RFID chips, passports and danger

New passports are to have RFID chips, supposedly to protect us all from terrorists. Wikipedia definition of the chip is

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a method of remotely storing and retrieving data using devices called RFID tags. An RFID tag is a small object, such as an adhesive sticker, that can be attached to or incorporated into a product. RFID tags contain antennas to enable them to receive and respond to radio-frequency queries from an RFID transceiver.

One of these little fellows goes on your passport, and Bob's your uncle, anyone with a low tech radio device can read your passport details as you walk down the street. A Wired article goes into this in detail

New U.S. passports will soon be read remotely at borders around the world, thanks to embedded chips that will broadcast on command an individual's name, address and digital photo to a computerized reader.

The rub is that your passport does not have to be physically read by being put into a reader, any suitable RFID transceiver can decode the chip from several feet away

civil libertarians and some technologists say the chips are actually a boon to identity thieves, stalkers and commercial data collectors, since anyone with the proper reader can download a person's biographical information and photo from several feet away.

The whole brouhaha has stirred up so much controversy already the US Government is now trying to pretend that the chips they are putting in passports are "contactless chips" or “contactless integrated circuits” in fact anything other than Radio Frequency ID tags. But make no mistake these chips are RFID tags, can be read by a remote reader without encryptation, and leave your passport details vulnerable to anyone wanting to snoop.

Why should this bother your. Well take for example a hotel in a foreign land, they will be able to get hold of all the (increasingly comprehensive) details on your passport from their reader. These details could be sold on for commercial use. And more chillingly let us say you are walking down the street in Cairo (or any other country) on a carefree holiday, anyone with a grudge against the US government, and hence its citizens, could identify your nationality as you walked down the street, and take whatever action they desired against you.

Its a grim scenario, these RFID passports are not likely to protect the world against terrorists, it will just cost terrorists more to get a "genuine" passport. But it will leave you open to all sorts of abuses of your privacy, or even your life. Me, when I get one of these passports, I will take the advice given by those that know, and wrap it in aluminium foil to carry it around. This creates what is known as a Faraday Cage, and stops remote unauthorised reading of your passport. All you do is take it out of its aluminium envelope when you give it to the nice man at immigration for him to read on his RFID machine.

Stealing content with frames? Possible?

Having tackled the problem of 302 page hijacking, my attention was drawn to the sites that appeared to be using frames, in some way or another to gain advantage from Googles algorithm.

Certainly when one does an "allinurl" check on some of websites, there are a number of sites that come up under that search which are not apparently using 302's

A part of a threadwatch post today says

Stealing Content with Frames
Google says it's not possible for one site to frame another and rank for the content it frames..... i've heard enough rumblings from the SEO crowd to say that there's more than likely some problem with Googles assertion.

So a number of us think that something odd is going on.

Perhaps the best known of the framers is About.com. A sample "allinurl" search returns this for a Spanish hotel site where you can see the About.com adverts displayed in the top frame and the site in its entirety fed into the bottom frame.

As I put in my blog a couple of days ago, my attention was taken by another DMOZ scraper Artman.net . Again try a state at random, say Michigan Travel and Tourism on it, then select an entry like Apple Valley Golf Club

That page has top and bottom frames. Top frame is

http://artmam.net/www1/top/www.applevalleygolf.com/

bottom frame is

http://www.applevalleygolf.com/

But when I carry out claus's tests for "apple+valley+golf+course" and for www.applevalleygolf.com then the framing does not appear to be harming my ranking.

So if it is not harming my ranking, does the opposite apply, are they improving their own ranking. Undoubtedly tey are getting content ads from Google as a result of the framing, but are they actually being helped in their own ranking.

Seems that right now, nobody is able (or perhaps willing) to answer this question. Its certainly content stealing, but is it any more than that?

Here's another dodgy one - harming me?

Here is another very large directory, Ubbi, that comes up when you "allinurl" query Google.

I take as an example a random site and query their allinurl. This is for TravelForKids.Com

One of the entries for their site comes up as Ubbi , but a different page in the Google cache for Ubbi

The difference in the given urls for the direct link and the cache amount to a space in the cached link between the "www" and "travelforkids.com" on Ubbis site. If you remove the space, then obviously you end up back at the original Ubbi page

I cannot get anything out of the headers to give me a clue as to what is happening, and the Google removal tool will not accept a URL with a space (I do not seem to get anywhere by inserting html code for a space instead of the space)

There must clearly be a cloaked redirect for Googlebot, but I cannot tease out what it is. The site serves up one page for the cache, another for the direct link.

I don't think there is a 302 here, the links nowhere take one to the "target" site directly. However, I suspect that there is a harming of the ranking of any site caught up in the scam.

So basic question "is this just a little mild cloaking or are they harming my ranking?"

So I tried Claus tests suggested in an earlier blog
Query the site name
site:www.travelforkids.com

These both show these is no gain for the directory in "controlling" my position in the rankings. So again a little "harmless" cloaking that is making them money from advertisers, but appears not to be actually harming my own sites.

Can your ranking be hurt with others framing you?

Having removed most of the 302 filth from my sites, I got to looking at who else may be up to dodgy practices to harm my rankings on Google.

My attention was taken by another DMOZ scraper Artman.net . Again try a state at random, say Michigan Travel and Tourism on it, then select an entry like Apple Valley Golf Club

That page has top and bottom frames. Top frame is

http://artmam.net/www1/top/www.applevalleygolf.com/

bottom frame is

http://www.applevalleygolf.com/

Now do the allinurl search for applevalleygolf.com and you get only two results, the Golf Club's own site, and, would you believe their page on Artman.net

A header check shows no 302 and no cloaking

#1 Server Response: http://artmam.net/www1/main/www.applevalleygolf.com/
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK

I have tried to remove my sites on this guy that are appearing in "allinurl" but it is obviously not a 302, as Google sternly refuses to remove the referring page "We could not detect any meta tags on that page."

Instinctively I feel that this must be harming my rankings, but for the life of me I cannot work out what it is.

Am I being paranoid, or is this as deep a scam as 302 hijacks?

