It seems like everyone on my Twitter is headed off to SMX West this week, and I will be joining everyone Tuesday and getting ready for my session on Thursday. So, want some freebie AdSense placement advice? Jeremy Schoemaker )AKA Shoemoney ( & myself will be dishing out some contextual advertising advice to those brave enough to volunteer their sites. We try and cover a variety of sites, and even if you don't volunteer your site,

Many publishers have been annoyed by the problem where the "top channels" reporting link in the AdSense account control panel on the overview page stopped working just under a month ago. This was a handy feature nearly every publisher used to be able to quickly see what the top earning channels are, without having to pull a full report and manually sorting them by earnings amount. There was a "top channels" workaround ,

If you are a New Zealand or Australian AdSense publisher that was owed money from November earnings )checks sent at the end of December( you should have received the difference owed, according to AdSensePro. Publishers in those countries received payments with the currency exchange rate inverted , meaning publishers were shorted earnings in their last checks. I've gotten word that publishers affected by this issue have received any payments due,

Have you made a Google AdSense referral in the last month or two? If you have, chances are pretty good that instead of that nice $250 commission you thought you'd be earning, you will instead be getting only $100 for that new publisher. Google has severely cut back not only on the payments they are offering for new signups, but also just how many people will be able to even offer these referral products to their visitors. First,

If you are still being annoyed by the sorting issue that Google is having with their "top channels" on the reporting overview page , there is a workaround that some publishers may not have thought of. You can save a custom report, and then click on it from your control panel. Simply go into Advance Reports, and select the date range of "Today", then click Show Channel Data. Select "All", unless you prefer to select your most important channels, then select Group by Channel.

Google sent November earnings payments to AdSense publishers in Australia amd New Zealand with one major error... the currency exchange rate was inverted. So publishers ended up with less earnings that they should have, although fortunately because of the exchange rate, most were only shorted by a few hundred dollars, instead of the potential for thousands of dollars for other currencies with exchange rates not nearly as close to par.

As any AdSense stat junkie knows, when you login to your AdSense account and click the "top channels" link, it automatically brings up your top earning channels for the day, or whichever view you choose, such as today, yesterday, last seven days, and a couple different month options. But since yesterday, the reports haven't been bringing up the top earning channels. Instead, when viewing the top channels, it seems to be pulling random channels for showing the data.

While it doesn't seem to be publicly detailed yet, some publishers have received an email from Google AdSense regarding a change in the way the text ads are formatted, and yes, it is a legitimate email )I received one from an account rep, and I have received many copies of this letter from people who received this as well, and it seems to have been sent to those with account reps(. What is the change?

Publishers probably remember the Chitika audited payments scandal which saw many publishers earnings drop by about half, with some losing as much as 90% of the earnings. I was one of the victims, and ended up removing Chitika off the majority of my sites. I do earn enough with referral earnings and the limited pages I still run it on for test purposes to get a check a month. Isn't much, but meets the minimum check requirement and supports my Starbucks addiction :( However,

Looks like Microsoft ContentAds have started showing up in the wild, meaning it is getting a step closer to potential publishers. I just spotted some ads served by Microsoft on Digg . As you remember, Microsoft and Digg signed an agreement back in July that Microsoft would sell and serve advertisements on Digg. Not surprisingly,

It's that time again, there's been yet another update to the AdSense Policies . Don't forget, like always, the terms of service we all agreed to says we must comply with the policies whenever they are updated. Fortunately for publishers, the only change was the addition of the AdSense for Mobile program policies, which include additional polocies separate from the regular AdSense program policies and are found here .

So I knew AdSense would be launching an AdSense for Mobile product sometime this fall, so I did what any good publisher would do... I researched how make mobile-friendly versions of some of my sites that I knew got mobile traffic, and started transitioning some to recognize the many mobile browsers and forward those visitors off to a mobile.example.com. That way I would be ready to get them AdSensed-up once the new product was released. But alas,

I have been playing around with the Google AdSense referrals the past week or so as I have been doing some updating and some client work. And I have definitely discovered some serious pain points with the referrals program. So here is my wishlist for AdSense Referrals :( Let me set a location & keep it there Everytime I search for a new referral, I have to keep changing my location from Canada... even though somewhere in the neighborhood of 95% of my traffic is US based,

When I did my presentation at SES San Jose a few weeks ago, I added a new section on protecting your AdSense account. And one of the things I mentioned was the potential for someone to take your AdSense code and place it on an inappropriate website in order to damage the entire AdSense account. And I suggested that anyone who finds their account suspended to confirm with Google that their own list of domains matches what Google has as well,

It would seem that the Google AdSense Referrals CPA program must not be generating the levels of impressions and clicks that they had hoped for, since now some publishers are being opted into a new test that would force display CPA ads, despite those publishers not selecting any CPA deals to display. Over the past few weeks, select publshers have been informed that their ad units will display CPA ads mixed with their regular contextual and site-targeted ads.

While creating some AdSense ad unit javascript for a client today, I noticed a new feature in the AdSense control panel, the ability to chose the style of corners in the ad unit. Publishers can now select "slightly rounded", "very rounded" or "squared" corners on their ad units, which is done by adding a new line to the javascript.