Not only does Google AdSense pay badly, it can wreck your unemployment benefits. The State of New York cut one woman's benefit checks and told her running the ads was "self employment." AdSense earned her $1.30 per day. [TechDirt] (Pic)

NonSociety, Julia Allison's experient in making macro bucks from microcelebrity, hasn't come up with a clever way of paying the bills. So she's running cheapo Google AdSense ads! Do they ever tell a story.

As the election approaches, more bloggers are noticing ads from backers of Proposition 8, the gay-marriage ban appearing on Californians' ballots, courtesy of Google. The search engine's algorithm is mindlessly matching them to phrases like "gay marriage," regardless of whether the blog in question is for or against.…

In tough times, overcommunicate, says Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr, doing an inadvertent impression of so-sharey-he's-scary videoblogger Robert Scoble. One Kleiner portfolio company has gotten the message: Google! Kim Scott, the company's director of online sales and operations for AdSense, the company's system…

A photo that may or may not depict a young, nude and brunette Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee, has made the tabloid rounds after being featured on blog Hollywood Newsroom. It was sent in as part of a Photoshopping contest, but looks legitimate enough as a…

YouTube has an embeddable player with features that might feel familiar to publishers who've used Blip.tv's show player — it's not meant for casual embeds, and isn't accessible from the standard embed code found on most video pages. It's meant for static placement on Web sites for featuring multiple videos from a…

Media buyers and major publishers say that despite ComScore shareholders' worries, Google's Ad Planner, which provides Web metrics and demographic data to online advertisers, won't dislodge Web-traffic measurement leader ComScore or its rival Nielsen. “[Google needs] to add so many things, it’s not even a…

When our video producer, Richard Blakeley, sent me an invite to the Belmont stakes this weekend, a link appeared below his message. It read:

Over the last few months, wily spammers may have figured out how to crack the security feature known as "captchas." With an army of compromised Windows PCs known as botnets, they've been using their new power to flood Google's Blogger with spam. Why Blogger?

In January a pair of money managers, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, bought 9.1 percent of Slide for $50 million. Fortune asks, "Are these widgets worth half a billion?" The mag doesn't come up with anything more than "maybe," but I'm willing to go a little further. Slide worth $550 million? No, despite its huge traffic…

Last quarter, Google hired 889 people, bringing the total headcount to 16,805. What do all these new employees do? Stab each other in the back, apparently. A tipster writes: "The management within Google, especially AdWords and AdSense (the money making machines of the entire company ... engineering gets the glory…

Glam Media, the women-focused ad network, has raised $84.6 million, leaving the company valued at a rich $500 million. That still falls short of founder Samir Arora's hopes: According to a private-placement document circulating last year, he was seeking $200 million. Why'd he fall short?

Fraudulent clicks accounted for 28.3 percent of all clicks on ad networks like Google's AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network during the fourth quarter of 2007. After some approximations, Freakonomics puts the number of publishers who are theoretically complicit in click fraud as high as 26 million. Which means…

Google is the target of a trojan that could be more damaging than the worm that has affected literally dozens of Orkut users. This new trojan, however, hits Google where it hurts — its ever-swelling advertising revenues. It redirects Web ads from the AdSense program to a rival ad provider. Bitdefender, the Romanian…

Hoosier-powered search engine Chacha is turning to an unlikely source to fund its already cozy deal with Indiana University. Chacha is introducing Google AdSense ads to the university's search results. ChaCha already features both Google and Yahoo ads as sponsored links, on its public search, but until recently IU had…

Fortune is reporting that Google engineer Gokul Rajaram is leaving the Googleplex for a stab at his own company. Rajaram's greatest achievement? Oh, this little thing called AdSense, you heard of it? The ad system that places Google ads on blogs and Web 2.0 apps, keeping them financially viable against all business…

Phony press releases have become the grist for the newest Internet profit mills. If you're like Chris Anderson and us, you don't read press releases. But several tech blogs were taken in by a dubious press release issued by a nonexistent company allegedly backed by real investors who may or may not have invested in…

Google has changed the clickable area within AdSense ads to include just the title and the url of the ad, rather than the entire ad box. This should raise the value of ad clicks in the long run by reducing the likelihood of accidental clicks. [Google Blogoscoped]

Facebook updated its code over the weekend and, according to reports, Facebook's much-anticipated SocialAds are now officially part of the ones and zeroes. Based on the updates, Allfacebook created this mock-up of what a SocialAd might look like. Hmm. Looks like an ad. Here's a more revealing shot.