I tried Claus, who knows more about these things than I do, and his view was

This search is the most important one:
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=apple+valley+golf+course

Artmam has two listings in the top 500, none of them is the frameset URL. So, at first look there is no problem. I didn't bother to go to top 1000.

The second most important search is this one:
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site%3Awww.applevalleygolf.com

Artmam is not listed as part of the Applevalleygolf site. So, again, there is no problem.

The allinurl search shows only that Artmam has Applevalleygolf as part of a url on their site. There's no harm done in that.

So, framing seems to be safe (at least from this one example).

Actually Artmam is smart here, in that (s)he does not hijack the target site, but manages to display targetted ads in the top frame anyway. It looks a bit spammy with the URL and keywords in dark text topmost (as well as the ebay links), but it seems like it's harmless.

So it looks as if this framing technique is a little "harmess" spamming of the Google index, in order for them to get AdSense ads on the back of the original web site

302s on cloaked redirects using Dmoz base data

Here is a variant on the"get the data from Open Directory and put on a 302" scam. This one does a cloaked 302, serving up different food to Googlebot, than to ordinary browsers. Googlebot gets the 302

Have a look at CBTravelGuide and take a state like Rhode Island on their guide, then take a entry on their index like American Historic Inns .

Now run a header check on their entry for American Historic Inns and you get

#1 Server Response: http://www.cbtravelguide.com/us_rhode_island/index.html?w=14&p=19867&s=3&l=2
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.bnbinns.com/states/RI.htm
Redirect Target: http://www.bnbinns.com/states/RI.htm

#2 Server Response:
http://www.bnbinns.com/states/RI.htm
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Then check the Google cache against that and they are different - added this thing is moving quite fast at the moment, since first writing this the Google cache for the site I removed is gone too.

Neat, eh. Googlebot sees the 302, the rest of the world see the site in the unlikely event of them clicking on it. A cross check shows that the URLs come from Dmoz and the descriptions used on cbtravelguide are just the meta descriptions.

There are others of the same ilk, using DMOZ data

Ansme.com

yields in the header the cloaking info with a twist

#1 Server Response: http://dir.ansme.com/exec/dir/go.asp?u=www.mysite.com
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved
Location: http://www.mysite.com/
Redirect Target: http://www.mysite.com

#2 Server Response: http://www.mysite.com
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK

All of Earth dot com, 302's & DMOZ

This, my friends, is 302s on an industrial scale. A site that has taken all the 4 million Open Directory lisings, and put a 302 on them.

I came across a number of their sites while I was removing 302's from my own sites. AllofEarth runs a family of sites, one for each of the 50 US states, plus around 70 individual country sites. You can read about that company here

The basis of each state/country site is the same template, with listings taken from, you've guessed it, The Open Directory. As far as I can see all these listings have had 302 redirects put on. I have taken a random selection of entries, run them through a header checker, and each time I get "HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved"

A few samples of the sites and the 302 redirects are:-

http://www.alloftennessee.com/goto.asp?link_no=4496
for Ramada , there are over 50,000 302’s for this state
http://www.allofgeorgia.com/goto.asp?link_no=9555
This is for an inn in Georgia. over 20000 302s here in Georgia
http://www.allinnewyork.com/goto.asp?link_no=11425
A Holiday Inn, of over 30,000 302s in New York.

And so on for all states apparently over a MILLION 302's from this series of sites

For all my own sites that have been snared by these people, I have been able to free them using the tip posted in my blog yesterday "Back to work", and remove the offending page on the AllofEarth site from Googles index. Something that Google claim I should not be able to do, but also 302s are something that Google seem unable to police.

Googles own website says on its "Facts & Fiction" page

Fiction: A competitor can ruin a site's ranking somehow or have another site removed from Google's index.
Fact: There is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. Your rank and your inclusion are dependent on factors under your control as a webmaster, including content choices and site design.

Quite patently 302s do effect adversely the ranking of any sites that suffer from them, my sites certainly have suffered a loss of Google ranking. So effectively this site is reducing the ranking of any site listed in Open Directory. But for what purpose you may say? One would assume that it is to make their site rank better, if all the decent sites are knocked in Google serps.

So how do they make money - its from PPC adverts or "sponsorship" with a minimum bid of 3 cents a click (I would doubt that any of their advertisers are paying any more). The pages I looked at seemed to have particularly miss targeted ads, for example this hotel page in the state of Georgia has 4 sponsored ads, 3 of which are for UK companies that do not do any business in the state of Georgia. But I digress...

The Open Directory has over 4 million sites listed, so any of their AllofEarth pages that have been indexed by Google will have been 302ed by AllofEarth. My own experience is that the majority have been indexed, particularly the US listings. And certainly all the listings in AllofEarth directories that have not been "sponsored" appear to have been 302ed by AllofEarth.

302s are getting out of hand when you see it being done on this scale. Can anyone tell me why they are 302ing every site on Open Directory, if the intent is not to harm the Google ranking of those competing sites?

This is not just one guy with a good idea of turning DMOZ into 302s, others are doing it too.So there are 4 million times "x" 302s out there, where "x" is number of sites using DMOZ to create 302s. Its probably a number so large that it would make the population of China seem like a small number.

302's - how big a problem?

Having delved into this 302 hijack problem and by now found over 30 real 302s on my sites, for which I have successfully got Google to remove the offending distant pages from their index. To that extent I feel comfortable to assume that these are real 302s

So I went on to see how big a problem this was for other web sites. The big hotel groups are badly hit. It takes a long time to garner all the header data and ensure that they are real 302s. I by no way plumbed the depths of all InterContinental Hotel Groups sites. The same picture applies to virtually all the big hotel groups. Choice Hotels, Hilton Hotels, .... A selection of the InterContinental Hotels 302s can be seen in following any of these links.

Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
Exhibit D
Exhibit E
Exhibit F
Exhibit G

The BBC has a hijack from number 25 on the list when you query allinurl:www.bbc.co.uk and is for:-
www.allinitaly.com/goto.asp?link_no=22554
do a header search on that and you get

HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 14:53:47 GMT Location: http://formez.excite.it/search/news/results?q=url.host:www.bbc.co.uk&l=en Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Length: 121 Content-Type: text/html Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDSCBCBBQD=CPCCICABNKCOJHDMGPNKDIKL; path=/ Cache-control: private

In fact it then transpires that there is a whole series of these sites that are ironically part of an "allin" series covering many countries and states. The USA series must have over 1 MILLION 302's in place.

