Search engines are a critical part of the democratization of the Web and none is more important than Google. They provide the critical gateway to information in a meritocratic way that has traditionally rewarded usefulness and quality over name recognition of the content creator, valuing the utility to the searcher over all else.

In parallel, open publishing platforms have provided free tools for creating and sharing information with topical expertise and a voice to anyone on the Web. These platforms feed the search engines and, in return, the search engines have delivered steady audiences. This ecosystem has been lucrative for the search engines, an essential outlet for the information sharers, and a great way for the world to have access to a broad swathe of information, from the full range of political opinions to thousands of ways to barbecue a chicken.

Google’s recent “Panda” update intentionally upends this ecosystem; it doesn’t just lower the rankings of individual pages that the algorithm deems “low quality” (however that may be defined by Google) but, as Google has said publicly, “low-quality [page] content [on the domain] can impact an entire domain.” This means that high-quality content hosted on open publishing platforms like HubPages and YouTube can be negatively impacted in their search rankings simply by hosting contributions of various quality on a single site.

HubPages has seen a negative impact from this change, but so far YouTube has not (Search Metrics Winners). One presumes Google isn’t treating its own affiliated sites differently than any other site, but YouTube’s open publishing environment makes low-quality content as prevalent as on any other moderated open publishing platform. Google shows over 13 million indexed videos on YouTube for lose weight (known spammy area) and over 10 million for forex (another spammy area). Apparently, Google’s Panda update has been punitive only to platforms other than Google’s.

We certainly support and encourage changes to algorithms to provide the public with access to the best search results. We appreciate that open publishing platforms with a wide range of content quality also have a responsibility to moderate their content appropriately. While we understand the need for ordering search results, we also think it is a mistake to broadly impact an entire domain negatively where the content has been contributed by individual people. Bear in mind that a lot of the content on open
publishing platforms like HubPages and YouTube is great, and it is exactly what people are searching for on the Web.

We have reached out to Google seeking feedback and guidance about what elements of an open platform are being penalized by Panda. There has been little response to our inquiries, from questions about site architecture posted on the official Google forums, to personal emails sent to Matt Cutts, the head of web spam at Google.

We, as well as many other operators, are happy to engage in a dialogue with Google on what quality means and how to educate information sharers. It seems that publishing platforms that
are not operated by Google are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to guidance on how to adjust to this latest search algorithm update, as is exemplified by YouTube’s apparent immunity.

Before Panda, Google gave open platforms of all sizes many ways to separate high quality content from poor content without chilling an entire domain. In this respect, HubPages most closely resembles YouTube’s site structure. We send Google signals by how we program the site. For example, we let Google know what we think is the best content by giving that content more internal links from related pages. We also follow the sitemap protocol and give content a crawling priority. It seems these efforts are severely discounted after the Panda update since, despite their application, there is still a domain-wide devaluing being applied.

We are concerned that Google is targeting platforms other than its own and stifling competition by reducing viable platform choices simply by diminishing platforms’ ability to rank pages. Google is not being transparent about their new standards, which prevents platforms like ours from having access to a level playing field with Google’s own services. We want to comply with and exceed Google’s standards. Google has my contact information. Hope to hear from them soon.

After the recent TechCrunch post about HubPages, we received several questions about how HubPages got to 39 million unique visitors per month.  Here’s how we did it:

Four years ago, during our launch in August 2006, we wanted to do three main things to create a successful social content community: first, we wanted to make it easy for authors to create a one-page topical website; second, we wanted to drive traffic to the author’s content; and third, we wanted to share the majority of the revenue back with the author.

We had planned for natural search to be a major source of traffic, but it wasn’t until November of 2006 that we started to get measurable traffic from search engines.  To this day, we continue to refine our platform to help authors on HubPages to have the best opportunity to show up in the natural search results.  One of the key metrics we learned was about the longevity of content.  Content created on HubPages peaks in traffic on average nearly three years after it’s created.  This knowledge helped our business become more predictable.  For the author, creating a HubPages article is like putting a little bit of money in the bank that is going to increase its value over the next three years and then continue at that level for the foreseeable future.  The large quantity of content that was created early in the life of HubPages dramatically increased in revenue over 3 years, and allowed us to continue to grow the company.

We became a metrics focused company.  The two key drivers of our business are Hub production and revenue per thousand Hub views.  Based on these drivers, we developed a model that allowed us to do sophisticated micro-marketing including search engine marketing to attract writers.  Through analysis of Hubs created by new authors, our models are able to predict a close estimate of the traffic and revenue that a new author will generate over various time intervals. This prediction model has been significant in our growth.

