Google has announced a change to its terms of service that will allow the company to use your name, photo and company endorsements to be included in ads from 11th November (via the NYT).
When the new ad policy goes live Nov. 11, Google will be able to show what the company calls shared endorsements on Google sites and across the Web, on the more than two million sites in Google’s display advertising network, which are viewed by an estimated one billion people.
If a user follows a bakery on Google Plus or gives an album four stars on the Google Play music service, for instance, that person’s name, photo and endorsement could show up in ads for that bakery or album … Expand Expanding Close
Google reportedly published and then removed a rough draft on its Google Commerce blog about it soon allowing Google Wallet users to purchase Web content, but 9to5Google was able to grab a cached version of the deleted post.
“Today we are announcing Google Wallet for web content – an experiment designed to help content creators bring more of this high-quality content to the web,” announced the company in the draft. “Google Wallet has several interesting features that help your readers feel comfortable buying your web content.”
A few of the features include:
Buy web pages individually —Users can buy what they desire with prices ranging from 25 cents to 99 cents.
Instant Refund if they don’t like the content — Available within 30 minutes of purchasing, but Google is keeping a close eye to prevent excessive refunding.
Long preview content — Search engines rank articles based on the free preview content, so users should make long previews to rank well.
Rich obfuscated content —Users can show what is available for purchase in an obfuscated version of the page.
Single secure payment method — Allows users to buy web content with the same Google Wallet account linked across all Google products.
Provide perpetual access — Content belongs to a user for forever once bought, and Google even provides an archive service to support perpetual access if website expires.
Compatible with ads — Allows ads to run alongside preview content, so users can get an ad impression without relying on folks to buy the content.
As BetaBeat first noticed, Google is attempting to peel back the anonymity cloak that surrounds YouTube.
The search engine, which seems to dabble in all things Web, mobile, and tech, now displays a pop-up box to YouTubers who try to leave a video comment. The notice prompts users to start surfing the video-sharing platform with their full name instead of a username or pseudonym.
Google appears to crop names from Google+ profiles, which is likely a byproduct of the Google+ integration from last year that required all YouTubers to login with their Gmail account credentials.
Speaking at the Reuters Media and Technology Summit yesterday, YouTube chief Salar Kamangar talked about the video service’s desire to include subscription-based offerings that would possibly rival traditional cable channels. Reutersexplained:
Cable channels with smaller audiences will in the future migrate to the Web and become available on an “a la carte” basis, Kamangar said at the Reuters Media and Technology Summit on Thursday… Some of those channels, which Kamangar said receive little or no affiliate fees from cable distributors, could be one of the viable offerings for Google-owned YouTube as it weighs selling subscriptions to some of the hundreds of millions of people who watch videos on the website every month.
Everyone knows online advertising is a tricky business, but Google launched a new report today that hopes to uncloak some of the mystery behind the plug-medium that keeps everyone guessing.
In a DoubleClick blog post today, Google’s Director of Product Management and Display Advertising Jonathan Bellack announced the death of the 468×60 banner ad, which now only garners 3 percent of Google’s ad impressions. The classic ad-type is a standard across most blogs and websites, but its low success rate is just another indication of how touchy advertising on the Web is for publishers.
Google, through its buyout of DoubleClick, unveiled the “Display Business Trends: Publisher Edition” report today to help publishers finally determine what works and doesn’t work in the world of Internet-based advertising. Bellack explained:
The Publisher Edition will be the first in a series of publications looking at aggregated global data from across our display advertising solutions. We’re doing this to generate metrics that will answer a few of of the most common questions we hear from our partners, and put some data behind long-held industry assumptions. […] These metrics are a beginning: they give a snapshot of what’s happening in an ever-changing industry. We hope this sparks conversations across the marketplace about the trends driving these metrics, and how publishers can best capitalize on them to grow their businesses bigger, faster.
Google will also hold a DoubleClick “Insights” event on June 5, where it plans to live-stream discussions on the future of buying and selling ads online. Those who are interested can register online. Oh, and the full Display Business Trends report is available for download here (PDF).
Badoo is a social discovery website founded in 2006 that is managed out of SoHo, London and quickly reaching its 148 million user, but today it announced a very pivotal hire.
Google’s Product Management Director of Search Products and Local Business Products Benjamin Ling is leaving the search engine to become Badoo’sChief Operating Officer. He will help Badoo expand across mobile and Web platforms, which is essential since the website is widely revered as one of Europe’s leading Internet firms.
“One of the things that attracted me to Badoo is its mainstream appeal. Badoo is putting the ‘social’ back into social networking, and it’s doing it on a massive scale. To me, that’s a thrilling opportunity,” announced Ling.
Ling’s new gig starts May 2012 in London, where he will oversee corporate matters, product, business operations, engineering, and partnerships.
LATEST UPDATE: Google’s App Status Dashboard, an official website that offers performance information for Google Apps services, claimed earlier today that Gmail’s status went down, but the problem is now resolved less than an hour later.
“Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better,” contended Google.
The service interruption only affected 2 percent of Gmail’s user-base. DownRightNow, a universal monitoring service for the Web that is similar to Google’s Dashboard, described the outage as a “widespread service disruption” that started somewhere between 12:40 p.m. and 12:59 p.m. EST. The service interruption did not seem to affect mail pushing to third-party clients.
Those who tried to access Gmail.com directly found the following “Temporary Error (500)” notice with a “93” numeric technical code:
World—meet Google Consumer Surveys: Just when it looks like Google has extended its reach into every dark corner of the Internet, the search engine launches a new service to reap more cash online.
