Hardik Thakkar on Web Development, Internet Economics and other unrelated things

I just noticed some links below the usual google ads on my Gmail, here’s a screenshot:

On clicking on the “About these links” I was redirected to this page which interestingly has not been updated since May, meaning that Google has not added any new Terms & Conditions or explainations for link units. Which, in my humble opinions is fair enough since there has been enough transparency about the google ads in Gmail by the company already.

On a lighter side, that page is not the only one which has not been updated since May Yes, I have been awol for 4 months..

Continue reading ‘GMail now showing “Link Units” ads’

I just signed up for Google AdWords and guess which company’s User Agreement I had to click on ‘I Agree’? I know you read the title.. Google Ireland!

There is no reason for Google to have an Ireland agreement, they have a proper Indian subsidary, Google India with it’s presence in several cities throughout the country. The only logical explaination is that India and Ireland are both starting with ‘I’ and are pretty close to each other in the countylist, and someone in Google goofed up.

In my opinion, yes.

Continue reading ‘Will site flavored search results reduce your revenue?’

In this post, I am going to talk about factors that slow the pace of the ‘Equilibrium Effect’ I wrote about in my last post.

* Geotargetting

An arguable point would be that Indian webmasters would have content that would mostly attract Indian audience and hence would be subject to different ads altogether because of Geotargetting.
There’s a strong counter point to that: Globalization. Indian webmasters can always make sites targetting wester audience. Technologically Indian students have long since proved their powress. And also with the fashion of simulatenous worldwide release of most new movies and music albums, Indians have access to information needed to make related sites on.

Continue reading ‘Factors working against the ‘Google AdSense Equilibrium Effect’’

The folks at official Google Blog recently posted a proud entry about an article published in USA Today titled ‘Google’s Hidden Payroll’ where several instances were cited of web-publishers in developing countries relying for their income on Google. It is something indeed to be proud of, to be involved in accelerating development where there is a lot of scope for it.

However, reading the article in USA today, especially in regards to the amount of money mentioned there and applying some simple economics I couldn’t help speculating a more far fetched effect the webpublishers of the developing countries could have on the whole economy of the online ad industry.

The “feel good” factor put forward by the article was that despite payouts being as low as $200 the amounts when converted in payee’s home currency become significant income for the payee because of other economic factors that come into play. I believe it is precisely this which is going bring in a lot of changes.

Continue reading ‘Google’s Hidden Payroll - Will There Be An Equilibrium Effect? - Part I’

When moderating the comments of another of my blog late last week I was surprised to see one very spammy comment linking to a page on Indian Express’ Website (http://expressindia.com). On clicking the link I was redirected to a ‘Buy Phentermine Online’ page, the link was: http://www.expressindia.com/adlinks/pharma/phentermine.htm and while it has now been removed from the website it was very much active as late as this Monday.

You can check out the extent of the spam by searching for this link on google, or click here. You can see 281000 webpages containing the link. Google’s cache of the page also shows the contents of the page earlier.

If you check out the lower left corner of the main page of the Indian Express site, there are many more such spam-related links, mostly catering to Phentermine.

Continue reading ‘Major Indian newspaper ‘Indian Express’ is into spamming?’

I have been planning to start a blog where in I can publish my views about the emerging internet technologies, revenue generation models being currently used and mainly express my thoughts & opinions on Internet as it grows. I belive we are lucky enough to be witnessing the nascent growing stages of the new connected world, this era is gonna be stuff of history books some years foward.

While this is the general idea behind this blog, a more pronounced shape will emerge as I proceed depending upon the kind of readership this blog generates, the response I get to the articles, what I feel the best writing about, etc.

So do subscibe to the RSS feed and join me in this journey.
One confession before I end this post. While the idea of starting this blog has been hovering in my head for months now, the triggering factor was a potentially big news I just discovered (which you will be reading in the next post), of course only time will tell how “big” the news is.