Russian .SU Increases Stakes in ICANN Fight

ICANN is continuing attempts to delete the .SU (Soviet Union) domain extension. Pressure has increased after the successful decommissioning of the .YU (Yugoslavia) address this week, where operators for the new extensions .RS for Serbia and .ME for Montenegro agreed to migrate existing users.

ICANN has again, “urged the current .SU operators to make it clear to the .SU registrants the issues surrounding the domain, as well as to freeze new registrations until its future is clear” .

In response the .SU operators have announced an 80% price cut to celebrate their 17 year anniversary and plans for a new IDN .SU. This would bring the pricing for .SU into line with .RU and boost registration numbers.

While the .SU operators are keen to stress “relations are friendly”, this dispute is gaining momentum.

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Google to Sell Web-Page Ads Visible on Mobile Phones

In another step to extend its dominance of online advertising, Google said Monday that it would begin selling ads on Web pages that are viewed on cellphones.

The company said that its new product, AdSense for Mobile, would establish a cellphone advertising network in which Google would match ads with the content of mobile Web pages, much as it does online.

Other Internet giants, including Yahoo and AOLTime Warner, as well as some start-ups, have also created advertising networks tailored for mobile phones.

Dilip Venkatachari, product management director for AdSense, said the ads would provide a new source of revenue for publishers and could encourage more online sites to create mobile-focused Web sites. Like most other Google advertising systems, ad prices will be set through an auction and and advertisers will pay when a user clicks on its ad.

Mr. Venkatachari said Google had encouraged publishers to have no more than two ads per mobile page, a smaller number than typically appear on a PC’s Web browser.

Google has been testing the system with a limited number of advertisers and publishers this year. On Tuesday, it will open it to all mobile publishers in 13 countries, including the United States, Britain, France, China and India.

Last summer, Google began selling ads that appear next to search results on mobile phones through a program known as AdWords. Last week, it said that all of its online AdWords advertisers, which are said to number in the hundreds of thousands, would be eligible to have their ads appear next to search results on cellphones.

Google’s further inroads into mobile advertising have long been expected. But the market remains relatively small, and analysts do not expect the new service to contribute much soon to Google’s bottom line.

Still, advertisers and publishers appear to be growing increasingly comfortable with mobile advertising. AdMob, a start-up that runs a mobile advertising network, showed 230 million ads in January and expects to show about 1.5 billion this month, said Omar Hamoui, its founder and chief executive.

“The reason that Google and others are getting in is that the market is growing so rapidly, so people are getting very excited,” Mr. Hamoui said.

Earlier in the year, AOL acquired Third Screen Media, an AdMob competitor, while Microsoft acquired ScreenTonic, a mobile ad company based in Paris. On Monday, Nokia said it would buy Enpocket, a company in Boston that displays ads on cellphones.

Microsoft said it was expanding a mobile search partnership with Sprint first announced last November. Since then, Microsoft’s search technology allowed Sprint customers to look for ring tones and local Web content, like restaurants and stores. Starting Tuesday, Sprint customers will be able to use Microsoft’s service to search the entire Web on their cellphones.

In addition, customers will be able to choose to have Sprint track their whereabouts, so that when they search for local content, they will not have to type in their location.

Users will also have access to these services through voice-activated technology, allowing them to speak into the device rather than triple-tap or type in a keyword.

[via nytimes.com]

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Google Program Enlists Mini-Sites as Selling Tool for Advertisers

Google is seizing on the popularity of widgets — small online tools that function like mini-Web sites — for its latest push into advertising.
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An ad for Honda Civic was an example of Google’s widget program. Users can give the ad a ubiquitous presence on the Web.

The online giant will announce today a Gadget Ads program that will provide tools for advertisers to run widget ads in Google’s AdSense network.

Marketers can use space within these display ads on Google’s network to show videos, offer chats with celebrities, play host to games or other activities. If consumers like the widget ad, they can save it onto their desktops or on their profile pages online on sites like Facebook and MySpace.

The new widget ads represent a more aggressive push by Google to attract big brand advertisers who like flashy ad units rather than the simple text ads commonly run in Google’s ad network.

One big advantage of the technology is that the consumer does not have to click through to a Web site. A weather widget, for example, would constantly update the weather report in a particular area. Similarly, marketers could feature content to attract consumers while constantly updating their own messages.

More than 48 percent of Internet users in the United States — over 87 million people — now use widgets, according to comScore, the online measurement company. Some of the most popular widgets on Facebook, for example, are the “Top Friends” tool, which allows people to go to their best friends’ profiles with a single click, and iLike, which lets users add music to their profiles.

“Consumers are pulling in content from multiple sources” said Christian Oestlien, a business product manager at Google who is overseeing the new ad program. “It is what we are calling the componentization of the Web. The Web is sort of breaking apart into smaller pieces.”

Many widgets have been built by media outlets, like Lucky Magazine’s shopping widget, which features hot fashion and beauty products. And some companies like Slide are developing networks of widgets made by individuals that advertisers can place ads within.

But consumer brands like Sierra Mist and Honda Civic have also been creating their own widgets as a way of providing content or tools to potential customers. Google is hoping marketers will pay to place these widgets throughout its AdSense network.

Advertisers bid for keywords to place their widget ads in Google’s network in the same way they do other Google ads. Since many users will interact with the ads within the ad units and not click through, Google has developed a new interaction measure to document the interest in the ads.

Google tested its Gadget Ads program this summer with a group of 50 marketers. To encourage more advertisers to make such ads, Google is offering to be host of videos for the ads in YouTube’s servers — a cost-saving for advertising agencies. And Google provides tools for updating the ads, even if marketers do not bid for ads in Google’s network. Marketers pay Google only for the ads that run in its networks and not for any downloading or saving of those ads that consumers may choose to do.

“We’re not trying to monetize every single event that happens in a creative,” Mr. Oestlien said, adding that they wanted advertisers “to make rich creative ads that are really useful to the end user.”

Google’s tools are convenient for ad agencies because they make it easy to create a widget quickly, said Dimitry Ioffe, chief executive of Media Banners, a division of the Visionaire Group, a digital agency based in California. Mr. Ioffe ran a widget ad for Paramount Vantage’s movie “A Mighty Heart” this summer in Google’s new program.

Mr. Ioffe said that Google’s tools to help marketers make widgets more easily may also help them cut expenses. Instead of paying news sites to run videos from a movie’s premiere, for example, studios can make it easy for consumers to post the movie videos on their own sites or social network profiles, providing free advertising.

“Widgets are a dream for marketers,” Mr. Ioffe said. “They allow them to extend their brand off of their individual sites and allow their brands to live as long as consumers want them to live.”

[via nytimes.com]

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