Click Fraud On The Rise

According to an article published a couple days ago on IT World, the fourth quarter of 2008 saw a 1.1% spike in click fraud as reported by Click Forensics. In the 3rd quarter of 2008 the fraud rate was 16%, in the fourth quarter it was reportedly 17.1%.

Click fraud is the #1 threat to the pay-per-click advertising model that so many advertisement publishing systems use, and has resulted in drastic revenue reductions for not only the advertisement publishing system itself, but it's publishers as well.

The fraudsters have reportedly increased the size and sophistication of their botnets, which are large networks of internet connected computers that have been infected with various trojan viruses that allows the botnet owners to use the processing power of these computers to automate tasks such as finding, and clicks, ads published on web sites.

Anyone's computer, even yours, could unbeknownst to you, be part of these botnets.

Click fraud is committed for any number of reasons, they can seek out ads of business competitors to try to drive up their advertising costs, they can try to discredit the advertising system itself, or any number of other reasons. Whatever the reason, it is a threat to the advertising business online, as these publishing systems need to continually advance their detection systems, publishers continually lose credit for clicks, making them less, and advertisers lose faith in the system.

Click fraud is a threat to us all in the business of the internet in any capacity. It's sad, but there's the facts of the fourth quarter, which may help partly explain the large drop in revenue publishers have seen recently.

Effective Use Of AJAX, And The Consequences

I have grown to consider AJAX the Flash of the new century. It took a while but most people finally learned where and when Flash was effective, and Flash itself grew and adapted to make up for many of it's shortcomings. While it still has it's issues, and people still over use it at times, it has reached a place of acceptance with most folks to some degree.

Then comes AJAX. AJAX, like Flash, is cool, it adds some nice interactivity to a web site, controls bandwidth usage by limiting full page refreshes for small tasks and other various benefits.

However there are people that base their entire web site around AJAX, with a primary interface (or page template, whatever you want to call it) loading once and the content reloading within it with every click. Then, these people get mad at people like Google when Google AdSense program disallows using their ads on such sites.

Other limitations of this use, depending on how wisely it is implemented, can include limited ability for visitors to bookmark individual pages and poor search engine rankings. Some of these can be overcome with very wise implementation, but the more detailed the implementation the more limited the browser requirements for the site becomes.

AJAX, in my humble opinion, is best used for small interactivity on web sites, such as 10 star rating systems so the stars and rating refresh, not the whole page, or for adding comments to some story, so as not to need a full refresh. It is best used in small doses like that. The only time I see is useful in large-scale application is in administration tools or such applications that there is no desire for search engine rankings, you have some ability to control what browsers people are using and the like.

No matter what technology you choose, part of the choice is considering the limitations of such platforms. No platform is the be-all-end-all of platforms with all upside and no downside. AJAX is no different, Flash is no different. Web servers, scripting languages, compiled languages, databases...they all play a part in your site and you have to take advantage of the strengths of those choices and limit the impact of the weaknesses of those choices.

Kicking and screaming at others to try to get them to bow down and meet your requirements are not the way to go. One reaps what one sows, make your choices wisely, or suffer the consequences.

Just my two sheckles on the subject.

Interesting Statistic Regarding Chitika And Tribal Fusion

After one week of reporting, I figured I'd spend a lazy morning comparing reports. This has proven very enlightening.

I placed Chitika to take advantage of search engine generated traffic (it's strength according to them) in a place that was otherwise filled with Tribal Fusion ads. These ads were placed as filler ads to replace AdSense placements in an effort to try a new strategy I talked about quite a while ago. This space was never going to be a huge earner, and Tribal Fusion, on it's own, earned in the ballpark of $2.80 a day.

When I put Chitika ads up, they took about half of the impressions, and, much to my surprise was generating $2.40 a day average on half the impressions. As a direct comparison, on January 20th Chitika made $2.28 on it's part of the impressions where Tribal Fusion made $0.68 on about 30% more impressions.

So it comes out, as a sum total I made more that day by targeting search engine traffic differently with Chitika. Now, once I find the time to get in there and use the keyword targeting feature of Chitika I may darn well end up dumping Tribal Fusion all together, but that'd be hard to do since I still, as a whole feel that Tribal Fusion has been the best generic CPM ad system that I have ever used, so it will still make a useful back-fill advertising system.