A few samples of the sites and the 302 redirects are:-

http://www.alloftennessee.com/goto.asp?link_no=4496
for Ramada , there are over 50,000 302’s for this state
http://www.allofgeorgia.com/goto.asp?link_no=9555
This is for an inn in Georgia. over 20000 302s here in Georgia
http://www.allinnewyork.com/goto.asp?link_no=11425
A Holiday Inn, of over 30,000 302s in New York.
And so on for all states and countries, apparently MILLIONs of 302's from this series of sites

People are even hijacking the British Government, the Foreign Office site has a number of 302s pointing to it, for example from these two sites, if you click the links below you will see they take you to the Foreign Office site, and the header checks both show 302. I cannot work out why this has been done, I would assume that there was a reason. Let me know if you can say why.
The Daily Telegraph (surely a mistake you say, the Daily Telegraph I ask you)
Responsible Travel

The only way to get something done, must be to publicise the problem, and bring it to as many peoples attention as possible. Make no mistake, this is a BIG problem.

Back to work

Back in the UK now, and happily the sun is shining in Cornwall, cos I need it to shine. I started reading various posts that had cropped up whilst we had been ambling through Spain and across the Bay of Biscay.

I delved into this Post by Jason at Threadwatch on the 302 hijack problem, he pointed out that a poster called Idaho had given simple directions on how to check your own sites for the 302 problem.... and boy did I have the problem.

So far I have removed, apparently successfully about 20 hijacks, following the route given. There are a number of other ones that are using cloaking in the redirect, and I'll have to work round that one.

Lets start with Idaho's post, which is very clearly written

My site was doing very well in the SERPs. For over 2 years it had been on the first page for a competitive term (1.2 million listings). Then during the first week in January my site disappeared and traffic tanked for no obvious reason.

When searching for "site:www.mydomain.com" I noticed that my index page often wasn't listed or it appeared on about page 3 or 4 of the results after all my supplemental pages.

A search for "allinurl:mysite.com" often didn't show my index page at all but instead showed somebody else's domain (located in Turkey). When I clicked on this link, my site came up. When I clicked on the cached version of the site, it showed a very old cache of the page. This same site also showed up after all my results when doing a "site:www.mydomain.com"

Using a header checker tool on the site's URL I was able to see it was using a 302 link to my site.

Last night.. I went to Google.com and ... I found instructions on how to remove the page.

I then clicked on the "urgent" link.

Then:
1. I signed up for an account with Google and replied back to them from an email they sent me;
2. I added the "noindex" meta tag according to their instructions and uploaded it to my site;
3. Using the instructions to remove a single page from the Google index, I added the hijacker's URL that was pointing to my site. (copy and paste from the result found on "allinurl" search)
4. I got a message back saying that the request would be taken care of within 24 hours. The URL that I entered showed on the upper right hand part of the screen saying "removal of (hijacker's url)pending."
5. I then removed the "noindex" meta tag from my page and re-uploaded it to my site.

This morning the google account still shows the url removal as "pending" but when I do "site:" and "allinurl" searches the offending URL is gone and my index URL is back.

So it appears that one can remove the 302 hijacking page. I have been through all my sites and got Google to accept 20 of them for removal.

However... that is not all the damage, there are roughly the same number of other dodgy sites that come up in "allinurl" but I cannot remove, as they are cloaking Googlebot from spidering the page they are using for the hijacking. In fact the same sort of cloaking that Google banned some of their own pages for recently

It appears pointless, futile, and a waste of nervous energy contacting Google - all I get is a canned reply when I try to get any help with the problem.

In addition there is further fraud with a few sites that are framing mine, then putting their own AdSense round the framed site.

It would seem to me that Google could get on top of this by following up on scraper URLs that are submitted to them. But do they have the inclination - at present the answer appears to be NO.

Hasta la vista - for a few days anyway

I return to my old world now, so won't be such a regular contributor to this blog.

The reason I have been intrigued with blogging is that it may well the next leap forward in terms of revenue (there again it may not) and creating traffic to amortise the risks inherent in Search Engines dropping your sites out of caprice. There is a (relative) fortune to be made blogging, and I have been trying various ways to find it. Along the way have cropped up little nuggets of information that I posted here. I have also been concerned with the long term implications of the Toolbar, and have believed that publicity to the "real" world was the best way of fighting it.

I own a hotel, got into the web promoting the hotel on the web way back in 1996, got asked to write other hotel web sites, expanded into travel sites to promote the hotels, discovered Adsense, branched into affiliate travel to lessen AdSense risk, reduced number of hotel clients as I did not have the time. I could then afford to spend half the year in Spain doing web work, and the summer in the UK running the hotel - which is what I am returning to now.

Hasta la vista, I'll still be contributing, but not so often ... and I have enjoyed the company.

How do they make money - Blogads

AdSense have been the number one choice for bloggers, but what about Blogads ?

Pulling together two of the world's most powerful communications tools -- ads and blogs -- blogads is a unique vehicle for promoting your dragon-headed dreams

Blogads.com is a network of influential bloggers who collaborate to promote and sell blog advertising.

And the sales pitch is

Rewarding. The average blogger makes $50 a month selling Blogads, with some pulling up to more than $5000 monthly. As advertiser appreciation rises, your yield should rise. Blogads receives just 20% of your ad fee, unlike other networks that charge far more or won't even tell what they take.

An advertiser wishing to sign up for Blogads, gets a list of available sites for whatever topic is chosen, say "travel". Blogads offers ad rates tied to its clients' Internet traffic - the more visitors, the higher the rate for an ad on that site. Some sites will run multiple ads, but most on the list appeared to get either no ads or one.

They sell the space of approximately 500 predominantly US-based weblogs. "It's a wonderful self-feeding furnace," Copeland says. "We're now getting 100 million page impressions per month." That's within "spitting distance" of some of the bigger news sites, such as The New York Times at 400 million impressions, he says.

