Google’s a company that trusts numbers over instinct or aesthetics. As you might expect with a company that touts its algorithm as the secret to its success, optimization of results is the Big G’s bread and butter.

It should then come as no surprise that Google’s prime real estate, its search results Sponsored Results, should be open to optimization, as well. Most of us recognize these results, at least the ones at the top, as being shaded in a pale blue. But recently, we found a couple of differently-colored variants – one pinkish, one peachy – that suggests that Google means it when they suggest that publishers test, test and test again their AdSense ad unit background colors, since they can have an impact on clickthrough.

YieldBuild automatically tests background color on text ads (either AdSense or Premium Text Ad Program), but if you’re flying solo, then you’ll want to test and measure, and test and measure.

So much for the Google black box. Google ended years of publisher speculation when it just announced on its AdSense blog that it pays 68% of its revenue to its publishers for AdSense for Content. (It also adds that it pays out 51% of its revenue to its publishers for AdSense for Search)

The first question I had was “with what standard deviation?”. Does Google really pay out the same percentage to all of its publishers, large and small? The language of its post seems to indicate that, with the exception of large publishers with whom they have custom contracts, the 68% holds for everyone.

The second question I asked–and maybe this is just speculative–is “does that figure change?”. Google leaves that open, as its administration costs might change down the line, but the thing about putting a hard number out there is that it will be watched and commented on, and should it change against the publishers, expect an uproar. Since Google doesn’t exactly like to court resentment and bad PR, let’s assume the 68% is the lower bar for publisher payout going forward.

Third question: “what will AdSense publishers speculate on now that Google’s rev share is no longer a secret?”

Publishers using Google Ad Manager to manage their site ad scheduling and serving needs found an email from Google this morning notifying them that their Google Ad Manager account will be upgraded to DFP Small Business (DoubleClick for Publishers) over the course of the next couple of weeks. Along with the nomenclature change come an open API as well as an updated UI.

Google will also be moving (mainly large) publishers using DoubleClick DART for Publishers to a more feature-rich DFP over the course of a year.

Presumably DFP publishers will continue to pay for the ad serving service they’ve been receiving through DART. But what about DFP Small Business? Will the little guys continue to enjoy free ad serving on Google’s dime?

Although the product is self-service and tends to serve publishers with substantially lower traffic, the aggregate traffic volume of long-tail publishers must cost Google a pretty penny. DFP Small Business’s FAQ states that the free service is limited to publishers serving under 90 million ad impressions per month…excluding Google AdSense. Will that 90 million get the squeeze?

The online ad market, while stabilizing after a rough year, has been relatively brutal for the display ad market in particular. While search has continued to eke out growth during the downturn, spend on branding-heavy banner has taken a heavy toll with recovery still elusive.

There might be a type of display ads that buck the trend, though. Geotargeted ads, which combine the eye-catching appeal of a banner with messaging that resonates with a visitor’s locale, was an $897 million market in 2008 but expected to grow at a 16% CAGR through 2013, when it will capture 15% of the display market, comprising $1.9 billion, in the U.S. alone.

BIA/Kelsey’s report highlights increasing spend by SMEs, likely the greatest potential beneficiaries of ad geotargeting, of contributing the fastest growth to the geotargeted display market, with 66% growth through 2013. This is unsurprising. Having learned the ropes of geotargeting ads to reach customers from AdWords, local small businesses are likely to take advantage of services like AdReady, Personiva (now AdaptiveAds) and SnapAds to build display advertising to scale to service customers in desired locations. Text ads through AdWords lacks the visual impact of display and geotargeted display can round out the reach picture for advertisers seeking to saturate local markets.

Growth charts available at Marketing Charts.

We’ve met a lot of people, both online and live, who have heard great things about us, but don’t really know what we do and if we’re a match for their site. This blog post will lay it all out for the curious searcher, and answer some of the most common questions for people interested in our service.

In short: YieldBuild is a free ad optimization service for publishers. We help publishers make more money from ad networks like Google AdSense, Microsoft pubCenter, and ValueClick. Since 2007, we  have helped almost 1,000 publishers make their ads perform better.

How does it work? YieldBuild uses a proprietary algorithm to figure out which ad (across available ad networks, and their formatting options) that perform best to maximize your ad revenue. So YieldBuild will determine, for instance, if a specific ad spot should be filled with a white-background text ad from AdSense, or a display ad from Advertising.com, or a gray-background contextual ad from Microsoft pubCenter, in order to make the most money from that piece of real estate.