As long as you have a primary advertising system that generates the much more than the piddly number I mentioned above, you will still be on the road to have a web business that generates money that folds, not money the jiggles. It's very difficult and time sonsuming to generate enough to quit your day job (at least in most countries) but it can certainly generate enough to have a positive impact on your financial bottom line.

First Impressions Of Google Ad Manager

With the continued plummeting of advertisement space values on the web, I have started re-evaluating my main web sites placements and designs, and in addition, more finely tuned the channeling within the most popular areas of the web site(s).

In the process of doing this, I figured it would be as good of a time as any to more my ad management into the Google Ad Manager, as I have wanted to for quite some time, but never wanted to put in the time for just that. So with this new goal, I can get all those tasks done in one swoop.

I have not used any feature of the Ad Manager yet other than simply placing AdSense ads in my site, though, Ad Manager can help you place third party and privately sold ads as well, and then, just use AdSense ads as back-fill for unsold inventory. This I look forward to using at some point, but until I get comfortable with the new system, I will continue running those ads on my own system.

The "Inventory" tab is where you set up your ad space, channels (now called "placements") and get your code. It's all quite logical, define placements, set up "ad slots", which is the actual ad block, then, get the code and copy it in your pages.

The code generated is quite different than typical AdSense code. There is code to copy into the header of the page and one line of JavaScript to place in the location of the ad itself. This makes it a bit harder for dynamically driven sites that use a single include for the header of the site, as each space showing on any given page must be predined in the header.

That said, it is nice because you have a "default" design that you can apply, or, customize the colors. It makes it easier for sites that have mostly the same colors. However, like the "new" AdSense code (admittedly, months old now) it does make it impossible to dynamically change the ad colors with user web site customization/personalization, which affects some.

This does, however, neaten up the code, with much smaller code being in the page content itself.

There is a lot more to Ad Manager I haven't dabbled with yet, such as targeting criteria, selling inventory to override AdSense itself and so on, as my goal with this baby step was simply to migrate my web site(s) over to the new code style and get that base work done, channels (oops, I mean, placements) cleaned up and organized and then later move on. However, so far I am pretty impressed with what I am seeing in Ad Manager. It will be nice to run all my ad serving from one system, and a system that I do not have to personally maintain or pay for myself.

If you haven't tried it yet, do so. If you are only an AdSense user, and have no intention of selling your own ads, it may not be worth the time, but if you have hopes of selling ads privately, this looks to have promise as a great system from what I have seen so far.

Google Making Deeper Cuts With AdSense

It was reported yesterday that Google has, due to continuing keyword value drops, will stop selling ad spaces for newspaper publication based web sites. This is not the first move they made in cost cutting measures Google has made regarding their AdSense system.

Google, overall seems to feel that the model itself is still sound, I tend to agree with that based on the system itself, the problem has been that due to the failing economy all over the globe, companies have less to spend, and therefore, keyword prices continue to plummet. Yesterday my personal AdSense revenue was the lowest it's been in years, which troubles me. I am also seeing decreases in CPM ads, such as my Tribal Fusion spaces, but, have also found some more promising replacements/supplemental ads such as Chitika, as I have talked about the last few days.

The article linked above says that internet metrics indicate that while experts assumed people would click ads less, due to having less money to spend, they say that isn't true. I beg to differ, as my click through rate (CTR) has dropped substantially across most sites that I run ads on.

Then, to further complicate things for Google is the increasing level of complaints from people not getting paid on time, and now, even a very visible, high profile, apparent exploit of their code that has been getting mentioned on the support forum and in the blogosphere.

I suspect it will get worse before it gets better, however, it will get better, it's a natural business cycle. The basic concept and systems are still sound, but in order to make the most of it, they have some very serious issues to deal with with the payments, the approval process, which I have made complaints about before, the security of the code given this latest exploit and much more. Given the major cutbacks they are making, it would seem this would be increasingly difficult to get done in a timely manner, so it's a classic "rock and a hard place" situation...

Chitika Looks Promising

As previously stated, I have decided to give Chitika a try, and see how it performs for me. Much to my surprise, while obviously something that won't get me a giant step toward an early retirement, it appears to be a realistic alternative to maximize a certain segment of my web audience.

The click through rate (CTR) appears to be decent, in the first 5 days of stats the CTR is around 1.5% or so and on average I'll be padding my income by a dollar or two a day, which isn't earth shattering by any means, but it does help make up some of the slack from drops in revenue of my primary systems.