Problem is 30 million of Blogads' impressions are with Daily Kos which apparently earns $600,000 a year from Blogads, 14 million are with TuckerMax.com, 14 million are with Instapundit.com (earns $300,000 a year) and 40 million with the next 10 largest blogs. In other words very little traffic or money dribbles down to the small blogger.

My conclusion is that if the "average blogger" is putting out 1000 impressions a day, then they can earn $200 a year from Blogads, depending on the niche they are in (and a big if, is that they actually have to have advertisers sign for their site). But basically Blogads is not for the average blogger, Blogads make their money from their larger clients, 80/20 rule in action. The small ones are there to give either credibility or added profit from the "long tail" that nobody can afford to ignore.

Blog ads income from the "average" blogger would only be $50 a year on that basis. They would have to have a lot of these average guys to make any real money from the tail. Unless they can attract 10,000 of them, then there is no real profit for Blogads - but if they did attract 10,000 bloggers, then how would the poor advertiser decide if and where to place their ads.

The income seems to be roughly linear, so if you get 5000 impressions a day, you might expect $1000 a year. You can make so much more from AdSense with a niche site, that its hardly worth the effort of signing up with Blogads, and having what may be garish ads over your blog.

How do they make money - Jason Calacanis

Jason Calacanis and WebLogsInc is reported as having a healthy income in the BlogHerald

News from the Google Analyst Day that Jason Calacanis’ Weblogsinc is bringing in over $600 USD per day in Adsense revenue and made $45,000 USD in its first 4 months with the program, which would put its yearly take from Adsense revenue alone to in excess of $180,000 per year based on this early figure, but with continued growth amongst the Weblogsinc sites and regular new additions to the network, we are guessing that the figure will be closer to $250,000 USD over 12 months.

This, coupled with strong private advertising sales for a number of the more high profile Weblogsinc properties, could well be propelling Weblogsinc towards the $1 million USD advertising revenue figure.

Weblogs Inc. is the purveyor of a network of more than 70 blogs, which it characterizes as the world’s largest. The company is dedicated to creating trade blogs across industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product. Weblogs Inc. network categories include Consumer, Technology, Wireless, Video Games, Media & Entertainment, Business, Life Sciences, Personal, and Events.

Our goal is to partner with individual bloggers, letting them do what they do best (writing, creating community, researching) and support them with what we do best (upgrading the software that drives their Web site, generating revenue, running the business). We split the profits 50/50 with each of our bloggers taking out only hard costs (i.e., sales commissions, credit card fees).

We also allow bloggers to leave our network at any time, for any reason, and take their content with them.

It would appear that it is WebLogsInc who is making the money here, rather than the individual boggers, who get half their blog's income (less "hard costs"). WebLogsInc boasts a netwoork of 70 blogs, which get a total of $600 a day from AdSense. In other words each blog is earning around $9 a day, and the blogger gets half that.

Regular advertising could bring in maybe twice this, so the individual blogger could be earning $10 to $15 a day from blogging. $5000 is not going to make the individual blogger rich, but if WebLogsInc can also clear $5000 a year from each blogger in their stable, then the economies to scale start to kick in once they get over, say, 100 bloggers all scribbling away for them.

Bloggers can leave, but if they are made to feel loved enough, may be inclined enough to earn a pittance per hour for their labours, after all the Open Directory has thousands labouring away for nothing. Name of the game here is to sign up bloggers, and that would seem to be an achievable goal.

How do they make money - Tim Bray

Tim Bray is

Technology Director at Sun Microsystems, which I joined on March 15, 2004. By way of disclosure, I should also say that I am a significant shareholder in Antarctica Systems, which I founded in 1999.

However, what I say here is certainly not guaranteed to be any company's official position on anything.

Seems like my kind of guy, when he comments on tech things

we still fail, most times, to produce things that are fun to use. Every time I start out with a new software tool ... I know in advance that there are going to be some moments of extreme pain when I want to do something obvious, basic, and necessary and I can't figure out how to do it. Then once you know how to do it, you understand why that is the natural and correct way.

He tries AdSense, and after a month reports

Summary: I’m not going to get rich or buy a new car with Google Ads, but turning ongoing from an expensive hobby to a sideline revenue source feels good.

John Battelle’s Business 2.0 write-up on the Foo Camp... increased my typical daily readership by a factor of five or so. Since basically all of them were first-time visitors, the click-through rate went way up; I estimate that this link was worth well over $200 in revenue. It’ll be interesting if I ever get Slashdotted again, since that multiples the feed by a factor of ten or twenty not five.

He is onto the point about writing pages for targeted ads.

Bloggers like Searls and Scoble, who write great stuff but jam all of it into the front page, are really not giving Google a chance to be smart about dealing out ads, and while they’re both quite a bit more popular than I am, I bet I make more ad money than they could as long as I’m running focused standalone essays and they’re running inline pieces.

And posts about his stats and income in June 2004

Over at "ongoing" I do about 5,000 impressions a day (my own web bug confirms the numbers AdSense reports) and I make $2-300/month over hosting expenses, a bit more if I get a pointer from CNN or elsewhere in the mainstream press. Not a significant income, but there's lots of growth potential I suspect.

Having said that, I suspect that eventually AdSense will get some competition and there will be more money to be made.

So that sums it up, targeted AdSense adverts, 5000 impressions a day, and an income monthly from AdSense in the region of around $400 to $500. Don't think he needs the money, as the day job pays well, but every little bit helps!

How do they make money - John Battelle

John Battelle's Searchblog carries AdSense and Adbrite ads (humm, not sure if he is meant to do that)

Quite some CV, according to the UC Berkley School of Jouralism

Visiting Professor John Battelle is one of the co-founders of Wired magazine and the founder and former Chair of Standard Media International ("The Standard"), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. He has been responsible for or involved in the launch of more than 30 magazines and websites, including more than a dozen in international markets. He was named a "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as well as a finalist for Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year.

An interview with Google Blog reveals

I started it as a way to catalyze a conversation between myself and what I hoped would be a small but robust community of folks in the search industry, mainly to help me research and ponder the book i am writing. I was stunned when I realized that it got to more than 50K readers

That was the sum total of the information available on the search engines. I assume Mr Battelle is owning up to 50,000 visits per day (it is unlikely to be 50,000 per month - even a less high profile blog can manage around 1500 a day)

No indication anywhere as to what he is earning from Adbrite and AdSense, though he is not too impressed with Adbrite

As for the AdBrite system, I agree that the ads which show up on my site are mostly crap.