The process is relatively simple:

1. You set up an account with YieldBuild, and associate any ad network accounts that you’d like to use (we support many*)
2. You follow our step-by-step installation guide that helps you embed YieldBuild ad tags into the spots on your site where you want ads to run
3. YieldBuild will test a wide variation of ad layout permutations to train the algorithm for your site
4. Once trained, YieldBuild will serve up the best-performing ads on your site, occasionally testing new layout variants that might work better (in case your traffic patterns change or in case ad blindness sets in)

Here are some answers to common questions (more are answered here in our FAQ):

• Do you charge a fee?
  No, YieldBuild optimization is free. We used to charge a 3% impressions-based fee, but we phased that out in September 2009.
• Are there any potential conflicts with the ad networks I work with?
  No. We have optimized AdSense and other networks for two years and have never had a publisher lose their ad network account simply for using YieldBuild. (We can not prevent you from getting banned for other reasons, however, like click fraud.)
• Do you work with WordPress (Blogger, etc.)?
  Yes. We can work with any site or blogging/CMS platform. We do offer a step-by-step installation guide (our express install option) for  WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and vbForum.
• What sites do you work with?
  We accept sites of any size, and any type (with the exception of adult, gambling, and other excluded site types).
• What kind of improvement can I expect to see?
  That is entirely dependent on how well you had optimized your ads before using us, how much latitude you’ve given YieldBuild to optimize your site’s inventory, and the number of optimization options you’ve taken advantage of. An improvement of 20-50% is possible given the results we’ve seen among our top clients. (See some YieldBuild success stories.)

Ryan Hupfer (first in the video) and Ren Chin talk about HubPages and YieldBuild, respectively, at August’s SES San Jose 2009.

Online advertising is a $65 billion worldwide business, and growing again after the past year’s economic lull. But while television ads might be Superbowl-worthy or amusingly worthy of ridicule, online ads can be downright annoying. Marketers try all sorts of novelty to make sure ads get noticed and clicked on, but, many will argue that there are more than a handful of types that go too far: eventually eye candy becomes an eyesore. Here are YieldBuild’s candidates for the most obnoxious online ad formats:

1. The Pop-Up

More of an annoyance 5-6 years ago before pop-up blockers got really good, the occasional ones manages to slip through every now and then, leaving us to play whack-the-mole with the close window button. Leave-behinds (that entreat you to return to the site when you’ve made it clear you want to go) and pop-unders are equally annoying cousins. Netflix, while I love its service, is a notoriously pervasive pop-up advertiser.

2. Autoplay audio and video

There is nothing quite as infuriating as opening a page and wondering why it’s screaming “helloooo?” to you. Chances are it’s an ad peddling high-res emoticons. Autoplay music is something tweeners might have become accustomed to because of MySpace, but the rest of us typically hit the close-window or back button as quickly as possible.
Autoplay video is something even the IAB is trying to step in and squelch, before advertisers overeager to replicate television-style ads turn off Web visitors for years. Often incorporating sound as well, a simple page load forces you to download and sit through noise and visual distraction unless you can be bothered to click the tiny control button to pause it.

3. Deceptive system-message ads

A favorite among malware promoters, this variant of a popup looks deceptively like a Windows or antivirus window, down to the blue control bar on top and Windows system font. They typically use confusing language, like “Do you not want to leave your computer vulnerable to viruses?” and leave you afraid to even click the red-X close-window button.

4. Disgusting pictures

Yes, we understand the acai berry is chock full of antioxidants, but do you really need to show someone’s distended gut to make your point? And will saffron-yellow teeth scare you into buying teeth whiteners online? When I read an innocuous news article, I’m not sure I want to see the inside of a zombie’s mouth in the periphery. Who really clicks on these things?

5. Cheesy animations

Popular among mortgage lenders, who have cut all sorts of unsavory deals over the years, have found a bizarre form of ad that is totally unrelated to their product offering: videos of women or silhouettes dancing. They’ve faded in popularity recently, although that might not be too surprising; one look at these animations and your first thought is “subprime.”

6. Imperfect targeting

Behavioral, geo or demographic targeting that only goes part of the way ends up defeating the purpose of targeting altogether. If you live in San Francisco, for example, geotargeting that suggests you live in Hayward is not a compliment. Demographic targeting based on a geo/IP mapping may serve up the wrong types of ads when there are huge income disparities in a region. And lots of people don’t like to be reminded of discreet searches following them for weeks afterwards in the form of ads that creepily know just a little too much about you.

7. Prerolls on video clips

Video advertising makes sense for high-quality longer-form video. A total of 3 minutes of advertising on an hour-long TV show on Hulu seems more than reasonable to me (even if many of them seem to be PSAs). But a 30-second commercial before seeing an under-minute clip? You’ve got to be kidding me. As much as I love Comedy Central, I’d rather watch grainy bootleg than sit through so many prerolls ahead of their Reno 911 clips.

