I think Janet was the first to break the news of the Overstock changes

This is a story that both Linda at 5 Star Affiliate Programs and Shawn’s Affiliate Blog have been covering in depth.

The New York Times also has coverage and been giving out some great links.

Techcrunch has a Scribd copy of the original Overstock posted letter (Shawn posted the email)

The New York Times reports that

Linda is also reporting that this may soon affect California as well (there are lots of affiliates in California, they like the beaches)

On the good side, this may soon affect our good friend Jason Calacanis, who as a new affiliate I am sure was hoping to make some money from reputable sites such as Overstock.

The Times reports this will affect large affiliates in New York such as NextJump, Jellyfish and Entertainment Publishing, the unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp that prints discount coupon books.

So Why The Google Tax Headline?

This isn’t specific to Google, it could be any website advertising.

Google have a referrals program for various products

If you run Google Adsense on your blog, you are in many ways an affiliate of Google’s advertising program, you are selling traffic on their behalf.

So Where Would It Be Taxed?

Lots and lots of options

• California – Google’s primary location
• Where the servers are located
• Anywhere Google has a physical presence (everywhere?)
• The location of the company buying the advertising
• The location of the servers of the company buying the advertising
• The location of the person clicking an advert, or maybe the proxy server, or the company that is billed to
• The location of the publisher displaying the ads

Adwords advertisers in the EU have paid VAT since 2003 – I believe there is something similar in Taiwan
Adsense publishers in the EU if required can issue Google with a VAT invoice

As far as I am aware, no sales tax is charged in the US at any point in the chain.

As soon as you start down the rabbit hole of online business, the lines get blurred

Lets take a little look at why they might have done this.

Google Is A Business

It is actually quite a large business, and each division within a division is probably accountable for their own earnings. The Adsense referral program for new business is probably individually accountable.

Current (Old) System Earnings

Based upon quarterly and yearly reports, Google on average pay publishers only 29% of advertising revenue. Larger publishers probably get a larger piece of the action, so it is quite possible a new publisher only receives 25%

For every dollar earned, Google receive $4

Referrals Changes the Math

For the first $5 of earnings in 6 months, they pay a referral fee of $5, thus Google only make 50%

If a publisher earns $100 in 6 months, Google pay a referral fee of $250, thus of the $400 they receive in advertising revenues, they pay out $350… plus there is a bonus

For 25 people who make $100 within a 180 day period you get a bonus payment of $2000, that is $80 per person

In theory, Google could pay out $430 for every $400 received

This is potentially a loss leader…

In practice only a small number of people make it even to $5, and even less to $100 within 180 days. Darren mentioned in his article that he has never achieved the bonus, though if he comes close, those $250 fees for the ones that do make $100 must be reasonably lucrative.

The New System

The Adsense Team are reverting back to $100 for $100 earned in 180 days with no bonuses
Also the countries are now restricted to North America, Latin America, or Japan – for the referrer

What Darren and Shoemoney didn’t pick up on is that is existing referrals don’t qualify by the time this is introduced, it seems like you will only receive compensation based upon the new structure, not the old. That is significant if you were in some way paying for advertising based on anticipated earnings over 6 months based upon prior statistics.

Gaming Adsense With Referral Hydras

For me the obvious reason why they would restrict this to only partners in certain counties is fraud, or gaming the system. Google is made up of regional offices, so it would be hard to separate Eastern Europe from the rest of Europe, or Australia from others in the Pacific region.

If you look at this from the point of view of a person in a low income country, there is a potential $430 that could be earned instead of $100 for the clicks you might receive on a website you own that has reasonable traffic, all you need is new Adsense accounts.

Here is how such a system could work

1. Find 25 people who would be interested in earning $100 from Google just for providing their personal details

I can’t honestly imagine this wouldn’t be hard in many developing countries

2. Place the advertising units from those referrals on your own websites such that they will earn $100 within a month
3. The person referred gets $100 in Adsense earnings
4. You get to cash $330 instead of $100

Rinse and repeat

If you don’t want to give $100 away, you could always set up shell companies., but I don’t think it is really worth the effort, it would be easy to find people willing to earn $100 for doing nothing.

