Google Adsense Referral Ad Changes

On Tuesday, Talia Brodecki from Google Adsense Product Marketing, announced that two impending changes to Google Adsense Referral ads. If you, as the publisher, live in North America, Latin America, or Japan, there will be no more sign-up bonus and less earnings for referring a user to Adsense. Check out the link above for more explanation.

The second and more relevant change to me is that publishers outside of the three regions listed above, you will not be able to promote Adsense as referrals. When this change takes effect at the end of January, you may still continue to promote referrals for other products listed in your account under “Adsense Setup” -> “Get Ads” -> “Referrals” (see below).

Google Adsense Referral ad setup, JPEG 26KB

I have been showing referral ads for third-party advertisers using this sort of Adsense ads, and I have to admit they have not been successful at all. Perhaps the conversion criteria of advertisers have never been met as they usually require the visitor to purchase products or signup for services. Thus, I prefer to show Google-related referrals, such as Adsense, AdWords, Google Pack, and Firefox plug Google Toolbar, because their conversion is more attractive and their target audience is more global.

Getting visitors to switch web browsers from Microsoft Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox is the most satisfying because I’ve been a strong advocate of Firefox. If you’re not on Firefox, you’re missing out on the superior page rendering and extensive functionalities of this open-source browser. Click on the link on the right to download Firefox!

Back to Adsense referrals, unless you have a blog topic related to helping publishers monetizing their sites, I’d recommend you avoid promoting such referrals at all. Google Pack is a good choice as the software pack is very useful for common Internet users.

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Speed Up Performance of Mozilla Firefox

There are some tweaks that you can put in the Mozilla Firefox web browser to speed up your web user experience. Pages will render faster using more simultaneous connections, prefetching and other tricks.

In a blank Firefox window, enter “about:config” in the location bar. Some of the preferences below already exist, and you can check if they are there by typing the beginning in the “Filter” line. If a preference exists, you can change its value by double-clicking on it in the list. If a preference does not exist, right click on the window and select either “New”, then the appropriate “Type”. Enter the value and press “Enter”.

No. Preference Type Value Description
1 network.http.pipelining boolean true send multiple http requests before receiving any responses
2 network.http.pipelining.maxrequests integer 8 as previous
3 network.http.proxy.pipelining boolean true as previous
4 network.dns.disableIPv6 boolean true disable IPv6 DNS servers’ bug of returning IPv4 addresses for IPv6 requests
5 content.interrupt.parsing boolean true allow browser to respond to UI events by interrupting parsing of a page
6 content.notify.interval integer 750000 as previous
7 content.switch.threshold integer 750000 as previous
8 nglayout.initialpaint.delay integer 0 set time delay from initial page loading to the first page that is rendered
9 browser.cache.memory.capacity integer 65536 memory size used for storing pages for instant recall

Restart Firefox to make the changes take effect.

If you are not comfortable with messing with the above and/or want more complex enhancements, try the Fasterfox extension for Firefox. It can prefetch links, tweak network settings, and block popups created by Adobe Flash.

List of options in Fasterfox (bold means described earlier):

  • Enhanced prefetching
  • Page load timer
  • Memory cache
  • Disk cache
  • DNS cache expiration
  • DNS cache entries
  • Max. connections
  • Max. connections per server
  • Max. persistent connections per server
  • Max. persistent connections per proxy
  • Pipelining
  • Pipelining first request
  • Proxy pipelining
  • Max. pipelining requests
  • Initial paint delay
  • Submenu delay
  • Disable popups from plugins

Related post:

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.1 Web Browser Released
<URL:http://glob.lokety.com/2006/12/mozilla-firefox-2001-web-browser.html>

Links:

Fasterfox

<URL:http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/>

Download Firefox
<URL:http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=affiliates&id=187103&t=213>

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Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.1 Web Browser Released

Mozilla Firefox (FF) 2.0.0.1 has been released on December 19 2006. The second release from 2.0 has 8 general bug fixes and many new features.

Always use protection. Firefox.

Among the fixes, the five critical ones are:

Click on each of them to view details.

New stuff I haven’t seen before are:

Live Titles – Allows you to create bookmarks with microsummaries on the bookmark labels that can be regularly updated, as opposed to a static label. Web site owners can quickly put bits of updates on their site <title> tag without having to implement a RSS feed.

JavaScript 1.7 – New scripting language version includes support for generators, iterators, array comprehensions, let expressions, and destructuring assignment. More ways to complicate browsers and confuse visitors :P

Client-side session and persistent storage – Online transactions that make use of client-side storage for document and mailbox management can now store large structured data. Useful for websites like Google Docs and Spreadsheets http://docs.google.com and online banking sites.

New Windows installer – Uses the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, which is neat and stable. You may have probably seen it used in Winamp.

Personally, FF 1.5.0.8 has been very stable for me. Although I have more than 10 tabs and 10 extensions installed, it has crashed no more than a few times since I started using it.

Click on the download link below to get this release.

Update (21 Dec 2006): If you are still on 1.5.0.x like me, you should get the update to FF 1.5.0.9 which contains the almost the same set of bug fixes as FF 2.0.0.1. The download should be about 510KB.

Related posts:

Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8 Web Browser Released
<URL:http://glob.lokety.com/2006/11/mozilla-firefox-1508-web-browser.html>

Mozilla Firefox 2 Web Browser Released
<URL:http://glob.lokety.com/2006/10/mozilla-firefox-2-web-browser-released.html>

Firefox Into The Sky!
<URL:http://glob.lokety.com/2006/05/firefox-into-sky.html>

Links:

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.1 Release Notes
<URL:http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0/releasenotes/>

Download Firefox
<URL:http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=affiliates&id=187103&t=213>

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