In the early days, we decided we didn’t want to be the arbiter of quality or try to control what people wrote, but we soon discovered that high-quality authors and advertisers did not feel comfortable with the fully open publishing platform that included adult content. So, in July of 2007, about a year after our launch, we modified our terms of service and took leading steps in the social content category to become a porn-free site.  The short-term impact was over a 30% drop in traffic, but it reaped long term gains.  We also continued to build anti-spam technologies and put in place requirements for publishing on HubPages that improves the overall quality.

Then we wanted to give insight to authors about the type of content we saw working well on HubPages so that they could earn more. We started hosting contests about writing on evergreen topics.  We started incorporating analytics into each page of the site that showed authors their traffic sources.

We continue to invest in specialty tools that teach authors what pages to link to with the Interlinking Tool and how to refine the titles of their Hubs with the Title Tuner Beta.  By taking the data we collected, and putting it inline with the tools, authors became more successful on our platform.

HubPages is a set of technologies, but we really are about authors.  We took pro-writer stances by letting the author choose what they wanted to write on, and giving them ownership of their content, so that the revenue they earn can increase over time.  As the author community grew, we built features that fostered communication – like the ability to follow and compliment other authors.  As a result, HubPages’ reputation as a writing community continues to grow.

Now, going on our fifth year of business and with nearly 140% growth in the last 12 months in terms of visitors, I can see the site growing well into the future based on our three original tenets of making it easy to create content, driving traffic and sharing the revenue.

Hubbers (HubPages authors) can earn money by publishing their Hubs and then collecting ad revenue (which is split with HubPages). Articles include written content, original images, video, slide-shows and more. The startup actually shares a hefty portion of ad-revenue with authors, giving Hubbers 60 percent of the revenue.

In terms of traffic, the site is seeing 39 million unique visits per month; and 2,200 articles are created on the content platform per day. HubPages faces competition from Demand Media (which filed for an IPO a few months ago) and Associated Content (which was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year), but the startup differs from these two competitors because it lets its content creators choose the topic they would like to write about. HubPages also gives authors SEO, content creation and monetization tools.

HubPages also faces competition from Squidoo, Mahalo and About.com.

HubPages, a content community based around topics, is adding a new real-time feature this week: feeds. The site lets anyone create “Hubs” around any type of topic, and divided content into forums, questions and answers.

The new feed makes it more easy to read all components of a particular hub or topic, where you can comment, ask and answer questions and participate in forums. Hubbers (HubPages authors) can earn money by publishing their Hubs and then collecting ad revenue (which is split with HubPages). Paul Edmondson, founder of HubPages, tells me that several thousand new Hubs are created everyday. Edemondson adds that the new feed hopes to make Hubs a “living, breathing piece of content.”

HubPages is also growing, seeing 20 million unique visitors in November and growing 112 percent in traffic over the past year, according to Google Analytics. HubPages faces competition from Squidoo, Mahalo and About.com.

Remember Squidoo? Founded by current CEO and famous marketing guru Seth Godin, the service allows Internet users to generate rich, topical web pages (dubbed ‘lenses’) to serve as a hub for information, videos, links etc. centered around any given subject. The concept is similar to what companies like HubPages, Mahalo and Helium are all about.

Now Squidoo is looking to monetize the web service directly – rather then depend on on-site advertising – by persuading brands to pay for management of their respective lenses.

In a blog post, Godin shares more details about the new initiative – dubbed ‘Brands in Public’ – and explains why he believes brands will be willing to pay for it.

You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.

That all sounds super duper, and I have the highest respect for the man, but I also have mixed feelings about the way Squidoo is going about it.

Rather than convincing companies to set up their own public profile pages for their brands to aggregate and manage online conversations, Squidoo is creating hundreds of unofficial ones (e.g. for Guinness) in the hopes that companies will come to them and cough up $400 per month for the right to develop the page on their terms. Once a company pays up and gains control over the relevant Squidoo lens, the left hand column will ‘belong’ to them.

This will enable companies to post responses, highlight third-party blog posts, run contests and quizzes, and more. Basically, it becomes a place where companies can both lead, monitor and respond to the online conversations about their brands, which Godin says is particularly helpful when shit storms brew on the Web (whether deserved or not).

I’m not sure I like the fact that Squidoo takes the lead in creating pages for brands only to ‘unlock’ them for a monthly fee afterwards. Sure, there’s some truth to its claim that conversations are happening around the web anyway and they’re merely aggregating them, but I’m sure many will claim that the company is doing this for obvious SEO reasons. Get Satisfaction follows a similar strategy of holding company profile pages ‘hostage’, and has in the past been criticized for that behavior.

I also think a $400/month price point is extremely high for something that can easily be built internally. Squidoo seems to realize this and offers the first 100 brands to sign up a share of the $500,000 in-house ads that the company will run across the site promoting the service and the first partnering brands.