If you are just doing blackhat stuff this provides an unlimited supply of fresh Adsense accounts, and you earn everything 100% “legitimately” as just the referrer.

Can It Really Be That Many People Doing This?

If you were a slightly shady blackhat, wouldn’t you like to keep your Adsense earnings 100% clean, and earn 3x as much?

Especially if you were living in a slightly poorer country, or had contacts in one… China, Russia..

Would This Hurt Google Financially

Certainly if it got out of hand. Most of these referrals would earn their $100 and then drop off the face of the earth after they cached their checks.

Could It Be Another Reason?

I am sure growth rates outside 1st World countries are fast enough without the financial incentive for referrals, and there is always a question of scaling up support costs, and the lack of competitive advertising.
With low paying clicks outside the English speaking world, those that are active Adsense publishers are often more inclined to experiment with more grey or blackhat methods, because they don’t necessarily have to create their own content to make money.

Too Good To Be True

I always looked on the referral program to be full of holes

• You don’t know who you referred so you can’t help them, unless it is by arrangement
• You can’t honestly declare you make money by referring people, it is against the referral program terms, though they encourage word of mouth marketing.
• The reporting was always a little on the basic side
• The time period for qualification was far too long and it seems that has come back to bite people

For a negative change such as this, you would expect a full 6 months notice, or for referrals who qualify within 6 months to be paid at the old rate.
For referring publishers outside North & South America, and Japan, they are effectively being told that all those referrals they have made that haven’t quite earned $100 by the end of January will not be paid.

I am glad I haven’t promoted Google Adsense for 2 years.

Update

The vocal reaction to the changes encouraged a change of heart for Google Adsense Referrals, though it still isn’t perfect. I can understand the decreases, but they shouldn’t affect existing referrals, at all.
With the Adsense referral program, your task is to get people to sign up, you have no influence on their performance and how quickly that is achieved. All existing referrals should be under the original terms, as many affiliates may have to pay advertising costs which they assumed, based upon expected earnings.

Google should have to bite the bullet and assume the cost of maintaining the referral payouts the same for 6 months from date of sign up. It is not like they are going to face financial hardship.

Blocking adverts could actually cost you money, or damage the web as we know it is today.

Ok, don’t take my word for it, Nicholas Carr wonders would Jesus block adverts with Adblock Plus?

As always a compelling read

If javascript based adverts get blocked, and possibly images, what are Google going to do?

As far as I am currently aware, Clicky, developed by Roxr Software Ltd are not a direct competitor, and thus in my mind them having access to my data is potentially less risk.

Accuracy of Tracking Data

The accuracy of your tracking data is important, thus I am doing a test

Clicky
Performancing Metrics
Mybloglog

Just to give Performancing Metrics a slight advantage, I am going to include their tracking data first in my page.

Clicky does seem to have an edge currently on interface over MyBlogLog, but remember that as I previously wrote, MyBlogLog might well have an API available soon and that historical data is highly valuable if you have been using them for a while.

Also what happens if Clicky gets acquired? I feel more confident in a change over and longevity of the service if it is not being hosted on 3rd party servers.
If Performancing Metrics was just an affiliate white label, and they didn’t have anything to do with my data, I would be much happier to recommend them, but at this stage, Clicky direct gets my vote.

Update

Performancing Metrics and Clicky don’t seem to want to co-exist, thus one of them has to go at least until they improve their scripts so that they truly are different. Maybe there is a problem with shared declaration.

Performancing Metrics

Nothing highly personal, I would just prefer Clicky to have my data rather than Performancing.

UPDATE:- based on the information I currently have, I would much prefer to use and recommend the use of the Clicky service directly, rather than a white label version hosted by Performancing.

As is a tradition on this blog, I don’t have any favoritism, and I don’t hold any punches. It is what my readers expect, especially when I am also including affiliate links in a review.

Better The Devil You Know

There is a saying “Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t”

Another equally good expression is “A wolf in sheep’s clothing”

Is Performancing Metrics A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing?

