It will soon be illegal for American banks and credit card companies to process payments to online gaming companies. The new law will make it vitually impossible to operate online gambling companies in the US.

“The bill, a compromise between earlier versions passed by the two chambers, would make it illegal for banks and credit card companies to make payments to online gambling sites. Democrats had accused Republicans of pushing the bill to placate its conservative base, particularly the religious right, before the 7 November congressional elections“

Some websites went further and described the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 “a spectacular display of hypocrisy, meaningless toadying to right-wing zealots, and a blatant attempt to protect the horse racing, tribal casino, and state lottery lobbies”.

That’s telling ‘em.

Meanwhile, shares in online gaming companies nose-dived.

I’ve noticed a new trend, or, to be more precise, an old trend in new clothes.

The old way: launch an e-book get-rich-quick-scheme. Flog it.
The new way: launch an e-book get-rich-quick-scheme. Give it away. Create an “exclusive” network of people, whom you train, and keep the top performers.

The new way makes a lot more sense, of course. Given that CPC revenue-share networks appear to be swan-diving, there will be a lot of semi-savvy operators who would transition well to a CPA environment. If the top performers are bundled up, they become quite a valuable commodity.

I’m not going to mention names, but see if you can spot them…

Google are looking for testers as part of their user-research program. They pay up to $75 per hour, and you can contribute in-person at Mountain View, online, or Google will visit you. This program is also open to people outside the US, and the form consists of one sign-up page, followed by a five page optional survey.

You can sign-up here.

The FAQs are here.

Are we in serious bubble territory here? Facebook are rumoured to be on the verge of deal with Yahoo – for $1 Billion dollars.

“Facebook, the social-networking start-up popular with high school and college students, is on the verge of being purchased by Yahoo, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal“.

Ok, I can see how a social network could be leveraged to produce that sort of revenue, but there’s a big leap of faith involved. These types of businesses don’t yet make much, if any, money. Some analysts think the price is way up there. No bargains, certainly.

Reminds me of a time….1999, in fact.

Alternatively, social media is the new Google.

It will be interesting to see what happens…

Adsense has a new banner sized 200×200….yawn….

It’s barely worth mentioning. I used to be quite bullish on Adsense, but since smart-pricing and content bids came out, it hasn’t been as much fun as it used to be. “Fun” a euphemism for “wildly profitable”, of course.

I can’t wait for a Google CPA network. An ultra-wide, deep, efficient, reliable affiliate network. It raises the bar. And the income possibilities to those SEO/Ms who can deliver genuine conversions (difficult), as opposed to click traffic (easy) or rankings (dubious).

Meanwhile, Adsense stumbles along. Is it just me, or do I get the impression many Adsense publishers are running to stand still these days?

Provocative headline: Google AdWords: soon over-priced with poor ROI

Poor ROI is easy to understand, to those who are actually measuring ROI, that is.

Donna also reasons:

“What are Schmidt, Sullivan, Scoble and Malik missing? Google’s unprecedented gross margins and a seemingly unstoppable bid price inflation are derived from the Google-centric auction system which is economically dependent upon price inelasticity of demand“.

Meaning that people don’t care much about the price of clicks, until they get close to a negative ROI position. Certainly, the clicks will top out – there’s no way anyone can make money on, say, ringtones if the CPA is, say, $1000 via PPC.

Perhaps Google aren’t telling us something. Perhaps they know that most keyword inventory isn’t bidded upon? There’s near infinite headroom? And perhaps they will increase page views i.e. increase the traffic pumping through the system?

WAN, which stands for the World Association of Newspapers, said it was leading efforts to find a technological solution to the problem of alleged copyright infringement by Internet search engines.

“A solution suggested by WAN would be for selected search engines which have paid a royalty or have a commercial agreement to display properly attributed images or articles for a limited time“

Smart operators will probably:

a) Hope that WAN succeeds in removing all their competitors from Google News

b) Announce to Google “We’re available, for free!”

c) Watch traffic skyrocket

d) Collect advertising dollars based on page views

A new study indicates that people who search Google Books end up buying books. At Amazon.

“Google’s controversial Book Search is driving traffic to booksellers, new figures show. According to Web monitoring firm Hitwise, the top destination for surfers visiting Google’s UK Book Search was Amazon UK, accounting for 8.3 percent of visits. Book sites accounted for 15.93 percent of all sites visited from the Google Book Search page last week. WH Smith was the second most popular destination with 2.08 percent of visits, followed by Amazon.com with 1.38 percent“

Once book publishers start to understand that the publishing world does not revolve around copyright control, they may start to realise what significant opportunities search, and the internet, can provide in terms of boosting their bottom line.

According to BusinessWeek:

“Google Inc. on Wednesday plans to begin letting consumers download and print free of charge classic novels and many other, more obscure books that are in the public domain.“

What’s the bet that copyright books will follow once the book publishers wake up and see the huge volumes that can be sold vs the cost of production (i.e. virtually nil)? Just add Google Checkout (when it’s working). Easy.

Or they can do what the music industry is doing and bury their heads in the sand, hoping it will all just go away.

Some new media sites are doing the business.

• Techcruch – 60,000 per month
• BoingBoing – $1 million a year
• PaidContent.org – even more than that
• Fark.com – rumoured to be in the millions

“the blogging-for-dollars phenomenon is only in its infancy, and already blog ad spending is roughly twice what it was last year. With overall Web advertising expected to grow by 50 percent to $23.6 billion in 2010, it’s certain that more and more ad dollars will land on blogs. For a growing cadre of bloggers, the opportunities to score fat profits from pumping out posts on whatever their particular passions might be are widening–and one consequence could be a radical reshaping of our notions of how to build a successful media company”

Not all blogs make money, of course. It depends on a) the size of the audience and b) the nature of the audience (i.e. do they buy stuff). The same way old media works.

The main advantage is the cost of production. Virtually zero.