I will say, as well, I am only really testing the Chitika ads that are optimized for visitors that are coming from search engines, so it doesn't interfere with impression count of the Tribal Fusion ads that it displaces for those first page viewers coming from search engines. So it hasn't affected the income generated by the other system that much at all. One funny thing I noticed is that if you channel the ads right, which is incredibly easy with Chitika, I might ad, you can easily see which areas of your site recieve the most traffic from search engines by just watching the impression count from those channels.

I have found the Chitika does sometimes retain search info and ends up showing ads on more than just the first page of the visit, and I have also seen some weridities in their reporting, inconstencies from report to report, and that they also have a monthly audit that may cost some click revenue if they find issues. The auditing exists with any reputable ad serving system, it's just often called by different names, so time will tell how that pans out.

I have since seen that Chitika also has options to feed keywords into the ad space for non-search engine generated showings, they have a lot of help documentation regarding integration into WordPress, Blogger and other systems. Their interface to create code blocks is pretty easy and logical to use as well.

While I am not sold just yet, it isn't a system I can write off after a few days like Ihave with many ad systems. This test will run the duration so I can see what a monthly audit does to my earnings and how well it performas over a longer term.

Sell Ad Space, Yes, Buy Space To Advertise, No

I got into an interesting conversation with a friend regarding buying ads, and since he knew I played the advertising game, he asked me about it. I told him that I really don't know much about buying ads, as I never do that. He acted somewhat surprised.

I have been in this gig for over a decade, and I have a few successful web projects, a few unsuccessful ones and a few in the pipeline at any given time and I have yet to even buy advertising.

Why? Well, I have never needed to. For one, I never have costs to make up, or, minimal costs if hosting is an issue. For two, most any project I get into is a very content rich project, with very few exceptions. For three, my basic habit, when building web sites, includes good search engine optimization (SEO) right from the beginning. Lastly, I always use the webmaster tools that are available to monitor my sites on the various search engines, YAHOO, Google and MSN all have tools available to really monitor such things.

Together, those factors often make it unnecessary to spend money on advertising, as good SEO combined with well written content, and a lot of it, is ripe for good search engines rankings, and the lack of expenses to recoup means I can wait a bit for organic growth of my sites. Thus far, it's worked every time.

Now, I don't want to discourage people from buying ads, because the money you spend on ads may just be going in to my pocket. Ad purchasing does have it's place, for immediate visibility, or timely promotion, such as a seasonal sale, political message before elections, new product announcements and that sort of thing ads serve a very useful purpose.

If you feel you need to buy some ads for quick impact, go for it, but I would recommend using discretion with your dollars, if you are just starting a blog, online community, some sort of informational site, or that sort of thing, you may not need it, just let organic searches generate your traffic and let nature takes it's course, you may be surprised how quick it can happen sometimes.

In these trying economic times, make sure you spend your money wisely.

Ad Placement And Design Is Everything

I have been hit by the economy in regards to my ad revenue. Revenue has dropped, but, not only that, click through rates (CTR) have dropped. Revenue drops I can handle, I understand the economics of the business world, of which advertising is a big part of.

The CTR though, that's another matter. While it can be a truth that in tough times people are clicking less ads because they are not looking to spend money, I can understand that, but, likewise, it is also something that you have some direct impact on.

The money people are willing to spend on ads we as publishers are relatively powerless over. Ihave noticed CPM drops across the board, basically every ad system I use has seen some, oddly, the least effected seems to be Kontera, the in-test advertising which, ironically, many people say is the most annoying of all ads.

So, in an effort to at least try to do something about CTR, I decided to try a little redesigning. On one of my bigger sites I have always had an AdSense horizontal link unit blended in to the header over the site search engine. I decided to change this with a header redesign. I wanted to lighten up the look of the site a bit as well.

What I did was made the header a bit taller, and move the search engine (a Google CSE of course) under the logo on the other side of the header, and add some imagery to the header that related to the site. The site is about audio production, so across the header I put the image of a wave form. Then, inside that wave form I blended a 468x60 ad. I have talked with Google previously about this type of designing using design elements like that to wrap around ads, as it may have violated any of their rules, but, they have said that it is OK by their standards. I saved the email from them just in case I get called on it later. :-)

Much to my surprise that ad has jumped in to the top few channels on my site now. Just as well, it doesn't visually take up loads of space on the site since it's part of a section of the site that would be taken up by the header anyway. Plus, it allowed me to get rid of the low performing ad spaces toward the bottom of the page and use that space in a first-fold position.