Possibly…

Splashpress Media

Splashpress media is the owner of Performancing.com , along with many notable blogs such as the Blog Herald.

I haven’t had any direct dealings with the guys at Splashpress Media, though I have frequented their blogs, linked to them, they link to me etc.
But…

Splashpress Media Are Competitors

If you are in a profitable niche, maybe they are not in your niche now, but they may be in the future.

Their terms and conditions suggest that they will not provide your data to third parties, but that doesn’t prevent them aggregating data for their own use.

Performancing Tracks Everything

The Performancing Metrics service is tracking click data, and that could well include monetization links to affiliate programs, advertising and PPC.
Performancing also tracks page views

This data even if just looked on in an aggregated manner could be used to identify niche markets that are profitable or experiencing high growth.

Bad Taste

I was debating whether to mention this, but decided it would be best to have everything out in the open from the off.

Recently there was a blogosphere scandal regarding MyBlogLog tracking Adsense clicks. I don’t know how the “learned” A-list “reputable” bloggers could have missed it as it was reported on a number of prominent blogs previously, and it was obvious the data was being tracked.

Performancing.com is edited by David Krug
901AM is owned by David Krug

Just a few weeks ago Duncan Riley was writing for 901AM (he is just a paid seat there), and reporting on the “MyBlogLog Adsense scandal“, which didn’t really exist.

It doesn’t take much effort to research whether you have your head stuck in the sand, or whether there is something real to any story. As an example Darren Rouse first reported about the Adsense feature back in September 2006, and Michael Gray had discussed it as well.

I actually noted at the time Duncan’s piece was written that in the footer of David Krug’s 901AM blog was a reference to Performancing Metrics, pre-prepared to become a hyperlink to a sister site in the future.

I actually still have a screenshot of the full story.

It will be interesting to see how many people who attacked MyBlogLog’s Adsense tracking write balanced reviews of Performancing Metrics.

You see there were 2 key points

• Whether people knew about the tracking
• Would tracking Adsense really get you banned

As mentioned above, Darren Rouse and a number of others had reported it, and as I previously wrote, it was fairly obvious that MyBlogLog was tracking Adsense.

Can tracking Adsense get you banned? Actually it may be the opposite, the only way to defend yourself if you are accused of click-fraud, and the only way to determine whether Adsese are tracking your clicks correctly.

Jeremy Zawodny was previously asking people whether their MyBlogLog Adsense tracking results compared well with those clicks allocated by Google. Don certainly saw a difference, and discussed the differences in stats with the Adsense team. That wsn’t the first occurrence.

It should also be noted that Performancing Metrics in its previous incarnation always tracked Adsense stats. It was a known feature, as is the case with many stats packages.

As far as I am concerned the story was ill-conceived hackbait, and as 901AM was connected with a soon to launch competitor, they definately shouldn’t have run the story, even if it was topical and written by a 3rd party (Duncan has no direct interest in Performancing Metrics)

Performancing Metrics Has Great Features

So that is the negativity out of the way, lets look at Performancing Metrics and what it has to offer.

It is free for most bloggers and cheap for the rest of us
The statistics seem to be accurate
The statistics are “almost live” due to caching, but much faster than things like Google Analytics
The interface is fast – Google Analytics honestly after more than a year still runds exceptionally slowly

This isn’t the old Performancing Metrics that were highly rates, but honestly I never really liked the interface. The new Performancing Metrics is Slick.

Would I use Performancing Metrics?

Damn tough question… probably on a few sites.

Whilst I might universally use Google Analytics on every site I own, I doubt I would use Performancing Metrics on my niche blogs that are not public knowledge.

I might use them on a few public sites, including this one although I would much prefer a situation that a purely monetization company is running a statistics service, and not a potential competitor.

Once I have some more stats to compare over the next week, I will write a full review.

But Performancing Metrics isn’t Performancing Metrics

It is just a rebranded version of Clicky as is being reported.

Do Performancing still get access to the data, and why no mention of this in the terms of service?

Here is the answer:-

It is not just a ploy to earn affiliate commissions – he has “officially” licensed our product and is hosting it on the Performancing servers. He believes in our product, as do we, otherwise we wouldn’t be in this position. I don’t know what else to say, but I think you are being overly negative for no good reason.