Given his (considerable) income from non blogging sources, he is certainly doing well with blog traffic. If he were to achieve even a modest CPM on AdSense of $2, then he would be getting $100 a day, or say $35,000 a year at a best guess. Not bad for a hobby site.

How do they make money - Jason Kottke

Jason Kottke sets out his objectives for his blog, which he started in 1998

This is a collection of my experiments in media, design, hypertext, photography, writing & programming. If that's too pretentious for you, this site is a bunch of stuff I've been noodling with for the past few years.

He is now a full time blogger, so his income needs to be reasonable from the site. SFGate reported in May 2004 that Kottke says his site, gets 12,000 to 15,000 visitors a day. And by February 2005 he is reporting 25,000 visitors a day

Prominently displayed on the site is a "Support kottke.org with a financial contribution" banner linking to a page giving full details of how to contribute using PenPal. As an incentive to donate:-

If you contribute $30 or more (that's $2.50/mo. over the next year), you'll be entered to win one of the following gifts donated by several generous individuals and companies. If you're the type of person who's impressed by numbers, the total cash value of the gifts is about $6200.

He appends a list of over 600 micro-patrons including Google and Disney Blogs

Wired News comments on the risks involved, versus the gain to be made, by not taking advertisers.

But eschewing advertisers is more of a risk. Kottke is avoiding them because, as a one-man operation, there's no easy way to neatly separate editorial and advertising.

"Advertising introduces a third party into the relationship between me and my readers," Kottke said. "I don't want to be doing things on my site that are geared more to advertisers than to readers."

He is a powerful feeder of other sites, for example is number 9 on the list that feed Waxy.org and number 18 on the Technorati list of most influential blogs. And there is a nice quote from David Galbraith

So Kottke has set up in an garret in Brooklyn to become the first full-time Blogger with Left-Bank style freedom - which is great news, good luck Jason.

“I’m attempting to revisit the idea of arts patronage in the context of the Internet,” said Mr. Kottke, who attracts about 25,000 visitors per day. He suggested $30 for the year, or about $2.50 per month. Mr. Kottke hopes to make one-third to one-half of his prior salary as a web designer, but declined to give numbers.

The conclusion would appear to be that Jason Kottke attracts 25,000 visitors a day, and has 600 patrons. If you assume, for no good reason, that they average $50 a head it gets him to an income of $30,000 a year. I suspect that it is more than that with a few large donations, but the lack of any advertising certainly cuts the potential for any large income.

How do they make money - Jeremy Zawodny

Jeremy Zawodny, one of the highest profile of the bloggers, moved into the platform engineering (infrastructure) group at Yahoo in 2003 to do MySQL support, architecture, planning. As he put it himself "Jeremy Zawodny plays with MySQL by day and spends his spare time flying gliders in California."

His entertaining daily blog chronicles his work at Yahoo, plus random personal thoughts about the web, the weather and the hereafter.

Actually it's not quite right to say that he talks about his work at Yahoo, more his work outside Yahoo and his, shall we say, "evangelising" for Yahoo

His bio, used to promote the upcoming WMW conference in New Orleans, where he is a speaker concentrates solely on the tech side of his work

Jeremy has been with Yahoo! for almost five years. His Yahoo! career started with the high-traffic Yahoo! Finance site, where he worked to make MySQL part of the site's core infrastructure in large batch operations, as well as real-time feed processing and serving content directly on the site. He has since worked on numerous other groups including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! Sports, and Yahoo! Shopping. Jeremy is currently Yahoo!'s MySQL guru, working closely with Yahoo!'s many engineering groups on application architecture design, database support, tuning and troubleshooting.

What Jeremy seems to do is give Yahoo a rather personal feel, but it appears as "mild" PR none the less

"PR does not own the blog. And it'd be a wasted opportunity if it was just another PR outlet," he wrote. "I've tried to impress upon the folks involved that running a weblog is about openness and that it's a two-way street. Bloggers can often smell PR influence a mile away."

Zawodny added he expected readers would be a mix of "journalists, bloggers, power users, and random other folks." Zawodny debates the issues himself in Honest and Blogvangelism

It'll be harder than it used to be, because I'm more likely to actually know the people that I run the risk of offending. And that means toning down would be the easy thing to do. But would you be nearly as interested if I always did the easy thing?

And he signs off with the words of Mark Pilgrim on corporate blogging:

A corporate blog is just like a personal blog, except you don’t get to use the word “motherfucker.”

This is a personal blog. I just happen to talk about work stuff more than is probably healthy.

And he wrote himself in 2003

If you wanted to gather some statistics about the usage and growth of blogging and aggregators, where would you get 'em? I'm talking about the kind of numbers that make a slightly pointy haired boss think twice about ignoring the blog world.

If he ever found out the answer to his own question, he certainly isn't letting me find it. Like Russell Beattie, Jeremy Zawodny is a "semi corporate" blogger, though both would probably deny the term. No advertising on their blogs, and no way of getting at site stats. Obviously independence has a price.

How do they make money - Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble, The Scobleizer, is both a blogger and also an employee of Microsoft, where he holds the official title of “technical evangelist”. Those two roles are interlinked. Blogging led to him getting a job at Microsoft, and his job at Microsoft involves blogging.

The Economist ran an article about him, pointing out what he has achieved

he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience.

Robert Scoble used to work for NEC on tablet PCs and used his blog to give tech support and get feedback from his customers. The blog was refreshingly honest and achieved a following among the cognoscenti.

This caught the attention of Lenn Pryor, who is—really—Microsoft's “director of platform evangelism”. Until then, says Mr Pryor, Microsoft had been evangelising mostly one-on-one, “which doesn't scale well”.

Mr Pryor figured that the straight-talking Mr Scoble would make a reassuring pilot or “a great evangelist”. So he hired him. Mr Scoble, for his part, simply kept doing what he was good at. His blog—which he has kept outside of Microsoft's computers, and to which he usually posts in the wee hours after midnight—reads like a stream of consciousness.