Either way, Squidoo already signed up a number of beta-testers (e.g. Home Depot) and hopes to attract more brands in the near future. The company published an e-book (PDF) about why any company should be considering this, and in it shared some numbers about the Squidoo network size.

Founded 3 years ago (Michael Arrington thought it could become Godin’s ‘purple albatross’ at the time), Squidoo claims it has attracted 400,000 users who hand-built over 1 million pages to date. Squidoo also says it has raised a ‘significant’ yet undisclosed amount of capital for charity and is one of the 500 most-trafficked sites on the Web. Looking at the Compete chart below, they do seem to be getting a decent amount of visitors (about 4.4 million a month) even if its two closest competitors both attract a bigger audience at this point.

His results are below. In a nutshell, he finds Facebook a much better experience. When it comes to the results, though, things are mixed. Ryan’s test showed a lower cost per click on MySpace than Facebook ($.27 v. $.44). But the Facebook clicks were more productive: a new user cost just $5.11 on Facebook, v. $8.03 on MySpace.

The results, though, can’t be taken too seriously, for a number of reasons. First, Ryan spent $3,119 on Facebook ads and only $225 on MySpace (he says MySpace ads are much harder to administer, so he spent less). But that difference alone makes the results unreliable. Second, Facebook has text ads, MySpace has display ads, so the results are not apples-to-apples.

That gets me to the biggest reason the test isn’t scientific – both MySpace and Facebook knew about it. Ryan interviewed both extensively for the post. Since both knew this was coming, they both had incentives to help his ads get better performance.

But the post is valuable in that it shows what a real world advertiser thinks of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the platforms. Based on this, we may commission a true third party test of each of them, without notice to either company. Those results will be more relevant.

Update: A statement from MySpace on the post below:

We welcome the constructive feedback we’re getting on MyAds from our more than 15,000 advertisers—we’ve only been live publicly for a handful of weeks and we continue to make updates to the system. Unfortunately a lot of the information in the post above is outdated and we wanted to clarify a few important details on the new product.

Last week, we debuted a new functionality—“On-going Campaign and Daily Spending Limit,” which allows an advertiser to easily set up a continuous campaign with a daily stop-limit budget. Since its launch last week our daily budgeting has been adopted by 90% of advertisers. We also recently launched “Bulk Pausing and Restarting” which enables advertisers to better manage campaigns in bulk and filter by campaign status. We think these new improvements should address the major points above.

MySpace does an exceptional job of empowering MyAds customers to receive an analysis of campaign performance, however, in the break-out spreadsheet above, it says “No Daily Reporting,” which is factually incorrect. Not only does MyAds have daily reporting in the product, the reporting is updated on an hourly basis and has been core a functionality of the product since launch.

Ultimately, we wish the author would have spent more money with us to match what he spent on Facebook to ensure the comparison was reasonably balanced, but in spite of that we managed to deliver a 50% higher CTR at two-thirds the cost-per-click– making MyAds a better value for the money.

We hope this additional information is helpful to TechCrunch readers and are in contact with the guest author to update him on some of the absent MyAds product details.

Ryan’s Post:

After I had some issues with MySpace MyAds a while back, I’ve decided to dig in and come up with a much more detailed and apples-to-apples comparison of MySpace’s newly launched self-service ad platform to that of the slightly older, yet just as wet behind the ears Facebook Ads. As HubPages Communicator of Awesomeness! I have not only extensively used both of these latest attempts at the do-it-yourself advertising craze as a part of my overall marketing plan, but I have also had the chance to pick the brains of each of their management teams.

One of the first things that I found out was even though MySpace and Facebook have both created services that are similar in the fact that they’re finally able to capitalize on the data that millions of people are pumping into them daily, their implementation, strategy and vision couldn’t be any more different.

MySpace MyAds – Keeping It Creative And Looking To Monetize Now

While meeting with Adam Bain, the president of Fox Interactive Media’s audience network and the guy that Fox challenged to make some monetary magic with MySpace after they acquired the ad optimization and hypertargeting ad experts Strategic Data Corporation in 2007, it was clear that he has a plan to implement MyAds in a way that won’t affect the creativity and entertainment that MySpace has embraced since its launch in 2003. This is the main reason for him and his team deciding to go with a banner-based system as opposed to the more text-based systems that are currently used with Facebook Ads and other cost-per-click ad platforms such as Google AdSense.

