That Web Man

Well it had to happen sooner or later. Google has now launched its own web browser, called Chrome.

Having downloaded it earlier today and now used it on a cellular connection, I can say it’s very promising, although it looks a little too stripped down for my liking – I’d also like to be able to change its look as I can presently with both Firefox and Opera.

Its one main benefit over Internet Explorer is that it doesn’t stall and crash as Internet Explorer does with monotonous regularity on both of my Tablet PCs.

Sadly Facebook doesn’t want to know:

You are using an incompatible web browser.

Sorry, we’re not cool enough to support your browser. Please keep it real with one of the following browsers:

• Firefox
• Opera
• Safari
• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Flock

Ah well.

I’ve mentioned before that I run a YouTube Channel to support my adult website. The stats. for the channel are impressive (to me anyway) with 1.4 million video views, but have you ever wondered where those viewers are coming from and how popular your videos are in relation to specific geographic regions?

Well that’s the sort of information you can now get from YouTube Insight. It’s all explained here in the Official Google Blog entry.

Now all we need are traffic sources and we’ll be there…

Well Sunday was interesting, wasn’t it children?

I wanted to search YouTube to see if a particular video clip was on there – the “Jim’ll Fix It” rollercoaster cub-scouts – and found that YouTube was offline for a good couple of hours.

It now appears that the cause of the problem was Pakistan’s order to block users from visiting YouTube.

Apparently:

“A leading net professional told BBC News: ‘This was probably a simple mistake by an engineer at Pakistan Telecom. There’s nothing to suggest this was malicious.’”

I see.

So what they’re saying is that some witless fecktard in one telecom company in one country can take down a massive online entity like YouTube/Google by mistake?

Well if that’s the case, I expect it won’t be too long before fundamentalists (always with the accent on “mental”) start taking down websites all over the world, just because it appears to be so easy to do so!

You’ll perhaps have noticed that over there in the sidebar are some adverts provided by Google’s AdSense program: they are based upon the content in the page where they are shown and if a visitor clicks through one of them, I get paid a few cents depending upon what the advertiser is willing to pay Google through their corresponding AdWords program. I run AdSense ads. on all my personal blogs and personal sites and I also serve some on one page of one of my businesses’ sites.

I’ll never get rich from displaying Google Ads – I reckon to average less than a dollar a day but hey, $300 a year is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick – but I had noticed that revenues had been falling.

Now the positioning of the ads. over there in this particular sidebar isn’t that good from a layout perspective as most of them are “below the fold”, i.e. you have to scroll down to see them.

Google helpfully provide a useful guide on positioning their ads for maximum exposure/benefit in their AdSense Help Center. There’s a dedicated page for positioning for blogs too.

So as something of an experiment, I changed the positioning and added another set of ads to two of my sites: one a business listing site and the other a blog-based site for a community project I am involved with.

The results have been surprising with both sites performing significantly better since taking into account Google’s suggestions. My advice? Give it a go if you’re serving the ads.

Not signed up to earn money through AdSense? Click on the AdSense button in the sidebar.