And the article concludes with

Will corporate bloggers start to get tongue-tied and sound just like tedious press releases? Mr Scoble, for his part, hates the question but concedes that, theoretically, Microsoft's corporate view and his own could come into severe conflict, and it is not clear what would happen then. Will he criticise only the small things, but toe the line on the big issues?

Two months after joining Microsoft in 2003, and article by a Seattle Post reporter quotes Scoble

"Microsoft is like an anthill, and I'm an ant," explained Scoble, the employee who always thinks about justifying his posts to CEO Ballmer. "I'm allowed to give the ant's perspective on the world, but I'm not allowed to give the anthill's perspective on the world."

I have spent hours trying to get anything "concrete" about Robert Scoble, the real man and about his web site stats. And come away with little real info on either. There is just nothing out there. It is quite neatly summed up in a quote from Mr Scoble's own blog, on the subject of Mark Jen, the ex Microsoft guy, who joined Google and got fired within 2 weeks for blogging about Google in a way his bosses did not appreciate.

Reading Mark's blog I can see a variety of mistakes he made. When you start at a new company you need to build a relationship network before you start discussing the company in public. You need to understand what the various forces that have power (and, at every company there are probably people who have more power than you do -- even the CEO has to listen to the board of directors and to other people inside the company) and you have to work carefully and deliberately.

It's not easy writing in public. All it takes is one paragraph to lose credibility, have people laugh at you, get you sued, create a PR firestorm, or get your boss mad at you. Think about that one for a while.

Robert Scoble has certainly followed his own advice. He is successful in that he has a blog in his own name, but that "evangelises" Microsoft. If he were fired today, he would still be a successful blogger tomorrow, but would presumably have to monetarise his site. At present we have no idea how many people read it, other than it must be a fair few, given its popularity in the RSS feeds.

And I assume that there is no income from the site other than any donation Microsoft may make, or indeed whether his salary is in any way tied to the blog. The blog and Microsoft appear to be intertwined.

A successful, but enigmatic blogger, who has maintained his credibility, even when working for what is not the most loved corporation in the world.

How do they make money - Russell Beattie

Russell Beattie is not a full time blogger, and he is not trying to earn a full time income off blogging.

He has ended up working for Yahoo. Bit of networking involved, but we all do that don't we?

a few weeks ago I wrote about deciding not to go through the interview process at Google and suddenly my site got a megaton of attention. It was nuts. Among the variety of emails I got over the next week, Jeremy emailed me again to ask if I heard anything from Yahoo and when I said no, he used some of his newfound pull at Yahoo to have "someone" get in contact with me. You can imagine my surprise when a few days later I received an email from Jerry Yang himself.

And after 4 months working as a contractor for Yahoo, he gets a full time job there in Feb 2005

So on Monday morning I'm going to trade in my blue Contractor badge, and swap it for a spanky indigo Employee badge and become a full timer at Yahoo! This just happened during the last couple of days. I was coming to the end of my current contract, and Y! extended a great offer to join full time and after some thought I decided to take it. Though I'd love to start my own company or join a little startup already in progress, the opportunities at Yahoo are just too big to pass up. It's literally an opportunity to change the world, how can I say no?

He is sensitive of the problems that blogging can cause within corporations - remember Mark Jen and Google a few weeks ago.

That said, this blog will remain, as much as I can make it, an independent entity, but I'll obviously have to post more disclaimers from now on.

Anyway, having established that Rus is not a full time blogger, lets see how much he is raking in from his blogging on the side. He has built up his blog to getting in March 2005 around 5000 visitors per day according to his site stats counter. He has tried to monetarise that traffic with AdSense (there is an O'Reilly ad as well)

I made $819 in ads in December.

He has dabbled with AdSense alternatives, but that has not worked

Yep, Kanoodle didn't work out. Over two days I made $12 (where I would normally make almost $45 given my AdSense average for Wednesdays and Thursdays). And worse than that, today the Koodle ads just aren't showing up. Nothing, just a big blank box. No one's going to click on the ads if there's nothing there.

Interestingly not everyone gets the AdSense ads served. The ads only appear when you visit this site from a Google search or from a referrer, the "regular" visitors do not get the ads

I've changed it so *any* referrer will show the ads. Based on the links people click, it's obvious that many people are searching, finding other blogs first, and then clicking through to my blog. Since I can't see the trail, I just turned it on for everyone. Regular readers, however, still don't see it.

And he reaches the same conclusion that everyone has on niche sites for blogging as the way to make money

If you think about the business models of Engadget or MobileTracker or any of the new types of professional blogs out there, they're really nothing but honey traps like this. But they're still making the pretense of focusing on a specific topic area like gadgets or phones. Screw that! Whatever the big seller is (say Vioxx or whatever), well, you spend a couple of hours researching that topic, writing up a summary, maybe add a few links and bam! You've got a honey trap. Now you wait a few days for the Search Engines to start referring over traffic, much of which notices the largish ads you've place in the middle of your content and when they click, you get paid.

So there we have it, Russell gets 5000 visitors a day, and makes $27 a day ($800 a month) off the web site in adverts, the bulk off AdSense. And he yearns after getting more from niche marketing!

You make utter bollocks blogging

Fred Wilson recently posted in his blog that he was making the grand sum of $500 a year from the blog. In round terms he is "raking in" $2 a day from around 2000 site page views daily, and getting 1.5 cents a click. That's a CPM of $1 and a click through rate of around 1%.

Its really the under 2 cents a click that is the killer here. One reader comments on Fred's blog

If your weblog was more focused on a specific niche (ie, venture capital) rather than just a random slice of your life, Google would show better ads and you'd earn substantially more money.

I blog on a tangential subject and make $500 a week off your traffic.

Which would be, say, 10000 clicks (7% CTR) at 50 cents a click (or whatever similar permutation. Undoubtedly, if you want the money, then that's the field you have to go after. And attract targeted AdSense ads that will actually deliver that sort of CTR and EPC

And at the other end of the scale The Blog Herald reports

News from the Google Analyst Day that Jason Calacanis’ Weblogsinc is bringing in over $600 USD per day in AdSense revenue and made $45,000 USD in its first 4 months with the program, which would put its yearly take from Adsense revenue alone to in excess of $180,000 per year based on this early figure, but with continued growth amongst the Weblogsinc sites and regular new additions to the network, we are guessing that the figure will be closer to $250,000 USD over 12 months

And would you believe it Weblogsinc is in niche blogging

Weblogs, Inc. is dedicated to creating trade Weblogs (a.k.a. “blogs”) across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product.