Adam was also quick to let me know that the MyAds platform is now utilizing the same hypertargeting technology that they have been successfully using with larger big brand ad campaigns, such as the major mobile phone carriers (which he claims MySpace is the number one online lead generator for each of them). His overall vision for MyAds is to quickly focus on monetizing MySpace by utilizing this new hypertargeting which now gives users the ability to target a professional and creative campaign to practically anyone on MySpace based upon their interests and location. Also, he stressed that as the adoption of MyAds continues to grow he feels that that eventually the ads that most people are used to seeing on MySpace (punch the monkey) will go from being annoying to becoming something much more relevant and entertaining.

It’s probably also worth mentioning that the MyAds platform itself was built from the ground up internally by MySpace and that many of their core members came over from the team that helped Yahoo integrate their acquisition of Overture’s search advertising system. MyAds is seen as a huge revenue opportunity for MySpace and according to Adam the 40,000+ ads that have been submitted are already having an impact on their bottom line.

Facebook Ads – Monetization Taking A Backseat To Overall Growth Strategy

Facebook’s director of monetization, Tim Kendall, seemed to have a much different take on their now one year old self-service ad platform, which is an evolution from the Facebook Flyers that I once used a few years back when I was a graduate assistant at a college in Indianapolis, IN. According to Tim and despite the over half a billion dollars of funding that they’re currently burning through, Facebook’s main priority isn’t monetizing – it’s continuing to keep the now fastest growing social network of 140+ million worldwide users on pace to become something even bigger.

Growth, Tim says, is the only way to eventually get to a point to where they can start bringing in a positive cash flow and can begin turning their now venture capital devouring machine into something that can show signs of actually making some real money. Until they get to this point of growth that they’re happy with, Tim says that the proper resources required to really break out the Facebook Ads system into the mainstream won’t be available and they will continue to grow at the modest pace that they’re currently seeing.

The excitement about and around the Facebook Ads team wasn’t close to being on the same level of what I experienced when meeting the MyAds team, but I suppose that could be due to other growth-based initiatives, such as Facebook Connect, getting all of the attention. Also, as we discussed the overall vision of Facebook Ads there was much less focus on the potential effects to the overall user experience when it came to the ads being implemented into the Facebook as compared to my discussion with the MyAds team. This is probably because of the more spontaneous and community-focused nature of MySpace vs. the more connection-focused Facebook that is used more like a communications tool.

Using MyAds In Two Words: Clumsy Yet Creative

The newly launched MyAds is a huge step in the right direction for MySpace’s attempt to empower potential advertisers of all sizes to be able to tap into their network of promotion-friendly users by utilizing their new lineup of self-service tools. As a marketer with a mid-sized and somewhat limited budget, the idea of what MyAds can offer is very appealing – as long as it’s easy-to-use and somewhat self-managing.

You see, the self-service model that is meant to take advantage of the longtail of advertisers (50,000 advertisers spending $25 as opposed to 25 advertisers spending $50,000) is somewhat of a double-edged sword due to the fact that the smaller and mid-sized advertisers that are meant to use the system are a much different beast than the larger and more experienced advertisers that are more used to dealing with advertising platforms, terminology and management. This means that dealing with smaller advertisers (like me) also comes with dealing with advertisers that have less time, are managing many different things at once, and are most-likely less educated on advertising methods and seem to need more tools that allow them to make sense of their campaigns easily and quickly.

This brings me to my own experience with the MyAds platform, which up until this point has been a little bit of a struggle. This isn’t surprising considering that it’s only been openly available for less than 3 months and is still in public Beta. I’m not one to get frustrated easily with something new and I understand that they are consistently making improvements every day, but as it stands now there are some issues with the MyAds platform that have made it really hard for someone like me to work with as efficiently as I’d like. Some of these issues are as follows:

• Extremely slow and non-intuitive Flash-based management system that can be a real time-killer: It takes me a lot of time and a lot of screens to manage the campaigns that I have created. I want to get in, make some changes and get out fairly quickly and this system just doesn’t allow me to do that at this point.
• No multi-ad campaign creation: Unfortunately every ad that I enter into the system has its own campaign, budget, timeline and reporting. This makes it impossible to create specific sets of ads that can be managed from the group level such as Christmas ads, female-targeted ads or groups of locally focused ads. Managing each ad on its own is very inefficient, unpractical and isn’t worth the time that it takes to manage them.
• No ongoing campaigns and no daily spending limits: When a campaign is created there is a specific budget amount and schedule set for the ad and once either that budget or schedule runs out the campaign is officially complete and stopped until it is restarted manually. This results in excessive management of the campaigns or the inability to manage them at all, especially for the ones with smaller budget amounts. One odd quirk that I specifically ran into was that when my $25 budget ran out for an ad I couldn’t figure out how to get it restarted. This was because even though I extended the schedule for another month, I had to go in and add another $25 by hand to the $25 that was already listed for my budget, meaning that I had to change the original $25 to $50 to get it up and running again. Then the additional $25 ran out (which happened a day later) and I now need to go in and change the budget to $75 to get it restarted one more time. As you can see this can begin to get very annoying. This past week the MyAds team informed me that they are rolling out both daily spending limits and ongoing schedules, which will clear this issue up and will make MyAds much more manageable.
• Being creative could also mean more work: The banner-based system that MyAds utilizes allows for a higher level of creativity for those who use it, but this also means that it takes more work to get these campaigns created and running. Google, Facebook and others have developed more text-based systems for this very reason. But, the user-generated ads that I was shown by the MyAds team were super creative and looked as professional as many banner ads that I have seen on other sites, which shows that users are already capitalizing on the flexibility of the platform. MySpace has never been one to take the more boring route and they’re hoping that these types of banners will make the ads more effective and relevant to their users as time goes on.

