Google News Out of Beta

After nearly four years, Google has finally taken the popular Google News service out of Beta. This means that they have likely managed to work out the majority of bugs and problems with the advanced news-sorting algorithm, so as to provide the best and most targeted news headlines to searchers.

To celebrate its coming of age, Google News has also added a couple of new features, including a Personalized Search feature that will help users find interesting articles, based on their previous search history. There is also an option to view a list of the most popular news stories, targeted to your language and country.

By providing increased personalization, my hope is that the traffic for included websites will also become more highly targeted. That would certainly benefit me, as one of my most popular sites, TeleClick.ca, receives a significant portion of its traffic from Google News.

New Government in Canada

Without getting too political, I just thought I’d voice my congratulations to Canada’s new Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.

From a citizen’s point of view, I hope to see Harper’s Conservative government bringing positive change in this country, while from a webmaster’s point of view, I am intrigued by the new government’s plans to lower taxes on small businesses.

Harper has made a lot of promises over the course of this campaign, and I really hope he manages to keep them. He will need to prove himself an honest man if he hopes to form a majority government next time around.

Google to Share Revenue with Canada.com

Google has just announced a multiyear partnership with CanWest Global Communications, which will see Adwords advertisements displayed on Canada.com, and related online media properties.

This is quite an interesting development for the online advertising market in that it expands Google’s “premium” Adsense-style program, and improves their reach into the Canadian market. It is also a victory against MSN, who’s in-house adCenter advertising program is just getting off the ground.

Financial terms of this deal weren’t disclosed, but I think it’s safe to say that Canada.com is getting a much more attractive revenue share than independent Adsense publishers like me. How nice is must feel to be a national media giant.

Tags: Google, CanWest, Canada.com, Advertising, Adsense

Chitika - An Honest Analysis

Okay, so there’s been a lot of talk recently about how much Chitika sucks. On SitePoint, for example, there are several threads like this one, where people get together and talk about how little money they’re making with it, and how what they do make gets “audited” and heavily deducted at the end of every month.

I originally noticed this kind of sentiment about a month ago, just after I started using Chitika, but decided to stick it out and see how well it did for me. And the results… well, they certainly weren’t great, but in general, it did a lot better than I expected.

In total Chitika made me $49.01 in the month of December ($44.46 after audit), with a single 468×60 banner placed at the bottom of each article on TeleClick. That comes out to an eCPM of around $2.

Now that’s nothing compared to the $3x.xx eCPM and $796.47 in earnings that I got from Adsense on that site, but it doesn’t seem to reduce my Adsense revenue at all. And an extra $45/month on my existing traffic (with very conservative placement I might add) certainly doesn’t hurt.

I can see that all those people earning $0.05 eCPM on Chitika, with 75% of their revenue being deducted would want to stop using it — and they should — but that’s not to say it’s completely useless for all websites.

In general, it’s only international clicks that get deducted, the reason that I suffered a 10% loss is that 90% of my traffic comes from the US, Canada, and western Europe. For sites with a high level of international traffic, and no relation to a product niche, I wouldn’t recommend Chitika under any circumstances. For a US-targeted shopping website, however, it would probably perform very well.

So the final verdict? Chitika isn’t as good as Adsense, and probably never will be, but if you haven’t tried it yet, it’s certainly worth giving a shot.

If you’d be interested in obtaining a free Chitika account, and seeing how well it works with your website, please click here.

My Websites

Okay, it’s a little self-promotional, and probably nobody cares, but I think that when starting any kind of webmaster-related blog, one should throw together a quick list of their websites.

I’ve prepared such a list which can be seen by clicking here…