Blogging for Dollars has a heap of tips on how to make more from a blog. And it all seems to come back to niche blogging. That guy produced a blog on Personal Video Recorders, and

Late that night I remembered the ads and logged into my Adsense account to see how the day went. I clicked over to reports to see the activity. From approximately 3,000 visits (not too shabby at all), enough people clicked through that I made $40 in the first 24 hours.

Must have been pushing 200 clicks at 20 cents a click (or whatever combination). TBray with his general blog

Bray says he makes about $200 to $500 a month from Google ads, after subtracting his Web hosting charges, which he won't disclose.

Russell Beattie Claims to do well from AdSense

Yep, Kanoodle didn't work out. Over two days I made $12 (where I would normally make almost $45 given my AdSense average for Wednesdays and Thursdays).

But for the life of me I couldn't find a single AdSense ad on his site. Bit of digging and I find that he only serves you up AdSense ads if you have come via Google search (or is now changing it to from any referrer) - regulars do not get the ads

What I have decided to do is to look at he income generated by a number of high profile blogs, and see what I can learn from them. Then relook at this summary page, and rewrite it in the light of what I have learnt.

They click faster in India

Click fraud is a major problem, but either nobody knows how big a problem it really is, or they are not saying.

Google and Yahoo have a vested interest in playing down the problem, the newly coined "click fraud consultants" have a vested interest in talking up the problem.

The infamous Times of India article last year tells how the "job" of clicking on adverts is established in India

Maya Sharma (name changed) gets down to work every evening from her eighth-floor flat at Vasant Vihar. Maya's job is to click on online advertisements. She doesn't care about the ads, but diligently keeps count — it's $0.18 to $0.25 per click.

Clickers say they pay $7 commission for every $50 earned.

And as they point out searching for "earn rupees clicking ads" in Google, and you get enough suggestions to keep you in rupees for months.

You hear tales of massive click fraud like this Medical Billing Software company that lost $100,000.

The market for advertising of this sort is in the region of $4 to $5 Billion, but nobody is prepared to say how much is fraud. The Cnet article quoted for the medical billing example above, is equivocal on the total amount of fraud

It's anyone's guess as to the financial liability it holds over the search engines; Google, Yahoo and others do not break out numbers on the amount of fraud detected and refunded. But anecdotally, people estimate that it could comprise between 5 percent and 20 percent of industry sales.

Problem is the evidence is only anecdotal, which means vested interests come into play

"It's a billion-dollar problem," said Tom McGovern, president of Snap.com, a relatively new search engine backed by Idealab, founder of commercial search pioneer Overture Services.

But Snap.Com has an axe to grind in over-estimating the problem. Their new service will let marketers bid for placement in Snap.com's search results but pay only if a customer buys something. And at the other end of the scale

"Click fraud exists, but it's mostly a big paranoia," said Chris Churchill, chief executive of Fathom Online, a San Francisco firm that studies the spending patterns on search engine ads.

Perhaps it is best summed up in this CNN report

"Click fraud is like a big elephant standing in the middle of the living room," said Lisa Wehr, president of Oneupweb, a search engine advertising consultant. "Everyone sees it and knows it's there, but no one is quite sure what to do about it."

But as we all know, it is an expanding business

In mid-1999, advertisers paid Overture an average commission of 11 cents per click. By the end of last year, advertisers were paying an industrywide average of $1.70 for the hundreds of keywords tracked by Fathom Online.

Ands it is expected to double in volume in the next 3 years. No doubt invalid clicks will double too.

Click fraud, bollocks or not?

On the surface the odd bit of click fraud would not seem to hurt anyone much. After all what is the odd few cents for a bogus click to a big company (bit like nicking a pencil from the office, or making a personal phone call when the boss is out)

No, its more than that, big money is involved, A New York Times article points out

Google, the most popular search engine, said in February it collected $1 billion in revenue during the last three months of 2004, both from ads that appeared alongside Google results when people searched for specific keywords and from ads it placed on other companies' Web sites based on the context.

Yup, that's $1 billion from those little clicks to big G alone in only 3 months. Add to that the PPC income generated by the other players in the market. We are talking serious money here. A few years back it was simple, you set up a PPC campaign, and you paid the SE for the results. Today you need to consider employing a specialist click fraud consultant

Several years ago, nearly all the money spent on keyword advertising flowed directly from marketers to search companies. Now, half of that spending passes through a new cottage industry of middlemen, agencies that specialize in search engine marketing and click fraud detection, according to a report from JupiterResearch, which conducts business and technology market research.

A Clickz report goes into some of the figures that are touted for the extent of the problem

It is on these affiliate sites that 70 percent of click fraud activity takes place, according to Scott Boyenger, president and CEO of ClickDefense, one of a score of companies that has launched in the last 18 months to identify and stop click fraud. Affiliate publishers distribute pay-per-click ads and search players pay them a cut of what advertisers bid.

"About 15 to 20 percent of all click activity is erroneous. Seventy percent of that is not by real people," Boyenger said, referring to bots designed by fraudsters to click on PPC ads. "The advertiser is the loser and the companies offering PPC are winning, and so are the affiliates

So the problem appears to be more prevelant, and there is some agreement among the experts that the percentage of click fraud is higher on so-called tier two services like Kanoodle, Enhance Interactive, and FindWhat.com than on Google and Overture.

Overture says it employs three lines of defense against click fraud. First, every click must pass through a system of thousands of filters designed to screen out "unqualified" clicks of all kinds. Second, Overture employs a team of expert analysts whose job it is to screen out invalid clicks from genuine click traffic. Finally, Overture actively solicits input from its advertisers, forming what it refers to as a "neighborhood watch" helping to report suspicious activity, Slade said

So how big is the problem, seems nobody knows, or that those who do know are not wanting to say A CNN article reports

Estimates vary widely on how much click fraud is going on in the $3.8 billion search engine advertising market.