Each of these issues can probably be easily fixed and like I said, the MyAds system is only a few months old and they have a very capable team working on improving this system every single day. I fully expect MyAds to only get better over time, I just hope for their sake that they don’t lose a lot of advertisers in the meantime.

Using Facebook Ads In Two Words: Speedy And Statistical

Everyone knows that Facebook hasn’t exactly been free of any issues when it comes to trying to monetize their network, but ever since I have used them Facebook Ads have consistently improved their extremely easy-to-use tools and have quickly realized the benefit of empowering their advertisers with as much statistical and analytical data as possible. The speed and ease of use that comes along with using Facebook Ads makes creating campaigns and managing their budgets, schedules and messaging extremely straight forward while their reporting options also make it easy to get a quick and easy overview of what your different campaigns are up to.

In fact, there aren’t a whole lot of things to complain about from a marketing perspective when it comes to Facebook Ads, but the one thing that I do worry about is how much noise their users will take before the ads begin to get in the way of what they’re actually there for – communicating with their friends. Here are a few things that I feel Facebook has done right:

• They have developed a great keyword-based ad targeting system: Facebook has over 20,000 unique keywords (and a pool of over 1 billion) that you can use when targeting your ads. These keywords come from profiles, Facebook pages, groups and authorized Facebook applications and are entered with a free form predictive keyword system. MySpace, on the other hand, uses a less-organic method to targeting interests via a hierarchy tree-based system.
• They have created a very flexible and friendly campaign management and reporting system: There are options to group ads into a campaign, to set a daily spending limit and the ability to make the campaign run on an ongoing basis. Of course, all of this is well complemented with a quick and comprehensive reporting system that Facebook calls Insights. Insights goes well beyond just clicks and impressions by enabling you to dig deeper into your campaigns by providing user-specific demographic data for the people who are actually end up clicking on your ads.
• The use of adding Social Actions can really boost your clicks: By adding Social Actions to your Facebook Ads you allow the ads to potentially run with an image of one of the Facebook user’s friends if they’re a fan of your Facebook Page that is connected to the campaign. Adding Social Actions has been known to double the amount of clicks that an ad receives.

So, does Facebook have the perfect system? No. But as far as I’ve seen they’ve made some huge leaps in the right direction when it comes to advertising on social networks and I can only imagine what they’ll come up with once they actually give it the attention and resources that they think it eventually deserves.

Stats, Conversions And The Bottom Line: How Do They Perform?

The bottom line when using these self-service advertising platforms is whether or not they make my life easier as a marketer and whether or not they give me a good return on my investment of time, money and attention. I ran some numbers on how each of these campaigns has performed for me, but like most advertisers will be quick to tell you, results can and probably will vary from campaign to campaign. With that being said, here are some things that you should be aware of before I lay out my numbers for you:

• These stats are from the campaigns that I ran in November of 2008
• Each week I spend some time each Thursday to update, manage and adjust these types of marketing campaigns and depending on ease of use, I can get more done on some platforms than others. MySpace tended to take me more time to manage, so it usually didn’t get the same level of management that Facebook Ads did.
• These stats include analytics that I have pulled from both Facebook Ads and MyAds and the amount of data they allow you to view and download varies. While MyAds only offers a Flash-based reporting interface with some basic analytics, Facebook Ads allowed me to download more data than I could ever ask for in an easy-to-use Excel format.
• I was more than willing to budget the same amount of spending on both of the platforms, but due to some of their campaign restrictions, I honestly had a hard time spending as much money with MyAds.
• As far as HubPages interests go, there are two metrics that we are most interested in when it comes to determining a good ROI – newly registered members and more importantly the Hubs that they end up publishing. Depending on these two metrics we can determine whether or not various marketing campaigns are giving us the return that we need to deem them successful.

