profitlabinc.com

Google Inc. on Monday agreed to pay News Corp. $900 million over three years to provide search and distribute advertising on the popular social network MySpace.com and the rest of the media company’s Fox online network.

Under the agreement, Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., would be the exclusive provider of text-based advertising and keyword-targeted ads on the Fox Interactive Media network. It would also have the right of first refusal on display advertising sold through third parties.

In return, Google would make guaranteed minimum revenue share payments to News Corp. of $900 million… more

It’s a bold, aggressive move from Google, and the significance of this deal goes beyond the mere capture of market share. I see 2 of Google’s most important strategic directives at work in the Myspace deal.

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MAKING LINKS THAT INCREASE USER VALUE AND BUILD SEARCH ENGINE TRUST

It’s easy to tell when you’re visiting a page or a site created by an SEO. The titles are nice, the URLs are nice, the images have ALT tags, and there is a certain self-consciousness evident in the links they have made and in the ways they have made them. I am not talking about intra-site navigational links. I am talking about the links that are made purposefully by the author of the page. These links are, I have been asserting for a while now, the important links on a site, because they reflect the ideas and intentions of the author. Because blogs and other CMSs automatically generate the navigational links, Google knows to treat them differently. What Google is looking for are the choices you have made when you created your links. This is where you will reveal wehether you are to be trusted and whether your site contributes value to the Web, and if so how much. Blogroll links, while more telling about you and your blog than automatically-generated intra-site links, are less important to Google (unless they reveal a gross Trust Violation) than what I am going to call Volitional Links… more

adsense - google - usability - trustrank

EMPOWERING THE LITTLE GUY…

…is a big part of Google’s vision for the Perfect Web. I came across a post in Google’s Inside AdSense Blog that suggests revenue models such as Google AdSense will empower individual webmasters and bloggers far beyond traditional limitations imposed by geography, culture and economics:

When we visit our favorite websites, we have very little insight into the person who created them other than recognition of our shared interests. A publisher in India might own a website about his penchant for classic American cars, and the majority of his readers might reside in the UK. The beauty of the Internet is that each web page could have been created by anyone, anywhere in the world — and the site’s readers are often as demographically diverse as they are a group of like-minded people.

This is where AdSense comes in — publishers can earn money for something they probably would have done for free, i.e., writing about subjects they love. Since ads are targeted both to the content of the page and the location of the user, there are no geographic limitations on who can succeed. This puts publishers in the developing world on a near-level playing field with publishers in the developed world when it comes to earning money from their interests. We’ve heard stories from publishers in all parts of the world about how AdSense earnings are being reinvested into creating better websites and content, or spent on life improvements including new cars, vacations, education and even engagement rings… more

ADSENSE