"Click fraud exists, but it's mostly a big paranoia," said Chris Churchill, chief executive of Fathom Online, a San Francisco firm that studies the spending patterns on search engine ads.

Others believe anywhere from 10 percent to 20 percent of the clicks are made under false pretenses.

You pays your money and you takes your choice apparently.

Is Google going nowhere?

Todays Issue of Business Week questions where Google is headed

In an article headed

Google: A $50 Billion "One-Trick Pony"? Its focus on Web-searching -- an increasingly limited arena -- may be blinding it to big opportunities elsewhere

It points out

Google remains almost entirely dependent for growth on search -- a business that's poised to slow.

And whilst acknowleding that Google has been sucessful in getting revenue from Search, then goes on to say

But Google's belief in search may be blinding the company to other opportunities. To see what they risk missing out on, Google execs need look no further than key rival Yahoo! (YHOO ), which tirelessly looks for new business models. While search accounts for 45% of Yahoo's sales, the portal also snares one-third of its revenues from so-called display ads that contain graphics and multimedia, as well as 16% of sales from subscription services, such as online personals and fantasy football. By comparison, Google gleans 98% of its sales from text ads, primarily placed around search results.

They do not see much growth from Gmail

So even if targeted e-mail ads take off -- a questionable proposition, since most industry observers believe e-mailers are far less likely to click on links than searchers -- the money will come from the same budgets that buy the rest of Google's ads.

Business Week is equivocal as to where display ads will lead and concludes with

Google, rightly, has plenty to tackle in its core business of search. But those aren't the only opportunities for the search kingpin. Others deserve exploration, lest its narrow focus become a case of tunnel vision.

One really does wonder whether in say two years time, the world will have passed Google by. For those of you that recall Captain Queeg in the Caine Mutiny

Ah, but the strawberries! That's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes, but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, and with geometric logic, that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox did exist!

An acceptable career? or Utter Bollocks

Porn appears to be moving into mainstream life these days. Even the staid, respectable BBC has an article in how porn has come on these days

Today anyone can set up a website and become a porn star. With the internet fundamentally changing the industry, could pornography be becoming mainstream?

It takes the example of Francesca



Francesca, 59, lives in rural Oxfordshire and is apparently one of the UK's most popular internet porn stars. She has her own website and is known as a BBW - a big, beautiful woman. An acronym, that I must confess to never having come across before - but there again I have led a sheltered life.

Anyway, it was ever so easy to get the business off the ground

"A boyfriend suggested I get into pornography. He loved me the way I was and showed me other men did to. I didn't believe anyone else would find me attractive. We took six glamour shots, put them on an internet site and the next day I had 250 e-mails offering me work and from admirers."

And the web also means that the customer gets involved as well

Jo, who is in her 30s, meets subscribers for sex and puts the pictures on her site. She travels round the country, having group sessions with up to 20 men a week. Her partner Phil take the pictures.

All this has resulted in, shall we say, an opportunity for more to indulge in the porn business

"A lot of magazines are dying out now. Why have the embarrassment of going to a shop to get a mag when you can get everything you want more discreetly and privately on the internet."

The fact that it is readily avaiulable does not make it morally right, but the fact that more people are indulging in porn is a fact of life. The fact that the BBC reports on it in a straightforward way shows that we are all getting used to it being around

"All you need to be a porn star these days is a camera and internet connection. It also helps to be an exhibitionist."

When I was a lad, it helped to be photogenic in the conventional sense of the word, but we can all get involved in it now.

Moles, trolls, spies and lurkers

There was a hugely entertaining little spat at WebMasterWorld when the pack rounded on one poster because they thought that he was too pro Google and probably a Google stooge.

Post #156 has ThatAdamGuy saying

I know that Google actually reads all of their feedback, and I went ahead and sent some autolinks suggestions their way.....I hope others here will post their thoughts in this thread and e-mail Google directly to offer constructive suggestions on making the toolbar (autolinks function and beyond) more useful.

Problem was this was after 155 posts in the thread, where he had been the only one to defend the Autolink feature on the Google toolbar. This was the final straw for Multiman. In a post that stood for some time before being deleted by the mods, he accused ThatAdamGuy of being a Google employee, and perhaps (gasp) even the famed Googleguy himself in another guide

GoogleGuy, ThatAdamGuy, co-incidence? I find the latest post to be very suspicious.
And if not the same Guy, with my apologies to the former, then perhaps the latter is simply looking for a job with the Orwellian-style "Dept. of Mis-Information" at G$ or works there already?

"I know that Google actually reads all of their feedback"

How can ThatAdamGuy "know" that? And who would say such a thing that way except for someone connected or trying to be connected to the never-ceasing-to-be-evil G$?

ThatAdamGuy comes back with with a defence

I'm somewhat reluctant to respond to the "when did you stop beating your wife" stuff, but let me put some stuff to rest:

1) I am not a Google employee, a contractor, etc.... much less GoogleGuy. I do not work for Google.

2) I am, frankly, not likely to ever be a Google employee for a variety of personal reasons.

3) I have written a number of Google of criticisms here and elsewhere; ironically, one of them was deleted here on WW bcause it was deemed inflamatory. I don't believe Google can do no wrong....

4) How do I know that Google reads all the feedback it gets? As I noted earlier in this thread, I have a bunch of friends at Google, including several that READ AND PROCESS FEEDBACK (none of my friends work on or have worked on the Gtoolbar, btw). Call me naive, call me a shill, call me anything but late for dinner, but I believe my friends when they tell me that every piece of feedback is read.

Entertaining stuff, and without doubt Adam is not a Google employee. But you may ask who Multiman is (a school of thought believes he posted previously under the nom de geurre of Everyman) . You may well ask who any of us are

The bottom line is that the web and blogging have become so important that large companies need to employ people to "police" the web on their behalf. These are professionals from the PR dept. At best the contact is open and above board, we can see where "GoogleGuy" is coming from, but there are a stack of them out there now who are more, shall we say "subtle" in their approach. So when you read posts that are pro or anti, always ask yourself "who is this guy working for and who is paying their salary"