Why Nofollow Shoemoney.com?

Here is what is written in the Google webmaster guidelines:-

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Shoemoney recently has been been creating lots of controversial link baiting and hackbaiting content. This includes how to hack MyBlogLog, and encouraging other people to try it out for themselves.
Whilst the Google Webmaster Guidelines don’t mention hacking sites as being a bad neighbourhood, their Adsense guidelines certainly do not allow Adsense to be displayed on sites containing hacking content.

Taken from the Google Adsense Policy:-

Sites displaying Google ads may not include:
* Violent content, racial intolerance, or advocacy against any individual, group, or organization
[snip]
* Hacking/cracking content
* Deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site’s search engine ranking, e.g., your site’s PageRank
[snip]
* Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity, or infringes on the legal rights of others

I tend to look on the criteria for sites eligible to display Adsense as a good indication of what a “good neighbourhood” is as the webmaster guidelines are not very specific, and leave this up to the judgement of the webmaster.

I should also note that hacking material also contravenes Yahoos policies as well as I mentioned in my previous MyBlogLog post, so there is very little room for doubt.

My personal opinion (from a business standpoint, and not based upon differences in opinion) is that Shoemoney.com now contains objectionable content including information on how to hack and manipulate the data on 3rd party websites. In some ways what he has also been promoting could have been looked on as identity theft.

As such Shoemoney.com has become a “bad neighbourhood” to which I personally don’t want to link, and so I modified a plugin to save me time in deleting links from previous content and comments.

As I have the plugin, I though others should have the option of using it as well.

Plugin Name: Shoemoney nofollow
Plugin URI: http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/shoemoney-nofollow/
Description: Searches for links to shoemoney.com, and adds a rel=”nofollow” tag if necessary (based on Wikipedia Nofollow by Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson and Identify External Links by Mark Jaquith)
Author: Andy Beard
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://andybeard.eu/
License: GPL

Download Shoemoney Nofollow for WordPress

I should note this plugin has nothing to do with disagreements with Shoemoney in the past and his invitation tactics as previously discussed. Previously I had left all links intact from my domain to his, but as he is now encouraging hacking on an almost daily basis, I had to take action.

This seems to be a growing trend, and so many bloggers are falling for the linkbait, poorly researched content, and unethical marketing practices.

Reactionary development of computer products and services can prove to be a disaster both for development cycles and the feature set of a product. An extremely careful balance has to be achieved between supporting the wishes of hardcore supporters of a product, and achieving core goals and maintaining a development schedule.

I have experienced this first hand in the computer games industry being the middleman both between publisher <> development team, and consumer <> development team. I know that I have significantly disrupted development of products in the past, and at times I even ignored or delayed passing information from a publisher or customer on to a development team simply because of the disruption it could cause. Sometimes I used a middleman, passing information onto my only superior, the company MD, and allowing him to decide whether the feedback should be passed on to the development manager or development team members.
I was also in charge of sales and marketing internationally, and even though we had a relatively small organisation, channels of communication existed to prevent disruption to the development schedules. Here is a good article on the subject.

If someone is attempting to hack your website, steal your content, or damage your business, the expected reaction shouldn’t be to pat them on the back, thank them for their help and offer them all kinds of bonuses and credibility.

In a web environment, the logical first step to people abusing your site is to block their IP – this is what various spam control systems do. How many bloggers have a terms of service stating that if you spam them with comments they will block your IP address?

It shouldn’t matter how influential a blogger thinks they are, the tail shouldn’t wag the dog.

The first sign Shoemoney received that he had been banned from MyBlogLog was a 403 Error. From the w3.org site:-

10.4.4 403 Forbidden

The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated. If the request method was not HEAD and the server wishes to make public why the request has not been fulfilled, it SHOULD describe the reason for the refusal in the entity. If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 404 (Not Found) can be used instead.

If someone was spamming me, scraping me, or hacking me, and I could pinpoint it down to a single IP address, that is exactly what message I would give them. It doesn’t matter who the hell it is.