The Future For These Self-Service Ad Platforms

Although MySpace and Facebook are two very different businesses, they both have realized that they need to accomplish similar things in order to give their self-service systems the success that they’re looking for. Two big goals that they both mentioned were increasing their marketing and promotional reach to the millions of potential advertisers across the nation and once they reach them somehow educating these advertisers to the point that they feel comfortable using these self-service systems.

Facebook has already started setting up deals with partners as a way to get the word out, such as their partnership with the Visa Business Network that leverages Visa’s name to attract new businesses to advertise and a deal with GoDaddy and Intuit that gives their new business users free credits to try out the Facebook Ads system. MySpace is also working on setting up some of these partnerships and I’m sure that they will be figuring out ways to inform their music, comedy and other entertainment-based users about the MyAds service as they begin to implement their marketing and promotional strategy.

With both MySpace and Facebook looking to self-service advertising as a way to significantly bump revenues, the race is officially on to see who can get traction in the market first. Facebook has the polished tools and the growing audience, but I have a feeling that MySpace has just given us a taste of what their creative team can come up with and despite the issues that I’ve had with MyAds, they seem to be constantly improving their system that has already seen some early success. All I know is that I’m looking forward to seeing how these competing platforms end up performing through the rest of 2008 and into 2009.

MySpace has an embarrassing situation today involving their new MyAds self service advertising product – they’ve repeatedly rejected ads from a startup called HubPages as competitive to MySpace, despite the fact that the site isn’t a social network.

Ryan Hupfer from HubPages (who coincidentally is the author of MySpace For Dummies) writes:

This is a follow-up for these 2 posts (here and here) that you guys have written on the new MySpace MyAds advertising platform, which I was initially excited for and now wish that I’d never seen due to it being a complete waste of my time. I thought that you might enjoy hearing a first-person encounter with the system and from a business that actually utilizes these types of campaigns as a way for new member recruitment. I will give you a brief overview and if you’d like more information, I’d be more that happy to talk more about it.

Who I am:
My name is Ryan Hupfer and I’m the Communicator of Awesomeness! (marketing manager) at HubPages.com, a US top 250 website that focuses on helping writers monetize topical content. I believe that Mike knows one of our founders, Paul Edmondson pretty well and you wrote about our launch back in 2006. You last wrote something about in May of 2007 when we changed our look and added some text ad optimization to the site.

Why I’m contacting you:
Part of my job is to keep new writers coming into HubPages and we do all types of CPC campaigns and other online partnerships to help with this. Well, I have been using Facebook ads for quite a while now and have been very pleased with the results. It’s super easy to use, targets well and is very easy to create, update and manage as the campaigns progress over time. Well, when I heard that MySpace was coming up with the same type of self-service ad system I was pretty excited to try it out. I even had one of our designers come up with 2 versions of 5 ads that I wanted to start running. Well, as I started creating the campaigns, I first noticed a few things:

1. The targeting isn’t nearly as good as Facebook (I couln’t even target Finance or Autos topics)

2. The platform is very Flash heavy and super slow/clunky compared to Facebook

3. The campaign setup was fairly confusing and it seemed like I could only add one ad to a campaign, which dictates the ad budget (which had to be over $25). So that’s a daily spend of $25 per ad.

Despite these slowdowns, I still continued on and entered in each of the ads, with 2 versions of each (300 square and 728 banner). But, as I began to enter them in I noticed that they were starting to get rejected just as quickly as I was adding them in. I wasn’t really sure why they were getting rejected until I received an email from MySpace with a reason. This is where it gets interesting, too due to the fact that I received several different reasons for rejection for the same ad after I resubmitted it again. Also, 5 out of the 10 ads made it through, no probem so I have no idea why the some were rejected and some weren’t. Here are some screenshots of the rejection from the platform and here are a few quotes from the email that was sent to me (2 of them are different and they were for the same ad):

Rejection #1 (same ad as Rejection #2, but with different reason)
Dear Advertiser:

The Write 300 advertisement in your campaign(s) MySpace Writing 300 was reviewed to ensure that it complies with our editorial guidelines. We would like you to know that your ad was not accepted for the following reason: Other – Not accepting this type of business.

Rejection #2
Dear Advertiser:

The Write 300 advertisement in your campaign(s) MySpace Writing 300 was reviewed to ensure that it complies with our editorial guidelines. We would like you to know that your ad was not accepted for the following reason: Other – Promotion of a Myspace Competitor.

Rejection #3
Dear Advertiser:

The auto 700 advertisement in your campaign(s) auto 700 was reviewed to ensure that it complies with our editorial guidelines. We would like you to know that your ad was not accepted for the following reason: Other – Myspace competitor, cannot promote.

So, not only did they continue to reject my ads (and my money), but they did it in a very inconsistent way, not to mention that I would never view HubPages as a competitor to MySpace in the first place.

