Adsense - makes sense?

Isn't monetizing the holy grail of online activity? Maybe not to those addicted to online gaming, but large numbers of the blogging and vlogging community would auction their mothers if they thought it'd make them a quick buck. Since we're becoming increasingly resigned to the fact Hollywood won't come calling just because we post an online video we must take what encouragement we can for our 'art'!

To our rescue rides Adsense - at least that's how Google sells it. You can run Adsense ads on your blogs (although I'm not drawing you're attention to them!) and they are the basis of the YouTube Partner Programme.

Listen to 'senior' YouTubers play down their earning power and you'd think that mere mortals would be lucky to make a dime. I certainly didn't expect Google to contact me about my Adsense account. But they have. Naturally I'm going to discrete about the details - Google prefers it that way. I am, however, pleasantly surprised. Never again will I begrudge the few seconds it takes to monetize a videos on YouTube!

My Magic Phone

The Apple iPhone launched in the UK last night. My wife went down to the local O2 store at 6.02 hoping to collect some promised freebies. They hadn't arrived. Yes they had the iPhone but even the enthusiastic sales assistant couldn't convince her to be excited about it. Her impression was it is big (not in a good way) - and there were no freebies!

Which brings me to my point. Earlier this week I watched some videos from Google. One asked a bunch of young school children what their 'magic phone' would do. There answers were interesting but very different to mine. My 'magic phone' would make and receive calls, surf the internet and show video. Nothing different there. But here's the difference: it would have no usage limits and the phone would cost me nothing. No buying an expensive handset and no monthly payments.

How do you monetise a service like that? I have few ideas but let's not let reality get in the way of a good idea. Just think about how popular it could be!

Seek and ye shall find!

Google shocked people by proving there was a market for 'search'. We search everything now. And if we can't Google it it probably doesn't exist!

Creating 'Christmelicious'

This is the nearest I've come to 'viral video genius' - so far! A 5 five minute video that got 500,000 views in 5 days - that's equivalent to 5 years of back-to-back plays!

I didn't coin the word 'Christmelicious' - although I know who did. The day I uploaded the video it returned precisely zero results of Google. The word now exists, we created it!