I doubt Shoemoney was sending signals such as:-

Hey this is Shoemoney, I am hacking your site for hackbait to get links and subscribers, but it is all harmless and not really intended to damage your business

Now on one point yesterday I was wrong, it seems that whilst an email was claimed to have been sent a month ago regarding the cookies problem with MyBlogLog (but from the French site), it might have got lost in various technical and logistics problems.

Another insight, Shoemoney had been asked specifically by the MyBlogLog team to give them a heads up before posting any more hacking MBL information.
Here is what Eric posted in a comment on Li Evans post:-

Li –

Here’s the thing. We *did* have reach out to Shoe. Every time he posted a hack we thanked him in his comments for pointing out a vulnerability.

Then a couple days before this was posted, Scott Rafer emailed him and said, basically, “dude, I understand you’re pissed at Jeremey Zawodny and so be it. But keep in mind that he’s not part of the team and it still just us five guys bangin away. We’ve had a good relationship with you and we would just appreciate a heads up before you post your next exploit.”

And then he posted this.

(I had previously omitted the previous info because I was unable to get in touch with Rafer last night to request permission to discuss his email exchange.)

OMG A Tracking Service is Tracking Clicks

Today I have read yet another piece of Hackbait on Shoemoney’s site, though admittedly by his partner in crime DDN.

He has come up with the absolute revelation that tracking programs track clicks on adverts.

He thinks it is a scandal that a Yahoo owned company can track clicks on Google adverts.

Something Stinks & It is Not MyBlogLog

Google Analytics can be used to track Yahoo clicks in exactly the same way as MyBlogLog can be used to track Adsense clicks, and people have been doing it for a long time.
Aaron Wall posted code to do this in November 2005, and it was also discussed on Digital Inspiration in December 2005.

I keep a reasonable eye on discussions regarding analytics. I have never seen anyone claim that Google shouldn’t be allowed to have tracking information on Yahoo clicks or for that matter any other monetization links.

In many ways MyBlogLog having this tracking information as part of Yahoo is a good thing.

1. Defending on Clickfraud – A Yahoo owned tracking service would be looked on as a more credible source of data than a self hosted script.
2. Personal Data – MyBlogLog probably have enough data not just to isolate the IP address, but possibly who clicked the advert – for defence of your Adsense account, surely that is an ideal scenario

You should always have some form of tracking for advertising – both Google Analytics and MyBlogLog (Yahoo) fall short in this capacity, and I hope they improve in the future making this more accessible for average users to improve their advertising returns. Microsoft are also entering this field, and I doubt very much they will prevent tracking of clicks on Yahoo or Google adverts. That would actually make their tracking system useless.

Tracking systems should track advertising… period

In many ways anyone looking to earn revenue from their blog should demand more tracking and interoperability and not less.

MyBlogLog could easily become a universal tracker for the masses, it is so easy to switch between different sites to check stats, and Google Analytics for an average user is a little confusing.

I am not in a position to prove whether Yahoo ads can be tracked with Google Analytics.

With Adsense the code can be placed on any site, so I could just stick some Adsense on this site for people to test, either with my own publisher ID or… someone elses.
I am not sure whether that works with Yahoo, they might lock advertising code to a particular domain in their beta testing, but I am not going to use someone elses Yahoo code just to prove a point.

The Danger Of Controversy

Now if your content is deliberately controversial, and especially regarding hacking, you are not just placing your MyBlogLog account in danger.

Yahoo YPN Terms

Here is a small excerpt from the YPN FAQ

We will not show results on pages that contain problematic content, including but not limited to:
[snip]
# Propaganda, potentially offensive or controversial content
# Defamatory, libelous, threatening or other material that advocates against any individual or group
[snip]
# Political, religious or charitable organizations, issues or causes
[snip]
# Hacking, surveillance, interception or de-scrambling equipment

Google Adsense Terms

Taken from the Google Adsense Policy:-

Sites displaying Google ads may not include:

* Violent content, racial intolerance, or advocacy against any individual, group, or organization
[snip]
* Hacking/cracking content
* Deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site’s search engine ranking, e.g., your site’s PageRank
[snip]
* Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity, or infringes on the legal rights of others

The wrong kind of linkbaiting is seriously playing with fire, though some people it seems are meant to have asbestos suits.
Whlist I don’t have YPN or Adsense on this site, I have been very careful not to link to anything that has hacking related content, and as far as I am concerned, Shoemoney is now effectively “grey boxed”, a bad neighbourhood to link to containing hacking information.

