Mark Shead

Smart pricing is the way Google keeps advertisers happy with using AdWords on properties outside of search.  Adwords lets advertisers put a small image on their conversion page in order to track which ads produce sales. Google uses this information to determine how much to pay publishers who are displaying Adsense on their site.  Basically, Google will adjust the amount they pay downward for Adsense accounts that don’t convert very well to customers for the Adwords advertisers.

There isn’t a lot of information explaining smart pricing, but it appears to work like this.  Lets say Google normally charges an advertiser $1.00 for a click on an ad from your site and they split the money with you 50/50. (We don’t know how much this split is, so this is just a hypothetical number.) However, none of that traffic has converted to sales.  Google may then only charge the advertiser $0.50 and split it with you 75/25.  So now you may only get $0.125 from a click whereas you’d be getting $0.50 under the original scenario.

Originally smart pricing was said to work on an account basis.  So a bunch of low quality traffic on Site A that produces clicks and no sales can reduce the revenue you receive from Site B that has high quality traffic that produces sales. Google usually tries to do things in real time, so it wouldn’t surprise me if smart pricing has become a lot smarter.  Possible changes:

• Per page or per site smart pricing.
• Smart pricing based on where the traffic comes from or other attributes.
• More dynamic changes to smart pricing — if every Tuesday your traffic doesn’t convert to sales, maybe you’ll be paid a lot less on that particular day.

If you want to get an idea of what is possible, look at the Insights section of your Google Analytics account.  It shows the types of comparisons with historical trends that are probably going to be used as part of the smart pricing calculations.

I’ve been using Rackspace Cloud Sites for awhile and so far I’ve been very happy. However, their biggest problem seems to be their inability to support wild card DNS. Basically if you want to have *.domain.com all handled by their cloud servers, you can’t do it. I think this is going to start hurting them because WordPress 3.0 has the multi site capabilities built in. For example, if you register a domain for your city like gotham.com, you could let people create their own subdomain blogs automatically. So you could have joker.gotham.com and batman.gotham.com just like Blogger and WordPress.com, but targeted to your specific audience.

However, to do this in Rackspace Cloud Sites, you have to manually create an alias for each new domain–you can’t let it handle things automatically. I’ve gone round and round with them asking for them to consider changing this. At first they told me that they couldn’t because there would be no way to know which node should handle an incoming request since it could be handled by a number of different physical machines. They were saying that not only would the system not support it in its current form, but it would but there was no way to change it so it wasn’t worth even requesting that they consider adding the capability in the future.

I didn’t quite buy this, but it sounded like they were saying they couldn’t do this because a single IP address handles request for multiple domains. I had heard that enabling SSL on the account (another $20 per month) will give you the ability to have a dedicated IP address for your website. I asked if this was true and they confirmed it. So I asked if wildcard DNS would be possible if we added the SSL capabilities.

They still said it was still impossible. Keep in mind, I wasn’t asking if it would work today–I wanted to know what was possible if they were willing to make changes to their system so I could ask them to consider an enhancement to their service. I find it hard to believe that there is no possible way to make it handle wildcard DNS–even when you have a dedicated IP address.

WordPress can handle multi-site on their service if you don’t mind using the same domain for everyone. So instead of joker.gotham.com you’d use gotham.com/joker. For what I’m trying to do, I prefer the subdomain.

Google Insights offers a nice way to compare two terms to see their relative search frequency.  For example, the chart below shows that black cats are much more popular than brown cats when it comes to Google searches:

Notice that the interest in black cats seems to peak around Halloween each year.

This is all nice, but it is all relative. We still have no idea how many searches are run for black cats each month. However, if we can find a single term were we know how many searches are performed each month, we can use that to figure out the approximate search frequency of any other term.

Google Insights is particularly useful if you are trying to target a specific geographic area. There are language differences that will influence what search terms people use. It is worth comparing a number of different near synonyms for a particular term to see how most people are searching in the particular geographic area you wish to target.

When you watch a 3D movie there is a difference between where your eyes are focusing and the triangulation that your brain uses to perceive depth correctly. Strabismus or lazy eye is what this is called when you can’t bring both factors into alignment. Some people have trouble with this and there is concern that the new in home 3d televisions may hamper the development of these linked sense in children

Anyone who learned the technique that allows them to peer into stereograms has taught themselves a temporary form of lazy-eye. Stereograms are those pictures that look like confetti but transform into three-dimensional images if you stare into them long enough. They’re popular with college kids experimenting with Escher.

The modern digital 3D effect using glasses makes this same effect effortless. Your eyes are invited or forced not to properly focus in order to get the full effect of eye-popping 3D.

via 3D Video Hazardous to Your Health

Allegedly the 3d headset that Sega was working on years ago was shelved because of this potential problem.

While going to see a 3d movie once in a while probably isn’t going to ruin your eyesight, there is concern about using the technology constantly in the home–especially use by children.