PPA Advertising

Google today announced its new 'pay per Action' advertising product today.

Advertisers will need to pay only for completed actions that they can define, like submitting a request, filling a form, buying a product etc. This will make the entire ad world a lot more complicated. It will not be sufficient for google to monitor clicks now. They will also need to know what the user does after clicking on the ad.
The advertiser will need to report these actions back to Google.

Now ofcourse the advertiser has an incentive to not report these actions as he will need to pay for the same. But Google can effectively counter this by ranking the ad based on profitability to Google and value of each click to the advertiser.

Now all this makes sense in say a country like the US, where purchasing something online has become the order of the day.

In a country like india for example. Online sales are still not very common. Even the most tech savvy indian would prefer to check the product out online and then go down to the store, examine the product and then purchase it.

Online advertising in India, has never been the most attractive of options. As an advertiser, all you could expect from an 'online ad' is only visibility and mindshare and not an actual purchase online.

This being the case PPA is an attractive option from the advertisers perspective, as in most cases an advertiser in india is not looking for anything more than visibility. No 'action' is expected online.

So if given a choice they would gladly jump for PPA ads to CPC ads any day.

So is google taking a big risk here? Or do they have the wares to ensure that advertisers dont get what they want without paying a dime for it.

Techcrunch has a well written article describing the impact this could have on the advertising world.

Thought for the day

Holding onto anger is like grasping hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha

GizmoSMS

Michael Robertson, the man behind mp3.com and Linspire has added a new twist to his Gizmo free phone project. Gizmo has launched its new Gizmosms service.

While the SMS market is huge, 45 billion dollars worldwide approximately. This service is certainly not the first of its kind.
So whats exciting about this service, besides the man behind it all, when we have already seen so many sites providing an sms service.

a) With Gizmo, you do not need to know the carrier of the number you are smsing(or texting as it is known in some parts).
b) There doesnt seem to be any restriction on which carrier is supported. Or a large number of carriers are supported and this ofcourse is hidden from the user.
c) That makes the user interface clean. Requiring you to just know the number and the country where the sms needs to be sent to.
d) the site doesnt require you to register.


Michael does make tall claims of it being the best of its kind and the fastest. But I havent received my sms in the last 15 minutes. But all u text freaks, do check it out.

Gmail is down!!!

Gmail seems to be down for a while now. Wonder what google's up to?

Its been almost 15 mins since i noticed...

Google Maps : Zoom away

Well i havent checked this out yet... im going to do it as soon as i get home.. :)

But if this is possible.. wow!! but google may have some answering to do...

Time to go see if your car is still where u left it...
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-03-07-n12.html

:Derailed on Ruby tracks

Well if you have been trying to figure your way around ruby on rails and have been wondering what the so called :action's and :controllers and :id's are.

and Why do you need them in the code for?
and What do they do? etc etc. You have come to the right place.

Firstly these are called Symbols. And many have tried to explain the concept of symbols and have failed quite miserably.

Alas!! Its not me thats going to solve the mystery here for you. But yes I am going to show you the path : http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2005/08/19/understanding-ruby-symbols


A neat little blog by Kevin Clark that finally clears the air a little.

Cheers

Spotplex

Spotplex has added a twist to the Digg story. Here users do not submit stories. Instead sites that want to participate include some java code in their sites. This code then monitors the traffic to blog posts on the site and decides which ones need to appear on the Spotplex page.

This makes Spotplex clean as it cannot be manipulated externally. However i think these guys will still need to build trust around their algorithm and it is this that will prove to be their ‘tipping point’.

Like Michael A correctly mentions in his article on Techcrunch, the algorithm must prove itself to be unbiased to the already popular blogs.

We’ll have to see if this NKOTB will turn out to be the Digg killer.