If someone wants a link condom plugin so they can make all links to Shoemoney nofollow just let me know, it would be easy to modify the Wikipedia nofollow plugin. Hmm I think Matt Cutts might even have linked to Shoemoney in the past, it wouldn’t be good to link to a hacking site.

Today for the first time I am actually ashamed of Techcrunch, Michael Gray, Lisa Barone, and Duncan Riley.

For some true reflections on MyBlogLog, which I actually feel are unbiased despite being a sister company, try a co-founder from Flickr.
I can even claim a gripe against Flickr having a 2 month old support case on commercial usage that I really should “bump” again, but that is in all honestly my own fault. If I haven’t had a response, and I still have a problem after a few weeks, I should chase it up.
Sometimes honest communication does get lost – I have at least 2 issues with Google that haven’t been responded to, one regarding use of Google CSE with Toolbar Buttons, and for some reason no response to submission of toolbar buttons I have created.

MyblogLog have responded to the adverts tracking feature.

Unfortunately Eric has succumbed to the Wolfpack of lies, and just made Shoemoney, the guy who started his MyBlogLog recruitment campaign by carefully selecting and inviting 8000 contacts as “featured user” in the MyBlogLog panel. I am sickened. Shoemoney hasn’t removed any of the previous posts. Was he threatening to expose more?

Update:

Pamela Heywood puts some nice perspective on the tracking situation after examining the Google terms of service.
I would like to point out to Tony Hung that he doesn’t have a comments policy on the Blog Herald or on Deep Jive Interests. You really shouldn’t block people from comment spamming you without some kind of ToS or policy. I wonder if he realises that it is almost impossible to use any tracking service without some conflict of interest or insecurity, and he will need something if he is going to monetize his blog. In fact I don’t personally know of any tracking service or script that doesn’t represent some risk or conflict.
Mathew Ingram has made a fairly balanced post, but I think he like others might not be aware that Shoemoney was specifically asked not to post another exploit without giving a heads up.
I would love to know what Thomas Hawk would do if someone was attacking his servers with a denial of service attack… maybe block their IP? What happens if someone was trying to hack into private data? Block their IP?
Would he send them an email first asking them to kindly notify him before revealing whatever exploit the hackers discovered.
I wonder how much it would cost to pay an East European programmer to come up with some Zooomer hacks and exploits, or maybe Indian would be slightly cheaper. It seems that as long as you are not looking to change the data on Zooomr, then any hacking is allowed, and providing information on how to change data or tools would also be within the ToS.

Unauthorized attempts to infiltrate the Web Site electronically for the purposes of changing some part of the service are actively monitored and are prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to, ‘cross-site scripting,’ ‘worms,’ ‘viruses,’ and ‘trojan horses.’

Then again maybe you don’t really need a ToS (though MBL do have one now) to prevent someone hacking you or causing disruption for your clients.

Actually, if you read the ToS from Yahoo, it looks like it is a blanket ToS that covers all Yahoo services. Obviously as most people at one time or another have established a Yahoo account, everyone has read the Yahoo ToS at least once, and would know that it covers all Yahoo services, including any new services introduced.
Thus the Yahoo ToS has been in effect since the day MBL was acquired by Yahoo. Yes I am sure they forgot to link to it, and maybe they should get you to agree to it again when you next log into MyBlogLog, just to avoid any confusion. I am sure everyone would have read the ToS if it had been linked to from the MBL page.

Realistically, no one reads terms of service completely, but most people are aware of what is looked upon as good conduct. Hacking isn’t looked on as being socially acceptable unless you are a 14 year old script kiddie.

