something like oozm.com or other bookmarking sites. What other better way to find out about the site than the people who used the services at the site before?

As we hear about this today, there is a new report that was published through the tech news world that states, nearly 86% of the email consumers receive today are considered either malicious or spam.

Yes they all connected somehow. Maybe we will be paying much less for internet connection if there isn't any email spam. Less traffic to the system means less cost for the providers, which means the service can be provided at a cheaper price.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/ekZ8y0Ze2JxZkj/Report-Spam-Accounts-for-Most-E-Mail-Traffic.xhtml

http://news.com.com/Online+threats+outpacing+law+crackdowns/2100-7349_3-6084317.html?tag=nefd.lede

Is Paypal making it easy for Google to take over that market?

I have talked about Paypal and the security issues they pose to the general public before on several of my blog posts. I receive more than 5 emails a day from scammers that are trying to break into my paypal accounts. They are hoping that I would have a paypal account under that email account.

As Google is testing it’s own payment system to speed up purchases online, Paypal seems like it is struggling to keep up with their existing base. Is this opening up a door for Google to take over those frustrated paypal customers who have lost their credit information or lost their entire account to fraudsters?

Google claims that it would not directly compete with Paypal. Ebay purchased Paypal not too long ago. To my understanding Paypal really had no real innovative changes to their services other than their initial concept in the first place.

Eventhough Google’s officials said that they won’t move into the consumer-to-consumer market, there is nothing holding them back from doing that. Google’s own user base will want them to allow payments between users.

This is my take from this: Google is slowly taking a step into the online payment market. If Paypal falls behind or not, Google will move into Paypal’s market. At least they will make it look like there is a need to satisfy their users. One by one Google is expanding away from it’s core “Search Engine”.

PayPal fixes phishing hole

Google tests online payment system

Ray Ozzie to replace Gates as Chief Software architect

At a press conference from Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer and Chairman Bill Gates announced that in two years Bill Gates will step down partially and allow Ray Ozzie to lead his work at Microsoft.

Bill Gates will shift his time toward the Gates Foundation after 2008. He wants to dedicate more time to the foundation. This is in two years. Ozzie will work with Gates for the next two years to have a smooth transition.

Ozzie is known to be the most prominent advocate for web based software at Microsoft. I guess this is when we will begin to see even more web based applications from Microsoft to compete with other leading players in the market.

If you are interested in seeing the webcast for the consference, the following links will take you there:

56 kbps | 100 kbps | 300 kbps

Welcome to tech confidential

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