Yesterday, we launched the SearchForecast Marketplace allowing publishers – NOT domain names – to be bought and sold. Many AdSense publishers have built recurring revenue stream online businesses and are ready to sell their asset. Many buyers are looking to inject new ideas, enthusiasm and web 2.0 ideas into websites that have reached a point where the owners want to sell. It’s an inflection point in the evolution of contextual publishing.

Over lunch in West Hollywood in Los Angeles today with Eytan Elbaz, one of the original founders of Applied Semantics which invented AdSense, we spoke about the empowerment AdSense gave to global publishers, how those monthly AdSense checks have enriched their lives and bring hope, understanding and help people learn about new cultures.

We built the Marketplace so AdSense Publishers can realize their dream, capitalize on their entrepreneuralism and hard work with a pay day. We hope to attract buyers that aspire to joining the online publishing phenomena of passive monetization and bring new ideas to continue the growth of this industry.

Millions of people have worked very hard to build their websites – not speculated in domains – and have labored daily to build valuable traffic. The SearchForecast Marketplace is  another way we are embracing the publisher community and bring together people from around the world to learn, share and trade their websites. It’s a project for the publishers and we hope you all embrace and benefit from it…..

YieldBuild offer publishers a terrific adjunct to AdSense as they draw ads from top network and agency network sources (like AOL’s Advertising.com and Traffic Marketplace) and do an exceptional job at filling publishers 300×250, 160×600 and 720×90 inventory. SearchForecast works with YieldBuild to help identify and qualify relevant publishers for their unique programs.

Here are a few examples from our publishers to show what I mean:

* A gaming reviews site gets $0.38 eCPM per ad unit via AdSense. Then an additional $0.59 eCPM per ad unit via Yieldbuild’s service.
* A music site gets $0.09 eCPM per ad unit via AdSense. Then an additional $0.67 eCPM per ad unit via Yieldbuild’s service.

This is another way that we are bringing publishers a better deal and helping them make more money. We’ve known the YieldBuild team, led by Paul Edmonson, from their HubPages days – so they are practitioners who know their stuff!  Sign up today for YieldBuild.

Here at SearchForecast we are providing adnetworks and adbuyers with a simpler way to find AdSense Publishers than using the newly launched Export to AdWords feature which Google launched this week.

Whereas Google enables advertisers to export Google Content Network placements from Ad Planner into AdWords, SearchForecast works with our clients to hand-pick these from our AdSense Directory.

Compare fast-food to Mom’s home cooking! Whilst fast-food might be quick and taste good, the care and quality of a home cooked meal is ultimately healthier and better for you!

We all know there is very little convenience – or relevancy – for advertisers running text ads or display ads on the Google Content Network. SearchForecast provides a quality service that pinpoints keywords on publisher pages, identifies publishers that are often anonymized in the Content Network reporting and ensures our clients have an alternative to Google when selecting publishers and advertisers.

Each month, SearchForecast finds new AdSense Publishers. It is true,  “the universe of expanding”… much like the Hubble Telescope, our crawler is discovering new publishers every day which run Google Adsense.

Having read that surveys indicate 50% of the world’s population want to write a book, with blog technology and contextual advertising, billions of people can become publishers, monetizing their content with advertising. So what does this mean for the universe of publishers?

Working with AOL, we’ve been able to reach deeper inside the publisher universe and find new publishers that we may not have previously been able to find. Being able to provide publishers with alternatives like Advertising.com is helping breathe new life (and money) into this ever expanding universe of publishers.

Sitting at Googleplex last September having lunch with Kento Sugiura, Google’s AdSense Online Mobile Specialist, we discussed how 12% of Google searches per day are made from smart phones, rising to 40% on public holidays and weekends. Kento Sugiura leads the mobile partnership development and helps publishers and developers monetize their mobile Web content.

Fast forward 9 months and Google acquired AdMob and Apple acquired Quattro – $1B+ in acquisitions.

At SearchForecast, our AdSense Directory has tens of thousands of mobile enabled websites and we work with mobile networks such as Mojiva – who are a leading  mobile advertising platform for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell mobile ads on their mobile websites.

As our AdSense Directory has tagged AdSense Publishers by every major advertising brand in the world, – such as http://www.searchforecast.com/keyword-tags-publisher-directory/tags/bmw and
over 5,000 geo-locations – http://www.searchforecast.com/keyword-tags-publisher-directory/tags/paris – we are working with adnetworks to provide them with lists of additional advertisers being run on AdSense websites.

This is very important for the folks at adnetworks who want to increase their advertising base. With high competition for the prized brand advertisers, there is a frenzy of activity to sign up more brand advertisers.

SearchForecast’s  AdSense Directory can locate where every major brand in the world is likely to run advertisements across Google’s Content Network because we know which AdSense websites are most relevant to those advertisers!

We have released Publisher Directory Keyword API, designed to provide an open platform for advertising networks and agencies looking to help monetize publishers who run advertising such as Google AdSense.

It is the first time we have opened up the millions of publishers and millions of keywords in a programming interface format which map the Google AdSense Publisher ecosystem around the world. We are not releasing it to the development community at large but working with specific clients.

As detailed below, whilst Google charges $0.25 per 1,000 requests – SearchForecast plans to provide a more open API with fewer restrictions and more features for community building.

Yesterday, a client pointed out to me what looks to be some serious shortcomings in the placement targeting tool on Google’s Content Network.

Upon further investigation of the “mangaement placement tool” used to find AdSense websites within  Google Adwords, I found that the keyword “expat” returned websites running in the Content Network  that didn’t even exist. The most curious of these was the URL “8793.anonymous.google” (which doesn’t even exist as a website yet Google say it has 10,000 – 100,000 impressions per month).. Click on the image below!

One of the benefits of our AdSense Directory is the open view of each keyword so you can view a summary of expat websites http://www.searchforecast.com/keyword-tags-publisher-directory/tags/expats. Google doesn’t provide that level of detail, limiting the decision making process when selecting websites within the Content Network.

With over 400,000 AdSense publishers in the  AdSense Directory, SearchForecast is providing more visibility into the AdSense ecosystem. Each publisher listed in the directory is connected by relevant keywords that each AdSense Publisher has actually written into their website, not keywords associated with it. For example, at http://www.searchforecast.com/google_adsense_publisher_directory/Expatriates.com, we show the other keywords which were written by the publisher indicating their intent when scribing their website.

The SearchForecast AdSense Directory has visitors from all over the world. In Europe, the Netherlands, Germany and France show the largest number of visitors to the AdSense Directory which is not surprising given the market share dominance of Google, particularly in Germany.

What is interesting is that  our crawler picks up AdSense Publishers in all countries – not only in English speaking AdSense websites. So if you are looking for AdSense publishers in Dusseldorf,   you can search for publishers in German keyword. An example for an adveriser looking to target German travel websites would be  flughafen,  flugplan, abflug, departure, ankunft.

One of the biggest analytical questions in the online advertising sector that remains largely a puzzle is how many AdSense websites there are and how much do they earn?

Today, we’re pleased to announced that our AdSense crawler has collected and databased over 418,000 AdSense Publishers which can be viewed on the AdSense Publisher Directory. We are continuing the crawl and update our Directory every day with new AdSense Publishers.

In some ways, we feel like we’re using the Abacus, the first calculating mechanism known to us.  It was invented sometime between 1,000 BC and 500 BC by the Babylonians and it was reintroduced by Pope Sylvester II. Let’s hope it doesn’t take us a 2,000 years to crack the code on Google’s $7Billion AdSense publishing network.