Anyways, I thought that you and the rest of the TechCrunch crew would find all of this pretty interesting and I would be curious to see if anyone else is having the same issues with the new MyAds platform. As an advertising platform it’s not even in the same ballpark as Facebook’s system, but maybe other people would say otherwise. If you’d like to post something about this, feel free and if you’d like more information, just let me know.

I contacted MySpace and they said the rejection is an error and will be reversed. They did confirm that they reject ads from “direct competitors,” and point out that Facebook does the same. In this case, though, they said that their customer service representatives were overzealous in rejecting the ads.

MySpace also says they now have 10,000 advertisers on the platform. Earlier this month we reported early revenue numbers for the product.

Update: MySpace emails to say:

- You can target Autos…car tuning, muscle cars, trucks, motorcycles. Finance is coming next week.
- Facebook only allows text ads – MyAds gives you complete creative control which is why there is an ad builder.
- There’s no daily budget. You set the start and end dates and the amount. Min $25 total budget.
- Yes you can only have one ad per campaign but you can have up to 100 campaigns.

From a product perspective, Knol is not much different than existing products like Squidoo and Hubpages. It’s a new knowledge base for authors. Anyone, eventually, will be able to write on any topic they choose. Google will provide authoring tools, store the information, allow others to comment and suggest edits, add ads with the author’s approval, and provide traffic via their search engine.

But Knol isn’t really aimed at Squidoo and Hubpages. It’s much more likely that Google is jealously eyeing the massive traffic that flows through its search engine to Wikipedia. As Nick Carr has noted, Wikipedia continues to climb and climb in search results for many top search terms.

More Ad Inventory Needed, ASAP

Wikipedia, a non-profit, has stubbornly resisted any efforts to monetize its pages. Google would kill to supply ads to Wikipedia. Barring that, competing with them makes a lot of sense.

Google needs to grow revenue to support their valuation. And for that, they need ad inventory. It wasn’t surprising when Google started hosting news directly and allowing comments (that = page views). So the idea of them hosting a knowledge base shouldn’t be surprising, either.

Authors have a choice – they can have ads or not. But if they have ads, they can only choose Google. Many authors are going to include ads, and Google will get extra inventory.

Delicious Timing

Wikipedia has caused more problems than just refusing to take Google’s ads. They are also launching a much anticipated search engine this month via their for-profit arm, Wikia (Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales hates it when Wikia is called that, but it’s damned hard to tell where Wikipedia ends and Wikia begins sometimes). Google isn’t likely to be particularly scared of Wikia’s new search engine, but it has probably been a little annoying for them to watch all the press about the upcoming “Google Killer.”

Google doesn’t usually pre-announce products before launch. in this case they did. Why? Perhaps as a reminder to Wikipedia that competition can flow both ways.

Anyone Remember Google Base?

As a content management system, Knol is a kissing cousin to Google Base, a classified ad platform that Google launched in late 2005. Google Base has gone exactly nowhere – if anything it’s a spam farm and nothing more. But at the time of its launch the New York Times and others heralded it as a major disruptive force to the classified ads world. Knol may be Google Base with a little more strategic thought applied.

No Conflicts Here, Move Along

Google says that Knol pages will be indexed into their search engine but will have no special ranking. That’s a little bit untrue, since they’ll be hosted by Google and will have the advantage of Google’s hefty PageRank to lift them in search results. And since no one will be auditing Google to ensure that Knol pages are treated just like everyone else, there are bound to be claims of conflict of interest. The fact is, Google will make money from Knol, and so they’ll have a financial interest in moving people to those pages. That makes them less believable in the role of a neutral gatekeeper.

Google is now synonymous with search. Offering Google Knol and putting it in the search results is analogous to Microsoft offering Office for the Windows platform. Sure, anyone can compete with Office, but Microsoft has a natural advantage and finds ways of keeping market share. The Knol team will likely do the same over time.

Wikipedia v. Knol

Wikipedia gets massive support from the community because it’s non-profit. Google can’t compete with that, so they’re focusing on putting the authors’ names in lights and giving them a little cash on the side, too. That should help them pull some heavy Wikipedia contributors over to their project.

Very soon we are going to see a lot of Wikipedia content moving wholesale to Knol. Wikipedia content is basically free to use, redistribute, copy, whatever, under the GNU license:

All text in Wikipedia is covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work.

Anyone writing for Knol is likely to at least peruse Wikipedia content before publishing. And if they see anything good, they are at liberty to simply lift and copy it over to Knol, and get a adsense check for their time.

So, in a way, Google has found a way to monetize Wikipedia content after all.

In a poll on Friday, TechCrunch readers narrowly said Google hasn’t overstepped its boundaries with Knol. If Knol is a success, those results may be a little different a year from now. In fact, the more successful Knol is, the more uncomfortable people are going to be with Google as gatekeeper and content provider.