Update 2

There seems to be some confusion regarding how visible the advertising tracking might be, and the confusion is predominately among high traffic blogs who have so many external clicks that any Adsense clicks would be right at the bottom of the list.
You have to remember that the majority of MyBlog users that everyone seems to be so worried about, and encouraging to abandon MyBlogLog are lucky to have 100 unique visitors per day, and don’t get as many external clicks. They are much more likely to see the advert clicks and rather than be worried about it, they are going to be happy, and rush off to discover they made $0.20 in their Adsense account – yes, if you are only receving one click per day you can get fairly granular about how much it was worth.

Here is a screenshot I have taken from an account that is not upgraded, and clearly displays some Adsense clicks. Just a thumbnail you can click for the full size as I wanted it to be very clear that this was a basic free account.

I did modify the image to remove data that could be used to determine CTR for the short period of time these stats were for this morning.

Update 3

Here is a write up on MyBlogLog I missed over the weekend by Rex Dixon, and he doesn’t mince his words.

Technically Speaking, Shoe screwed Shoe. If he was really concerned about security, he could have reported it to the MBL crew asap via proper channels. What is that? He could have messaged Rafer, Eric or anyone else at the MBL staff. He chose to make more money for Shoe, and for that Shoe, you got booted. Please don’t come off as the innocent and hurt entrepreneur to the world. When I worked in the IT realm, YOUR type was the most scary to deal with.

Conclusion

This is my last update on this post, but nothing is really concluded. The hacking information is still being displayed along with Digg buttons. The poorly researched tracking story is still there as well.

Lots of bloggers jumped on this hackbaiting train, with poorly researched material, and even possible conflicts of interest or lack of disclosure.

I have seen people suggest that MyBlogLog banned Shoemoney for the exposure – what a badly thought out statement. They don’t need to rush promotion or increase support or PR time. They are still working on migration to new servers, hiring a community manager, probably looking for other staff to help with the problems of a growing demanding user base.

Then there are the “unknowns” like Measuremap that Google recently purchased. I have no idea what data that service tracked regarding advertising, possibly not just Google Adsense. Measuremap has been in private beta for as long as I can remember, though Michael Arrington still uses it on Techcrunch for more than a year.

I am sure there is going to be more on Techmeme all weekend.

It would be quite easy to write similar articles about how you can exploit various monetizing services, including Adsense, either for personal gain or damaging competitors, but that wouldn’t be very smart.

The big difference? MyBlogLog doesn’t issue large checks

MyBlogLog does have a few holes – it is strange how selective Shoe is in which ones he abuses, and which he “outs” in public.

Update: Pascal has some insights into the MyBlogLog story – it seems the latest flaw that was “outed” had been known about for a while, and it is quite likely the fix just hadn’t gone live yet.

One thing that is rarely noted is that as services grow, they become bigger targets and thus testing and fixing exploits takes up more and more resources.

I have also seen in various comments people claiming that the growth of MyBlogLog has slowed down.

MyBlogLog Growth Continues

There are a couple of spikes in the graph, the first being the MBL acquisition, and the second the recent problem with invites to co-publish gaining a lot of attention, but the trend is definitely upwards.

Update 2: Li Evans has a well reasoned post on the banning. For me that is the difference between blogging about this and using it to grab attention.
I wasn’t going to link to Andy Beal, as I think he might have lost some perspective on this, however Eric from MBL made an interesting comment.

That’s like asking Google how confident they are that people can’t game AdSense. I am comfortable saying that no one has ever been able to get to your personal information and that we have instituted a major security improvement to keep people from spoofing cookies. We’re working on reducing spam as explained in our recent blog post and we’re taking steps to reduce the opportunities for clickfraud.

Are we ever going to keep people from making their avatars voluptuous women for marketing purposes? Probably not.

Are we always going to be ahead of SEO-types (sorry) who want to game the system for their own gain? Probably not.

Is this good enough to be on your site? Only you can say. But I respect your decision either way.

Here is a challenge for Shoe – take the same MBL ID exploit and apply it to Google Adsense, see what damage you can cause someone, and then write about it before telling Google.

