A comparison of advertising options since I wanted to see if I could optimize advertising earnings from my sites, to see if there are any other options than AdSense. This mini investigation concerns foremost the Swedish market, but it might be of interest to international readers anyway.
I looked at some ad providers and the eCPM that they pay for a sidebar ad sized 250×200 or 250×300 for some sites related to mine. All solutions except AdSense are Pay Per Impression, while AdSense (as you know) is Pay Per Click (PPC). None the less, the earnings from the four ad providers investigated AdSense, Tailsweep, Livsstilsnätverket and Clear Channelranged from $US 2.2-40.6 per 1,000 impressions (eCPM to use AdSense terminology). In the case of AdSense the eCPM is likely to vary quite a lot from publisher to publisher. The number in my chart is just an example of a typical eCPM for one of my own sites.
Just a short note found on the MS Excel team blog stating that the Microsoft research team has developed an add-in that enables users to browse the web via the add-in and select data to import to Excel, all while the add-in will adapt and learn from your selections.
The system extracts data by learning from a user’s selection of data they wish to capture into Excel. The more selections, the more the system is trained. An example scenario: You wish to import and track data from MSN’s weather page. Visit the site using the tool, enter Data Capture mode, and select a row or two of data from the table. Then click Select Similar, and the system will find similar data based on your previous selections.
Excel is known for it’s excessive use of clutter and unnecessary “eye candy” (a.k.a as chart junk) in their default chart types. However, you can correct this with a few clicks to produce nice looking charts with at least less distracting layout. Have a look at this screencast for a quick walk-through on how to clean up the junk.