YieldBuild, a new service from the company that launched HubPages, will take a stab at optimizing those ad units for you. It’s similar to the Rubicon Project, a highly rated ad optimization platform in beta that finds the best mix of ad network and demographic data. However, YeildBuild has a focus on layout and design.

It uses computer algorithms to automatically optimize your site’s ad spots with the most profitable combination of ad layout, style, and network. The system continually tests alternative configurations of layouts, networks, and color, looking for the highest performing ones. You can see a timeline of the system substituting ads below. It takes about 100,000 impressions to train the system. As users become unresponsive to the ads, the system is supposed to switch in a more profitable combination of layout and networks.

They’ve been privately beta testing the system with some fairly well known startups and saw improvements of 50% to over 100% in effective CPM rates on user profile pages. They’re currently looking for more beta testers to try the system out on.

Hubpages allows user to create topical web page (think Wikia or Squidoo) that also included blog-like modules like comments. Pages are tagged by the creator and by readers, allowing for quick browsing among related pages.

Users are encouraged to build sites that can generate revenue. A good example is a list of important books on a topic, or a review of a product (the best running shoe, for example). Hubpages will insert google ads relevant to the topic, as well as allow links to Amazon, eBay and other affiliate-paying retailers, and split revenue 50/50 with the page creator. Compared to Squidoo, which only pays 50% of profits to page creators, that’s a good deal.

I created a page on the site, called Crunch Network, to experience the site building tools. The page took about 10 minutes to create, and includes summary text, RSS feeds from three of our sites, and a comment area. The creation tools are far beyond what wikia or squidoo has currently (I’d appreciate any comments on this from Squidoo authors), using ajax for previews, moving modules around on the page, etc. They’ve done a really nice job.

Pages are ranked and presesented on the home page. Rank is determined by a algorithm that takes total traffic and “polarization” into account; polarization is simply how often people click that they like, or don’t like, a particular website. Whether they like it or not isn’t relevant, only that they have an opinion.

Can Hubpages succeed? If it will, it has to differentiate itself from Squidoo, which has yet to see significant usage growth. A key way to increase the likelihood of links to hub pages is to encourage the creation of regular fresh content via a blog-like module. Paul says this is in development, and also adds that it’s so easy to create new hubs that beta users have been creating new ones regularly. Readers can subscribe via RSS to an individual author’s hubs.

The Hubpages team is founded by three guys out of Microsoft that were part of the successful startup MongoMusic. The team includes Paul Edmondson, Jay Reitz, and Paul Deeds. Most recently, Paul Edmondson was the Group Product Manager for MSN Entertainment, Jay Reitz was the Development Manager, and Paul Deeds was a developer in Windows Media Internet Services.

Squidoo has basic tools for publishers to create “lenses”, which are topic specific websites. For example, see this site on Web 2.0 by Joshua Porter. The idea is to allow an expert to create a site, combining static/evergreen and refreshed content. Better sites bubble to the top and publishers have the ability to earn a share of advertising.

But Squidoo is stingy when it comes to sharing money with publishers. They split profits, not revenue. And they give 5% to charity before splitting profits.

We divide up the money we receive in a very public way. First, we pay our bills. That’s direct out of pocket expenses like rent and servers and salary and benefits expenses (our CEO doesn’t take a salary, and neither does our board of directors). Then, with no other deductions, we pay 5% of our post-expense revenue directly to the charity pool, 50% directly to our lensmasters and retain the rest to pay off investors and employees.

HubPages is taking a different approach. They are promising more tools to create and promote sites, as well as an aggressive 50/50 revenue split with publishers.

Hubpages purpose is to provide easy-to-use tools and traffic to help anyone to produce content and monetize their knowledge by creating webpages. There will be monetization programs to choose from consisting of products, advertisements and lead generation tools that each person can easily incorporate into their pages. Hubpages will split revenue with the content creator. The pages are organized in the Hubpages website based on algorithmic quality index that promotes the best pages throughout the hierarchy (based on tags) of the website. Each author will earn a reputation score called a HubScore that can be referenced to meter the quality of the content by an author.

Hubpages will be positioned to take advantage of the significant numbers of new web content providers that want to supplement their income through content like many people do on eBay by selling goods.

The Hubpages team is founded by three guys out of Microsoft that were part of the successful startup MongoMusic. The team includes Paul Edmondson, Jay Reitz, and Paul Deeds. Most recently, Paul Edmondson was the Group Product Manager for MSN Entertainment, Jay Reitz was the Development Manager, and Paul Deeds was a developer in Windows Media Internet Services.

Sign up for the HubPages beta at Hubpages.com.