I believe that the internet is currently undergoing an interesting shift of focus. There are so many web sites and services, that people are losing their patience. Establishing your web site as a site that people will visit frequently is getting harder every day. Many web publishers tend to rely on Google Search for traffic…

But today there are platforms available that allow you to distribute your content or application outside of your own site. Those platforms include Widgets (of many kinds), social applications (such as the Facebook platform), toolbars, open APIs, and more.

Recently we have done quite a bit of work on those platforms -

• A few weeks ago we released the Tao Te Ching widget – you can easily add this fun and free widget to your blog or site and personalized page (iGoogle/Netvibes), and get daily quotes of Chinese wisdom.
• We are working towards an AdSense API, currently in first beta testing.
• We have several toolbars available, including the AdSense toolbar. This toolbar includes a small web application – your AdSense stats built right into the toolbar, and it’s getting quite popular.
• We have written the TripTouch travel widget – get local events, restaurants, travel information, travelers, attractions, and more. This widget is available for Netvibes (native UWA code) and iGoogle (native iGoogle code).
• Also for TripTouch, we released the Facebook TripRecord application – which lets you state the countries you have visited, and check out where your friends have been.

We are  happy to offer our development services for web publishers who want to distribute their content or services – If you need a widget or toolbar application, please keep Metalgrass software in mind – I’m sure we can do a great job for you.

We’re happy to announce the release of AdSenseLog 5.0.0. This new version includes support for AdSense for Feeds data, along with other minor bug fixes. You can download it here.

We have also raised the price to 69.95$… This is to reflect the lower US$ rates, and of course the amount of work still invested in AdSenseLog – to keep it updated and include new features. People who purchase get a year of free updates, and also discount for later updates.

We have just released a new version of the AdSense Toolbar.

We have added support for Feed ads, a new AdSense feature. The toolbar will auto-update for all users that already installed.

The latest AdSense related tool being worked on here at Metalgrass is the AdSense API.

Basically it will allow you to get your AdSense stats via an API call, whenever you need it. There are several possible usages for the API, including:

• If you want to write your own monitoring, tracking or analyzing tools
• Smart ads to your own sites: Many publishers put links to ‘popular’ or ‘best-performing’ pages in the home page of their site. Using the API, you can always make sure the best-performing links are placed in the most-clicked on positions – and more revenue for you!
• Perform some site or maintainance actions according to stats. For example we have one publisher who expressed interest in the API to use in some sort of user-benefit according to channels (i.e. whenever they earn money in a user’s page, the user gets credit). This can also be used as a simple solution for small revshare sites.

The API will soon be released in a first beta…Want to participiate in the beta? click here!

There are some reports that Google has finally started beta-testing AdSense tracking in Analytics. This will be really neat, and might help us web-publishers increase our earnings.  The reports say we’ll be able to get the following info from Analytics:

1. Number of ad clicks per page and revenue.

2. CPM and CTR per web page (might mean we’ll no longer need URL channels)

3. ‘Top AdSense Referrers’ – this is really interesting… perhaps Google will allow us to know the eCPM per each traffic source, or just the top ones.

More info here (Digital inspiration)