For a long time, I believed advertising with Google Ads was a magic solution to making money. Make a blog or some kind of popular site and put some ads on it and wait for cash to rack in. But the reality is different, and you don’t have to start your own super visited blog to observe it. All you have to do is look at numbers.

TechCrunch, the 400th most visited site (it’s a technology blog), had a revenue of about $200,000 in 2007 and is powered by advertising. Gawker Media, the owner of several popular blogs including Kotaku, LifeHacker and Gizmodo is estimated to have made 60 million this year. It’s also ad-powered. And then you got Facebook, the second most visited site in the world, with a revenue of $300 million in 2008.

Alright, fare enough. Your very popular ad-powered site could become a multimillion dollar business, but Google, being the most visited site, had a revenue of $21.8 billion in 2008. Yes, by just one position on the scale of site visits, Google has a revenue 73 times that of Facebook. Their revenue also comes from advertising, but there’s one big difference; Google is the ad reseller.

But besides the fact that Google has the successful version of the ad model online, which is to deal the ads and have them embedded in search, other observations that advertising otherwise sucks can be made much easier.

Take eBay, it’s a very good example. They have some advertising, sure (although most of it is actually advertising for eBay itself), but the real money they make is by charging sellers a small fee for each auction they put up. They also make money on the money the seller makes by taking in a small percentage. eBay’s revenue in 2008? $8.5 billion. eBay is only the 24th most visited site and makes 28 times Facebook’s revenue.

I don’t think I need to mention the panoply of other companies that make more than Facebook with absolutely zero advertising revenue to make my point clear. If you’re a small publisher dreaming of becoming rich on Google Ads, you might want to rethink your business model.

READ THIS FIRST: I may be wrong. Microsoft has made no official statement on the subject. The only reason, which is purely technical, that Microsoft currently ties Office 2010 with Office Web Apps is that the later is in Alpha form. This means that it’s not even Beta, and it’s far from being feature-complete. For example, you cannot edit any documents in Word in Office Web Apps yet, only view them. For this reason, the only way you can activate the Office Web Apps is by downloading Office 2010 Beta and using the Share to SkyDrive feature once. Users of SkyDrive that don’t use Office 2010 Beta won’t see this feature and thus Microsoft avoids the confusion of allowing random users access to incomplete software. It’s a bit like Google Wave, you have to want to use it to be able to use it, and its access is restricted. In other words, it could make sense, especially given the ability to create new documents already being there in Office Web Apps, that it will be free.

“You must install the Microsoft Office 2010 before using Office Web Apps. Install it today, and then get started using your Office Web Apps.” as is sadly worded on the Office 2010 web site today. Even though this is Beta, it’s understandable from this point on Microsoft definitely won’t be offering Office Web Apps for free when the official version launches. If they stay true to their current practices, it will mean you’ll have to activate Office Web Apps from a desktop copy of Office 2010 and that essentially you’ll have to buy it.

Fortunately for Mac owners, Microsoft will be launching the Mac version of Office 2010 at the same time instead of a year later, allowing Mac users to get Office Web Apps at the same time as Windows users.

But that’s pretty much past the point; Office Web Apps isn’t free and Google Docs is free. I don’t know what was in the marketing peoples’ heads at Microsoft but this is ensentially the equivalent of signing Office’s death certificate. In my head, the largely superior Office Web Apps would have been Microsoft’s trump card against the whole Chrome OS thing, but now that Chrome OS users will certainly not be using Office Web Apps because it requires a Mac or a PC, I really doubt the future success of Microsoft Office.

Chrome OS users will turn to the first software presented to them to write text: obviously Google Docs. And even then, one’s free, one’s not. One’s a product, one’s an accompanying piece of software. You go figure which is worth more.

I will, unfortunately for Microsoft, continue using Google Docs because of the aformentioned things, and in the future it might even become an even bigger part of my life because of less and less Windows usage (see Chrome OS instead of Windows 7 on my Netbook).

So please, Microsoft, make Office Web Apps free and untied from its desktop version, or otherwise I’m pretty sure it’ll just eventually fall along with the likes of IBM Lotus Notes. On that word, I’m also convinced OpenOffice has no future, except if they make it WordPress style (hosted environment plus installable server-side open source web app, which would truly be amazing for small enterprises focused on Open Standards like my own company Drazzil).

First, read Why Google Should Not Give Chrome the Go-Ahead from SitePoint.

Frankly, I think SitePoint misses the whole point of Native Client and Go here. Just look at Chrome OS, it’s pretty clear Google is thinking 25 years ahead, not 5. That’s just everyone, and in particular SitePoint’s Craig Buckler’s problem in perceiving what Google is planning.

It’s not about plugins. Google is making this native to Chrome. Remember Chrome’s future brother is Chrome OS, yes, an operating system. NaCl and Go are just a means for Google to enable easy development for their platform. It doesn’t have anything to do with browser wars, it’s operating system war. It’s also pretty far in the future. Google is setting the floor for the future of cloud computing, where all you need is a client.

Today’s technology limitations aren’t part of this equation. “Complex applications [that could benefit from NaCl] can be hundreds of megabytes in size” as Craig says, making the whole point of NaCl a bit moot today. But take a look at 5-years-ahead Japan that’s getting LTE on their cell phones in the following months and you might change your train of thought. LTE can push 300 mbps of downlink over the air; that’s 100 megabytes in 2.6 seconds. The aforementioned complex applications then become an accessible reality on the web.