While my experiment is based around AdSense, the same theories will work with any text-based ad system, and should yield similar results, depending on the quality of the ads that are selected to display within it. In the case I described, I also ended up making that header ad the first AdSense code found in the page code, so in theory, it should not only be a first fold ad, but also get the ads of highest relevancy...therefore even further helping the click through.

There is a fine line to draw on that first fold, however. You do want as many of your pages ads in the first fold as possible, but, you also need to have some usable, readable, page content in that fold too. If a visitor comes and sees nothing but ads, they'll leave. With clever design strategies you might be surprised how you can manipulate that first fold. The most common mistake most newbies make is simply making their header too tall, so many people use half of the first fold for some big, fancy logo and catch phrase, no ad, then put two big rectangles under it that fills up the whole first fold...then they wonder why traffic isn't coming in, or sticking around.

You header should not be over 100 pixels tall or so, and often can house at least one little ad unit of some sort. Then you have a few hundred pixels beneath that for content.

Giving Chitika Ad Publishing A Chance

I have heard a lot about Chitika over the last few months, but, never paid it much mind, and kind of wrote it off as another garbage, untargeted, CPM type advertising system. With AdSense revenue continually falling, I am much more open to trying out new things, so I figured it was time to dig in and see what it's all about.

It turns out they actually have a very interesting new product in their "Chitika Premium" package. Don't let the label "premium" make it sound like something for the elite few, it seems to me like it's their normal system available to everyone.

What is unique about this system is that it take further advantage of search engine generated traffic. If a visitor comes to your web site via a search engine link, Chitika looks at the keywords that were used to find your site and generates ads based on those same keywords. When creating the ad code you can then dictate what to do with that space, choosing from collapsing the space to show nothing, showing untargeted Chitika ads, or, give a URL of a file containing code for an alternate ad.

I like the idea here, taking unique advantage of search engine generated visitors with the option of not bother regular, or direct visitors with ads, or options to show them other ads.

I have implemented these ads using different options, across a few sites, including this blog. While it is too early to say anything about revenue, the fact I did not make one red cent on my first day after a few hundred impressions is disappointing, but hardly a cause for concern just yet. The idea is sound, Chitika's code generating tools are very easy to use and their reporting is average, nothing spectacular, but time will tell more as I use them.

The basic strategy I am starting with is to have Chitika be the default code in the page, and, if it's a search engine generated visitor, show it, otherwise, show something like Tribal Fusion, Amazon affiliate banners or that sort of thing. This, in theory, will optimize the use of that first page visit from a search engine, then fall back to the regular ads I had in those spaces, so CPM systems, such as Tribal Fusion, won't loose very many total impressions, and the impressions lost will be to more targeted ads, so hopefully it will prove worth it.

I am skeptical of the alternate ad option being compliant with AdSense's policies, since it is altering the method of delivery of the ad, and the AdSense code itself does not reside in the actual page it needs to be relevant to. With AdSense I tend to err on the side of caution and, if it makes me uneasy, I just don't do it. I suggest you all do the same. Looking at it even further, AdSense is (almost) always well targeted so there wouldn't be the same advantage in using Chitika as there would be with affiliate or CPM systems.

I will give Chitika my typical 30 day run and see what comes of it. Though that may be a mite unfair given the current economic recession, since everything is performing badly, but I will surely take that in to consideration when evaluating the product.

All in all, I have more hope for Chitika than I do for most of the systems I have looked at givent heir unique use of search engine generated visitors, that seem to be pretty well targeted ads (theoretically speaking) of visitors that sometimes only view the first page and then leave, so it takes full advantage of even bouncing visitors. I like that idea.

Greed Will Get You

The internet just preys on people's greed, and in ways, it's so incredibly easy to do. Every day new scams pop up, jus yesterday I heard about the "Google Money Tree", I hadn't seen that one before, and another one growing popularity is the "Net Pride Kit". There was also the "Google Money Machine", "Google Money", and many more.

Most of these scams play on well known names, or well known products that actually have some small basis of truth. Google AdSense seems to be a big one these days because it is based on a true concept, you can actually make money with it, thousands do, I am one of them. Where it gets scammy is the methods by which they promise not that it will make extra pocket money, but that it will make you rich, and will do so with no work put in by you.