8. Page Takeovers

These Flash-based ads that run aground the page you’re trying to view can sometimes be intriguing, but usually they’re pretty annoying. And while most have a “close” button, good luck sometimes finding it. They’re hidden in a way that makes you sit through a 10-second video as your pointer dances around the ad looking for a way to close it.

9. Expandables

I don’t know if this the right term for it, but these ads are the ones that look like simple image ads that flood into the rest of the frame, often occluding content you’re trying to look at, if you accidentally run a mouse across them. They often load video, so while you’re waiting for that clip to download, you’re staring at a blank box that’s covering the article you want to read. Finding the close/minimize button can often be tougher than finding Waldo.

10. The Stalker

The Stalker is what I call that “helpful” animated person that appears at a bottom corner of your screen and begins talking to you unsolicited. I’m not sure why the news of the Microsoft Office Paperclip pest’s demise wasn’t relayed to the creators of this ad type. And, unlike their real-world counterpart, the car salesman, the Stalker will ignore you when you curtly say, “I’m just looking.”

Just two years ago, Yahoo made another one of its expensive acquisitions by buying display ad network BlueLithium for $300 million. With a stated intent to marry rich analytical data with behavioral targeting, the ad network, founded just three years prior, was the fifth-largest in the US and the second-largest in the UK, with a reach of around 145 million monthly uniques.

Today—two short years later—it’s impossible to find it.

Google Blue Lithium or BlueLithium and the first page of results point to various news releases about the acquisition or stale company profile pages like on CrunchBase. There’s no link to a rebranding “BlueLithium is now Yahoo Web Advertising” or something similar that you’d expect. In fact, there’s no link to a yahoo.com URL whatsoever. (And just in case Google was gaming the SERP for its competitor, a quick look at Yahoo’s SERP shows similarly vacant results.)

Even worse: typing in bluelithium.com goes nowhere. As in a persistent time-out error. No 301 to Yahoo advertising.

This is beyond bizarre. Among publishers and advertisers, BlueLithium had developed a bit of a brand for itself; it was a name that was recognized. Branded searches (over 50,000 in August alone according to the Google keyword tool) and direct type-ins have undoubtedly continued. The ad network still exists (YieldBuild, in fact, supports it).

Doesn’t it strike anyone as strange that the network seems to have stonewalled any interest among publishers or advertisers that might be potential customers of Yahoo advertising? I mean, isn’t that Yahoo’s business?

The Fed Chief Ben Bernanke claims we’re emerging from a recession, real estate prices are stabilizing, and now even the moribund online ad sector is poised for a healthy rebound in the coming year. WPP’s GroupM is projecting 11% growth in online advertising in 2010 to hit $65 billion worldwide (across 36 countries), with online capturing 14.6% of tracked media.

United States in 2010:

• 7% growth to $24.4 billion
• 17% of overall ad spend (15.4% in 2009)
• search (including contextual) and video biggest drivers; display weak  (mirroring global trends: display will grow 5% next year compared to search’s 12%)
• strong weakness in traditional media (esp. newspapers) also a huge driver

The report gives a nod to behavioral targeting (“intentional marketing”) and the growing nexus between search advertising and socnets’ social graphs.

Mobile advertising gets notable attention: in 2010, it will account for 6% of total digital ad spend (or $3.3 billion), representing a 19% increase over 2009. In the U.S.:

• those accessing the news on their phones every day has doubled to 22 million in 2009
• those accessing socnets on their phones daily has quadrupled to 9 million this year

Today Google announced the launch of its DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which will open up both advertiser and publisher inventory and allow market dynamic-driven pricing and greater scalability with respect to audience reach for advertisers and access to a wider swathe of advertisers for publishers.

Or so goes the pitch. But this is Google, and if there’s one thing it knows and dominates, it’s online advertising.

Getting a sizeable exchange going can often present a chicken-and-egg problem, but Google’s reach among publishers and advertisers (DoubleClick for the head, AdSense/AdWords for the long tail) is already impressive, at 76% of the US and 73% of the global online audiences.

Exchanges, on the other hand, comprise about 10-15% of the display ad business (Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange is the largest). Google will shave off a relatively small fee through the exchange, but what it will gain is access to inventory sources if the exchange grows and dominates. If it can maintain higher efficiency than its competitors, Google will grow its share of a market that it will host and develop.

An PDF explaining the Ad Exchange is here. The DoubleClick blog also has more details.