Simply said, Google is thinking way ahead right now and anyone who realizes this also realizes companies like Microsoft, despite recent evolutions like IE 9’s GPU acceleration, are a bit far behind. I don’t think any of this has to do with web standards really. Open source aficionados that don’t want a new web standard to be operated by Google tend to forget this is all business and that in light of Google Chrome OS becoming more popular, they don’t really have a choice, much like today’s Gaming Businesses don’t have a choice when choosing which PC platform to develop for.

Point made, Google is being misunderstood these days, but is in my opinion doing exactly what it needs to do to put up a serious threat to Microsoft in the future. Apple is in my opinion not very significant but still less likely to get hurt in the process because their target business is generally very different from Microsoft and Google’s, despite appearances.

So, for all the curious out there, in episode 16 of TWiG (This Week in Google), Mary Hodder kept saying H-T-P instead of H-T-T-P to refer to the HTTP protocol. And so, here’s my personal message to her:

Unless you were trying to refer to a type of amino acid or a kind of rocket fuel, Hypertext Transfer Protocol has the acronym HTTP, not HTP. Unfortunately, much as SQL or PNG or GIF, acronyms are pronounced letter by letter, and no one letter is skipped. So SQL isn’t Sequel, PNG isn’t Ping, GIF isn’t Jiff (even though the authors of the format don’t seem to agree, but I guess they don’t speak correct English either), and HTTP isn’t H-T-P. I’m sorry if this message seems targeted, especially after the whole talk about women on the Internet thing, but ugh, hurts my ears. My whole point: HTTP has 2 Ts.

Surely you’ve heard about the European News companies making a partnership with Microsoft to shut down their door on Google and get better content control with a new protocol like robots.txt of which the development would be funded by Microsoft. Well, unfortunately for these companies, what they fail to realize is that Google is in the position they think they are.

Usually, the case is these companies get so much traffic from Google that blocking it out would kill their business and let another take over. In other words, Google can do without them, but News Paper can’t.

Adversely, if every single news paper corporation was to block out Google until they accepted the new protocol, two scenarios could happen; namely millions of Internet users that don’t even know the difference between Google Search and the Internet going “huh? Where are the news” and complaining instead of switching to Bing, or Google accepting the protocol and putting an end to this madness, the later having much more chances of happening. Or, a third option would be that a clever News company would not embark on the Bing wagon and let Google fully index their news, which would eventually result in every visitor of Google News going on their web site instead, and that company taking in all the profits.

The result, a massive investment from old companies that’ll kill them no matter how they do it, because they failed to understand and adapt to the nature of the new content distribution format.

The same is sadly happening with the TV market, with companies like NBC planning to shut down great shows like Heroes just because they can’t figure out that they need to change the way they deliver TV.

When diving into the browsers war, often times you will hear that using the browser you prone won’t do anything good. This argument is often used to trample new Opera users, the argument being that it is not worth it to use a browser, however more sophisticated it is, that isn’t widely supported. To these users, often promoting the use of Mozilla Firefox, using a browser does not necessarily augment its support, but I beg to differ.

Actually, the reality is all contrary. If you believe Opera to be superior to Firefox, for instance, then use it and make others use it. The more people use it, the bigger the usage statistic will be on people’s web sites, and the bigger the incentives will be to support it. For instance, on one of my web sites, AMV-Canada, I used not to care for the JavaScript window bug that happened on Google Chrome in early 2009. But, as more users used Chrome to access my web site, it became a major browser there and I was forced to change my strategy to provide complete support for Chrome, whether I liked it or not.

So yes, despite what some might say, using a browser for its sake does have an impact. You’re only 1 person to do so, but if you don’t, who else is going to?

Oh, the joy of cell phone technology. While for a while I thought, wow, HSPA+ is 3 times faster than current FOMA technologies in Japan, which means Canada, and the rest of the world, is finally getting up to speed, I now know that Japan is getting LTE by the end of 2009.

I mean, wow, but just wow. What it means is, while the rest of the world is getting 21 mbps downlink, Japan is getting 300 mpbs downlink, over the air!

It’s crazy. When you think that our super newest technology here is going out at the same time as Japan’s much more high tech LTE… I guess we have yet to catch up to the Japanese mobile market.

Might I say finally?

At least, it looks like one Mobile Carrier in Canada understood; don’t stop charging for access fees, just hide them in more expensive plans. I admit it doesn’t really change anything. TELUS’s new charging model isn’t very different than previous prices in the end, but the jump to an all included price that doesn’t hide service charges is an appreciated change.

For example, say you take the Clear Choice iPhone 50, a 50$ plan that gives you 150 local minutes and a choice of extra features, like doubling minutes or 1000 outgoing text messages and unlimited incoming, which unfortunately means Canadian providers have, as rumored, started to charge for incoming text messages (total rip-off) and 500 MB of data (also a total rip-off). Well, that’s it, that’s all you pay, 50$.

On the other hand, Bell has an almost identical iPhone plan that looks cheaper; 45$ (the difference being that you only have one extra option; favorite 5 numbers. But add on top of that the system access fees; 6.95$ and the 0.75$ 9-1-1 emergency service fee, and you get a fabulous 52.70$ (not mentioning the fact that the 9-1-1 service charges can be as high 1.28$ depending on the province, in this case New Brunswick). So, who’s cheaper now? Note that, however cool TELUS’s new scheme may be, Bell’s higher cost plans totally kick TELUS’s ass, really.

And on Rogers, well as always, it’s even higher, coming in at 57.58$ for the same thing TELUS offers. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention Rogers’ best matching plan to the highest Bell offers, coming in at 105$, doesn’t even manage to match the Bell’s offered minutes and unlimited text messaging plus the unlimited favorite 5 numbers for 95$. Good luck Rogers, cause really, you’re total rip-off. I hope nobody ever buys an iPhone again from Rogers.