Trent Hamm runs a website called The Simple Dollar, which gives financial advice for “people fighting debt and bad spending habits.” His issue with AdSense:

“…this automated bidding system allows anyone to bid, and I don’t have much control over who does the bidding. The end result was that the site would have ads from payday loan places, credit card brokerages, shady subprime lenders, and such.”

“In the end, I finally realized that the real reason I write The Simple Dollar is to help bring about positive change in people’s lives, and when the site showed ads that really conflicted with that mission, I was undercutting what I want to do here.”

To me, this is another positive sign in the evolution of blogging and online journalism. While online media does not have standards and practices that have evolved over a century’s time like print media – decisions like Trent’s show its move in a positive direction. When a blogger will dramatically cut his personal income because of ethical issues over ads… it shortens the expanse from blogger to traditional journalist.

“We’re excited about the launch of video units — a new way to enrich your site with quality, relevant video content in an embedded, customizable player. Simply embed a snippet of code and have relevant YouTube partner content streamed to your site. You can choose categories of video to target to your site, select content from individual YouTube partners, or have video automatically targeted to your site content.”

“Pay-per-action advertising is a new pricing model that allows you to pay only for completed actions that you define, such as a lead, a sale, or a pageview, after a user has clicked on your ad on a publisher’s site.”

One of the reasons that pay-per-action is getting so much attention is that it would eliminate click fraud.

Michael Arrington explains what Pay-per-action means to businesses and to Google itself. Among his observations:

“This won’t affect big advertisers much, because they already track ROI on CPC advertising very closely. For smaller advertisers though, click fraud can wreak havoc. The ability to largely filter out click fraud will help them track ROI much more closely that they previously could. This will be a big help for them.”

“Prices for some online advertising are going up, and some retailers and brand marketers say the big question mark hanging over 2007 is whether publishers will be so emboldened by a strong advertising market that they will raise the prices of ads sharply.”

“Google has been hand-selecting sites (no word on how many sites has been chosen) that they want to put in front of Fortune 1000 companies. The goal being to sell these big companies display and video ads at a very high CPM – unlike the AdSense network, the display network is 100% CPM based.”

“…the campaign uses the same concept of “engagement” that newspaper and magazines have used to promote their shrinking mediums.”

He references quite a number of issues being discussed on the web right now, with this conclusion:

“Online advertising will likely outgrow this phase and deliver a prosperous future — but we should have no illusions about how much pain there’s liable to be along the way.”

Bloomberg reports on the outlook for media advertising in 2007:

“The ongoing shift in advertising dollars from traditional media into non-traditional media, most notably the Internet,” will affect broadcasters and entertainment companies as well…”

Media Magazine shares their insight on the future of media and the internet:

• Traditional media companies will struggle to maintain their audiences.
• More business models will emerge to reward independent content creators.
• TVs, computers, and other digital devices will truly begin to morph.
• Technology will make it easier to find, access, and manage content.
• Digital video will drive the growth of online advertising.
• Advertising in digital venues will become more contextual.
• Small-screen devices will have limited appeal as a media platform.
• Marketers will make some mistakes as they move into new digital spaces.

“By letting companies and individuals build their own specialised search engines, it will also create competition for the many new “vertical” search products that have recently been launched on the web, she added.”

“Users of Google Custom Search Engine will be able to select the websites they want to be included in their searches, and add to this list in future by “tagging” websites they visit. Any searches will then return results just from that slice of the Google search index.”

Rex Hammock talks about his experience with providing vertical search prior to this announcement. On thing that is not clear about the new service is the search details that Google will provide. For example, in Rex’s current search method:

“…we’ve garnered a vast amount of insight from analyzing the search patterns of our users…”

Michael Arrington points out that while Google’s service is not unique, it is the first to:

“…bundle the service with Google Adsense ads and share revenue with websites that embed the custom search engine into their site. “

To help you get a piece of this pie, here are the Top 35 Most Profitable Keywords in AdSense system:

“Expensive keyword” (high CPC) isn’t equal to “profitable keyword” (high earnings) due to the low volume of traffic expensive (niche) keywords produce. The best way to find really profitable keywords is to rank keywords by cost/day (cost per click X clicks/day) rather than cost per click. Almost all AdSense publishers are looking for the most expensive keywords. Let’s have a look at the top 100 most expensive keywords. But first let’s add 2 extra columns to the list: clicks/day and cost/day by Google AdWords estimation…”

In other news, BusinessWeek reports on unreliable and confusing methods of measuring traffic online.

And just in case you aren’t depressed enough with the Google thing and the web metrics thing, here are 5 Reasons Why RSS Feeds are Not Popular.

“…a dizzying collection of scams and deceptions that inflate advertising bills for thousands of companies of all sizes. The spreading scourge poses the single biggest threat to the Internet’s advertising gold mine and is the most nettlesome question facing Google and Yahoo, whose digital empires depend on all that gold.”

While search engines have played down the scope of click fraud, BusinessWeek uncovered a “thriving click-fraud underground populated by swarms of small-time players.”

Steve’s take on all of this:

“My take on all of this is that advertising is clearly at a major crossroads. The old model of throwing stuff up there and seeing what sticks is dying. Search engine marketing, while certainly effective, can have its challenges too and clearly can be gamed. Over time, people are going to say “enough.” They’re going to want companies to engage them in conversation before they are convinced they should buy. This is why I believe we’re about to enter the golden age of PR. “

One thing is for certain, while the web changes the way we publish, the way advertisers reach their audience, and the way people consume media – the web itself must evolve beyond the bubbly expectation that Google will save us all. The great thing about the web though, there is not shortage of watchdogs.