The exact methods they promise these obscene amounts of money differs from program to program. Some tell you how to place and design ads, much like my own "Success on the Web" eBook, which can be good or bad, you need to make sure the suggestions are not violating terms of service policies. Others offer you free web site templates with ads all in the right places, others provide free "ad optimized" content. The danger in this is that hundreds of others, or more, have the exact same content, thereby earning you a penalty in rankings on many search engines for duplicated content. Regardless of the methods, if they are promising you big money, be skeptical. In my eBook I don't promise that big bucks, I promise to increase what you do make, and that's true, but, of course, since I am not blowing it up bigger than it is, it has moderate sales, while scammers promising unachievable things sell like crazy.

The only people making money on such things are the people that are selling the scam program, not the people buying it, I've seen it over and over again, if you want to see it, go to any of the many consumer complaint sites and look them up before buying. If you buy, and then find out it is a scam, don't expect to get your money back, it's likely you'll never hear from them again.

I've said it before, I'll say it again, the internet is a place you can make money, it is possible, and people do it every day, but don't let your greed get the best of you. If you plan to make a career on the internet, I suggest you get to work and learn as much about the workings of the internet, and web development, as you can, and start building some good sites, because making that kind of money takes a lot of work.

Bottom line, don't be a sucker. Making money takes work.

Is Contextually Targeted Advertising Too Accurate?

Many times I have seen people sign up for Google AdSense only to return to ask for support because the resulting adds are too targeted and they want to loosen up the keyword restriction. Essentially they want to change it from contextually targeted to contextually complimentary; which, I suspect, would be a much more difficult thing to develop due to the number of directions one could take "complimentary".

As I posted previously, contextually targeted system are not good for sites selling their own products or services for obvious reasons, those reasons being that the simple nature of contextual targeting means that your site will show ads for competitors. AdSense works best on informational web sites, blogs and that sort of thing, sites that are not directly selling their own stuff. These types of sites are not as anal-rententive (typically) about each and every ad that shows up and can be a little bit more relaxed and accepting of what does if it brings in revenue.

On the right kind of site, they are incredibly effective, as the ads match the content of the page, so it's for products, services or other sites directly related to what the visitor is currently reading. So for content that isn't selling something itself, the ads can do that.

However, if one is pickier, or you want ads that compliment your content, rather than target it directly, you are going to have a harder time. Somebody with a web site about a product or service, for example would want ads that are for accessories or add-on products/services to theirs, not direct competitors selling the same thing.

In cases such as this, you may be far better off joining affiliate programs of companies that sell those specific products or services, or, acquire direct advertisers, perhaps trading links with them or such strategy.

There is a good reason there are so many different ways to handle advertising. That would be because one type doesn't work for all web sites. Find out which one works for you.

Ad Revenues Continue To Decline

I've been hearing it for months, people complaining about ad revenues declining for online publishers. I've been pretty fortunate, myself, and have maintained a pretty even bottom line, with last year, 2008, actually being a record year for ad revenue, but, noticing a small decline in November and December from AdSense, and various affiliates, while Tribal Fusion and Kontera seemed to be holding pretty even.

January I had hoped for a surge, since Q1 marketing companies get their 2009 budgets and business resumes as usual after end of the year crunches. Such has not been the case, and January will likely be the lowest revenue month from AdSense that I have had in the last 2 to 3 years. Likewise, and not surprisingly, affiliate programs continue to generate little or nothing. If anything, it's November and December that these programs historically have done the best due to gift giving holidays across most cultures and religions. I didn't see much of a spike then, and I am certainly not now.

Interestingly, Kontera, which many consider one of the more annoying ad formats, the dreaded inline text links, has been keeping itself very even against historical figures, and Tribal Fusion, a CPM, untargeted ad system, often showing ads for smiley packages, various online games and general consumer ads, has been dropping a little, but not nearly the amount seen in the supposedly more intelligent AdSense system. That being said, since AdSense ads are sold via auction, it does put the advertiser much more in control which can make it far more profitable during good times, so, just as well far more inexpensive during bad times.

Obviously, the poor economy is the reason for these drops, unlike some of the people on various support forums, I am not going to sit and blame the system for robbing me when I know darn well the economy is to blame (yeah, I'm looking at you, you bunch of crybaby AdSense users). I just find it quite interesting how it's affecting the publisher. Which ad systems are being affected more than others.

It is what it is, do what you can, find new systems to try, placements and designs to try, and see what works best, it's about all you can do short of sitting in a support forum crying and blaming anybody but who/what deserves it.

