Sorta an old post that I forgot to publish until today! Having the site closed to new members has given me time to start working through a few of my almost done posts that were never published yet. It’s hard to have time to do everything while growing a few businesses.

Media has traditionally been afforded a wall between editorial and advertising due to limited marketplace competition. But, as Jim Spanfeller stated, the perception of value in “last click marketing” where search gets most of the credit for the entire demand creation and fulfillment cycle, is killing the value of online content:

A publisher can and should price their inventory at levels that will meet the market expectations and drive their business model. What they should not do is allow some sort of invisible hand (or should I say hands) to price their inventory against a backdrop of objectives that can and often does change at a moment’s notice. This practice has fundamentally driven pricing down across the web and, perhaps more importantly, changed the success metrics from ones based on “demand creation” to ones driven by “demand fulfillment.”

Worse yet, the leading metrics most closely track how the poorest members of society interact with media, creating a media ecosystem designed to exploit the poor. The above linked article states “we now know that 16% of web users generate 80% of clicks and that this 16% represents the lower income and education segments of the total user base.”

It may have cost Google 1 day of revenues to create the default analytics tool, which by default has a last click wins behavior that few people know how to edit.

Google’s web domination is so impressive that experienced and well trained journalists writing for publications like Wired mistake Google’s mission statement as the goal of the web. Literally…

The Internet’s great promise is to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams?

Gary Wolf should know that was actually Google’s mission statement, not the goal of the web.

Sure data mining and sentiment analysis can be parts of the web, but the best bits are often scattered messes and weird stuff we accidentally bump into.

It’s that time of the month again folks — time to pay your bills, flip a page on your calendar and refresh your linkbait ideas .  The month of October should be a big one for social media, and ideally you could use this to help aid in linkbait and content creation for your promotions.  By looking at some of the topics and finding a way to relate to your field, you can harness the momentum of that topic and hopefully get more traction.  Here’s what will be hot on social media this October!

• MLB
  It is playoff time!  Who’s in, who’s out?  How long has it been since teams have won a title?  Take a look at any of these angles as it is about the only time of the year that baseball gets hot.
• Halloween
  Get this type of linkbait going early, as the later in the month you go the more saturated the topic will be.
• 2016 Olymipcs
  The new venue is Rio De Janeiro  and there should be an easy week of analyzing the location and what could go right/wrong.
• Michael Moore & the Movie “Capitalism”
  Moore’s newest movie drops today and he is always loved in social media.  This movie might not be a blockbuster, but could bring up some good (and hot) topics for you to write about.
• Horror
  October is the month for lists of the scariest books, movies and more.  Putting together any list that will scare the pants off of readers is sure to do well in October!
• The Stock Market
  After seeing such a rebound in September, the market is sure to be a hot topic in October in whichever way it moves.  Goes up?  We are back to normal!  Goes down?  Another recession.  Any analysis should do well this month.
• Pumpkins
  This may sound silly, but any pumpkin cut-outs, recipes, or products are LOVED at this time of the year.  If you can work your piece around pumpkins (like carving a nerdy jack-o-lantern), you will have instant momentum due to the season
• Roman Polanski
  In case you have had your head in the sand, filmmaker Roman Polanski has been caught and could be extradited back to the US.  The court case was pretty clouded originally, so if you have any need for legal linkbait (tainted trials, extradition, fugitives, etc) use this for extra momentum.
• NHL
  The new hockey season has started so get your linkbait out there while people still care.  Hockey is usually a tough social sell, so try doing it while at least a few  people are talking about it.
• Protesting
  It seems that there is more protesting going on today than there has been in recent years. Whether you are having a tea party, protesting health care or are just mad at the world, protesting has been hot recently and will continue to be throughout October.

Now let the ideas flow and get creative (with the momentum on your side!).  Have a happy haunted month of linkbait!

Have any other hot topics for the month of October?  Feel free to share examples below!

…and don’t forget to follow 10e20 on Twitter and subscribe to our RSS feed.

Google Ad Planner has been beta testing for more than a month now, but there still isn’t a lot out there about it except for 1 greatpost and an even better rant, so I decided to check it out for myself.

At first, it looks amazing. The data is easy to find, easy to sort and more comprehensive than what you will find from Comscore. As an internet marketer, I find myself performing extensive competitive
research and this tool makes it easy to not just find more competition but gives me site statistics about them.

If I am creditcardguide.com for example, and I do not know who my competition is, I can simply enter my own website in the Online Behavior section and I get results showing acclaimvisa.com, smartbalancetransfers.com and creditcard321.com.

I can then drill down on smartbalancetransfers to see their websites demographics (in the US only at the moment). This can be a great way to show your boss your websites market share or see how the competition stacks up.

This also works great for e-commerce sites to help you find which competitors or even complimentary sites are also running Google text ads for site placement targeting. When searching for thefind.com, a shopping portal, I see that shopwiki.com and bedbathstore.com display Google ads. If I were TheFind and looking to grab some more of the market share, I would target these sites.

Google Ad Planner is very useful in regards to research and planning, but it still isn’t perfect.

Initially, while looking to see what websites Ad Planner associates with www.seo-chicks.com the list looks pretty good. It was populated with the likes of Sphinn, Bruce Clay, SEOMOZ, and SEO Round Table. It also mentions Chris Hooley, but did you know that Chris Hooley is in the Alcoholic Beverages category? I know he likes to have a good time, but do you think this is a little extreme?

Drilling down for more information about SEO Chicks, I found out that all of the US visitors to the site are 35-44 year old men. Am I the only one a little creeped out by this?

Beta errors aside, there is a lot of potential with this product for both media buyers as well as paid search professionals looking to do some more advanced site targeting, but in its current state it is still missing some key features. In addition to displaying websites that do not accept advertising, Google Ad Planner can be sorted to show if it accepts Google image ads, Google text ads, or gadget ads.

This feature is great if you are looking for new sites to placement target your PPC campaign, but there is no way to ONLY display websites that accept certain formats of Google ads.

Also, once you build your media plan, there is no way to actually execute it inside the interface. If I just spent all the time finding sites to advertise on, I can’t do much with it because there is now way to integrate this with my Adwords account. I could manually add everything into my Adwords account, but Google should know this better than anyone – PLEASE make spending money easy!

Overall, if you can get on the beta list for this one, it is pretty cool and well worth it despite some miscategorization. When checking their stats on my own sites to verify accuracy, the pageviews, visitors and demographics were spot on, even for the sites that do not run Google Analytics. This does beg the question of where Google is getting this information from, but I am not going to ponder that too much, because if I do I will likely run screaming from the internet and go back to two tin cans and a string for communication and the Dewey Decimal system for research in fear that Google really is Skynet.