Yesterday I happened upon something maybe of significance when I spotted Nick Baum who is the project manager for Google Reader had created an account on MyBlogLog for his private blog. It should be noted that he doesn’t discuss Google matters on his private blog.

I did however drop him a question via the MyBlogLog message system.

Nick did answer that message in private, but I couldn’t publish the answer yesterday because it was a private message, and might well have jumped the gun on an official announcement.

From the Google Reader Blog

Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.

Great… wonderful… amazing news – thanks Google Reader team!

Now for Some Speculation

You might notice I bolded the following:-

and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds

This is pure speculation, but 2007 has just started and a lot is possible.

• Blogger – Google already have avatars for Blogger accounts, but don’t have a much of a social network wrapped around Blogger interaction. Even WordPress.com have much better “community” between their bloggers with shared tag feeds and various dashboard features.
• Google Personalized Homepage – this doesn’t have any form of sharing yet, unlike Pageflakes or Netvibes
• Google Talk – allows you to set an avatar to be displayed
• Google Co-op CSE – Again, you can join as an editor of a Google Co-op search engine and it will display your avatar
• Gmail allows you to set an avatar



• YouTube – Yes Google already own one social network, but it isn’t yet fully integrated with the multitude of other Google services – login at YouTube isn’t yet unified – I wonder how far that is from becoming a reality
• Google Video – currently no social features
• Personal Search – Would Google ever provide users with the ability to share what they have been search for to friends and family – yes I know there are privacy concerns, depending on what you search for ;) – you could have an option “share this search”
• Google Reader Shared Feeds – I don’t share items, because I don’t support the fact that publishers don’t have a choice about their full content being shared. Snippets isn’t a problem, as long as there will be a way to warn you before you share private information you might subscribe to.
• Groups – Google Groups are not really integrated very well with your online experience and either you have to fill up your mailbox with unwanted emails, or you have to make a concious decision to visit.
• Picassa – You can share your photos, but again it is something separate from other Google Services
• Google Documents – lots of sharing possible
• Google Calendar – you can share your calendar, and this is one of the strongest features, but it is not well integrated with other services

Yahoo are looking strongly at integration of services. They have APIs for most of their social services, have just released Yahoo Pipes, and they purchased MyBlogLog.

Google does provide a lot of “behind the scenes” APIs for services, and it is possible to create a mashup service if you trust someone else with your Google account info – I wouldn’t personally share my Google account info with anyone – well my wife can retrieve my password if required, though she doesn’t have that need currently.
I didn’t list private services such as Adwords, Adsense and Analytics – maybe those could become a more private portal. It would certainly be useful to merge the data with more than just a hack.

Google is Missing Glue

You know… that substance that joins things together… and makes them sticky.

Google seem to be keeping very quiet about social network plans. Googlers have always been very good at keeping secrets, and have extreme job loyalty. I would think the majority of people who have left employment at Google over the last few years probably did so because they will probably never have to work again or for health reasons. Yes some people whose company has been acquired eventually leave, but financial security does allow a few entrepreneurial freedoms.

My prediction – sometime during 2007 Google will announce a major social networking platform that provides the glue between all their vast array of services.

I haven’t read the ebook fully yet, but it is actually worth signing up for just to see the new twist that has been added on the sales process.

The ebook follows a fairly typical pattern

1-2 page description of a theory (actually quite a good overview)
Affiliate link for a product

If you want a round-up of white hat, grey hat and black hat strategies in a condensed 52 pages, you couldn’t got far wrong.

This ebook certainly answers a lot of common questions I read on forums every day.

Some of the adsense placement tricks I haven’t read before, but maybe because I don’t hang out in the right places as much as I used to.

It isn’t all blackhat, it just probably goes slightly beyond “blending” adverts. Ok, a long way beyond blending, some of the tricks are insanely powerful.

It is partially like the process used by Death of Adsense, and the more recent Death of Internet Marketing, but with a nice “tell a friend” twist.

There are also some useful discounts inside for products I have purchased and even promote as an affiliate.

Adsense Blackhat Edition

Note: Very Important

I have had a few people sign up to receive the download who so far haven’t confirmed their email address. There is a double opt-in process and this is a sign of good intentions.