Welcome to the business climate of a recession. Sucks, huh?

Are Stored Procedures As Valuable In More Structured Languages?

This isn't a lecture post, this is a question post. I have been so used to developing in Classic ASP, that I looked at the primary advantage of stored procedures as a security measure. It gave me the ability to declare and define the input variables by data type and size. With PHP I counteracted this by creating functions to check the input integrity.

Today, however, I am doing more and more with more explicit variable requirements. VB.Net mostly. In these cases, variables are defined within the code itself as well, so the stored procedure security level isn't as great.

Arguably, there is a performance boost with stored procedures, but these are often only really noticeable on high traffic sites with complex queries. Simple queries on average sites hardly ever notice such performance increases, even though they are there, it's in the milleseconds and not visible to the average user. The biggest noticeable increases are in queries using text as a search engine query field on a large table or that sort of thing.

So, what are the benefits of stored procedures beyond this? I will continue using them, because, in addition to the above, I like having the code and queries separated, but that's a matter of preference.

EDIT: A friend of mine that is a SQL Server admin mentioned to me that inline can also expose database objects in the code. With stored procedures you only expose the proc name, with inline, should someone see the code, you are exposing table names, column names, possibly relationship between them and that sort of thing.

This also includes the user needing execute permissions on the tables rather than the procedure.

Good point, I hadn't really thought of that part of it.

Data Backup Management

Some wise man, somewhere, was quoted saying "if it's not three places, it's no place", in regards to data. There is a lot of truth in that. For all computer users, backups are important, and especially important for businesses. Backups of financial data, employee data, email data stores, document archives, and more are essential.

Many companies have tape drives, or entire servers dedicated to storing backups, which is great, but, if they are all in the same physical location, well, what happens if a power surge, fire or other disaster happens at that location? Then, enter the third location, the offsite backup.

To do this, many businesses, big and small, use automated services to send backup data "to the cloud", meaning, over the internet to a remote service. Carbonite has made a big name for itself in this regard, and I use it, personally. But, as cool at it is, it does not come without limitations, as I discussed in a previous post.

I found this very cool tool called DFIncBackup, that has a free version, that really helps one overcome some of these limitations. This tool creates zip archives of selected folders and files and puts them elsewhere on your computer or network. The best part of it is that you can also schedule it to happen on a regular basis.

The reason this helps so much is that some services, like Carbonite, won't accept some file types, so, if they are all zipped up, most any service will accept a zip file, and additionally, it's also a smaller volume to back up since zipping also compresses the contents. In the case of text based files, such as logs or database backups, the compression can shrink them up to 90% sometimes. I routinely archive my SQL Server backup files down to 20% of their unarchived size.

This also helps in keeping drive space open, as it allows you to keep only one or two days worth of backups locally, since they are zipped and sent "to the cloud" every night (if you schedule it as such) and it will keep all the backups there. If you have 1GB worth of backups each night, and can zip those into a 150-200MB file for backup, you are making the backup process much quicker and with only keeping a day or two at a time, you are also keeping those backups from burning up your disk space.

With this you can also archive server logs, which I have compressed even more than the SQL Server backups, to save space. Once a month or so, zip up the last months logs and delete the original logs. Logging, on active server, are a huge source of wasted disk space.

If this sounds helpful to you, check out DFIncBackup, I have found it most helpful.

Managing Exchange/Active Directory Users and Lists

I have had the rather new challenge of learning Exchange, managing users, distribution lists and the like with the departure of the guy that built the original infrastructure at the small company I work for. To this point I have had only minimal experience dealing with Exchange.

I am learning how to set up distribution lists, add members, remove members and so on. That is all pretty simple stuff. Now the challenge is to allow some users to respond to email that arrives via the distribution list, as the distribution list's email address. At this point the usability of user management gets weird.

When you go to Start > Programs > MS Exchange > Active Directory Users and Computers, and right click on any user or distribution list to open the "properties" dialog box, it pops up with all the options for that user or distribution list. The problem is, to add the options I need, which is the right to send from the distribution list email address, there is supposed to be a "security" tab in this properties dialog. In order to see that stuff, you first need to click View > Advanced Options then open the properties dialog and it will then appear.

After you have the security tab visible, you can easily add users to the permissions list and give them any range of authority on that list. "Send As" is one of those permissions. To add the option in their Outlook to select a "from" address in the emails they send to be from them, or the distribution list, you then need to add the "from" field to their create messages window from the "options" list, which is in differing locations depending on Outlook version and whether Outlook or Word is the chosen editor for email.

This, to me is pretty silly...I mean, to not have the security visible is one thing, if it's user specific, but to have this extra step, that isn't behind an extra security login or anything like that seems just wasteful and unfriendly.

Brand New Year, Same Old Complaining

Welcome to 2009, God willing, may it be a year of a resurgence of the global economy, but I doubt it. I am suspecting it'll take a couple years to straighten out the mess creates by the "have's" and "have more's" of lending and big industry. No doubt coming at our expense.

After all this time of dropping home values, layoffs, bankruptcies, financial fraud and more, people trying to monetize their web sites via running advertisements are still so ignorant as to wonder why their revenues are dropping.

People, people, people, why on God's green earth do you think that the internet is somehow impervious to the economic ups and down of life in the real world? Didn't the dot com bubble burst of a decade ago teach anyone anything? Or, I guess the possibility exists that many of the people complaining were not directly affected by that bubble burst.

Let me tell you what happened; people looked at the internet as different before the burst. Anybody with any dot com idea or web site had investors throwing money at them, even if they had no tangible product or assets. Millions of dollars were given to fly-by-night or copycat ideas because it was on the internet, then thought to be the sure fire ticket to wealth and prosperity.

Eventually, these wealthy companies with no product lost enough money people started pulling out, or, worse yet, stayed in and lost the shirt off their collective back.

What was a booming industry capitalized on excess and foolishness was now going bankrupt, laying off their staff which was vastly over hired, selling the pinball games and batting cages in their break rooms, and many closed their doors. It was a necessary weeding out to give the real businesses a chance, and only the real businesses survived.

Today, thanks to that bubble burst, companies now treat the internet like any other aspect of their business, they have expectations of revenue, and budgets set accordingly. Therefore, now that the economy is down, so are advertising budgets. Obviously, some industries are hurt more than others. Some have really bottomed out in revenue from ads, some not so much, but most have at least been effected.

This is the nature of being in business, if you can't see why this is happening, and look for other ways to make your money, to flow with the business cycle. Perhaps you should rethink if you want to be part of this business or not. Ad systems are not ripping you off, there is no big conspiracy, it's economics.

I Like Holiday Vacations

I always enjoy this time of year, and not just because I get a few well deserved days off of work, but, mostly because everybody else has a few well deserved days off work. The last few days of the year and the first few of the next I always see traffic spikes, ad revenue spike, message forum activity is at a high and everything good that comes with running a web site.

It's a good idea, if you are a young web entrepreneur, to run a site that covers hobbies. Hobby sites are especially profitable over gift giving holidays, as that is when people tend to loosen up purse strings, even during hard times, to give a gift to somebody that they may not otherwise give. Affiliate programs tend to do well in a hobby sector.

General news and informational sites get spikes during certain other stimulus, such as bad weather, big news stories, political voting season and that sort of thing. Some of these are unpredictable regarding when they come, but holidays are clockwork.

I did some end of the year ad redesigns, in an effort to actually practice what I preach, and low and behold, I have seen a revenue bump the last few days, with 2008 ending as a personal record setting year for my online projects. Still, not enough to quit my day job, but that's OK, I happen to be in the fortunate position where I actually like my day job...and my day job is web development and infrastructure management, so it all works.

If you have a good day job that supports your responsibilities, and, given the nature of this rather unsound economic climate, might I suggest something that I have personally done the last couple years? OK, I will...take that web project money that you are earning on the side and stuff it into a money market fund, stock market or something. Obviously the stock market is rough, but that's good, if it's not money you need right now, this is the time to buy, as long as you buy wisely. With a money market it's slower, but safer revenue growth. Then, just leave it sit and consider it a liquid retirement account. After all, at this point it's just extra money, right?

All that said, I am not a financial adviser, I just hope that in this coming year everybody is happy and healthy, and plans wisely for a certain-to-be rocky economic road in the next year or two. I am hoping that this economic downturn, at the very least, reminds us all to save our money when we can, and not be stupid with it.

Those of us that have this unique opportunity to make somewhat unattended revenue from our web projects have a chance to do something that not everybody does, have a revenue stream that could aid us in the long term. Be wise and appreciate the opportunity you created for yourself.

Happy new year.