Jan 08
- Expecting gratitude in exchange for having done something that was hard. Yes, you built a company, you might even have bootstrapped it. Yes, you’ve got the machinery and the packaging and the retail space. Yes, you’ve navigated hiring people and yes, you finally shipped. I couldn’t care less. I’m not going to buy your brownie/consulting/services just because you worked hard on it.
- Spending money as a substitute for doing something great. Spending on marketing an average product isn’t working anymore. You’re far better off spending money on making your product better. A lot better.
- Not realizing that it’s your company, and your marketing better be as good as everything else. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like marketing or don’t think you’re good at it. Figure it out or go home. Sooner or later, you succeed because you were able to spread your ideas. So go to school and figure out how it works.
- Listening to other people. If they’re so smart, why aren’t they running your company? Don’t take a poll. Don’t ask your mother-in-law, that’s for sure. Cover your downsides, double your desire to take a risk and then just do it.
- Failure to measure. All this is worthless if you don’t test and measure relentlessly. Do what works. Kill what doesn’t. Repeat.
Lessons some over-hyped Web 2.0 application producers could learn from, no doubt.
I note Kilko have added the following to their auction description:
“Kiko currently has no advertising revenue, but it has a pagerank of 7″
Heh. Buyers should be warned that PR scores sometimes do not survive a change in domain ownership details intact. Not saying that will happen here, of course, but as a selling point, PR may be of questionable value.
Jan 08
- Techcruch - 60,000 per month
- BoingBoing - $1 million a year
- PaidContent.org - even more than that
- Fark.com - rumoured to be in the millions
“the blogging-for-dollars phenomenon is only in its infancy, and already blog ad spending is roughly twice what it was last year. With overall Web advertising expected to grow by 50 percent to $23.6 billion in 2010, it’s certain that more and more ad dollars will land on blogs. For a growing cadre of bloggers, the opportunities to score fat profits from pumping out posts on whatever their particular passions might be are widening–and one consequence could be a radical reshaping of our notions of how to build a successful media company�
Not all blogs make money, of course. It depends on a) the size of the audience and b) the nature of the audience (i.e. do they buy stuff). The same way old media works.
The main advantage is the cost of production. Virtually zero.
Jan 08
“Google Inc. on Wednesday plans to begin letting consumers download and print free of charge classic novels and many other, more obscure books that are in the public domain.“
What’s the bet that copyright books will follow once the book publishers wake up and see the huge volumes that can be sold vs the cost of production (i.e. virtually nil)? Just add Google Checkout (when it’s working). Easy.
Or they can do what the music industry is doing and bury their heads in the sand, hoping it will all just go away.
Jan 08
“Google’s controversial Book Search is driving traffic to booksellers, new figures show. According to Web monitoring firm Hitwise, the top destination for surfers visiting Google’s UK Book Search was Amazon UK, accounting for 8.3 percent of visits. Book sites accounted for 15.93 percent of all sites visited from the Google Book Search page last week. WH Smith was the second most popular destination with 2.08 percent of visits, followed by Amazon.com with 1.38 percent“
Once book publishers start to understand that the publishing world does not revolve around copyright control, they may start to realise what significant opportunities search, and the internet, can provide in terms of boosting their bottom line.
Jan 08
Provocative headline:
Google AdWords: soon over-priced with poor ROI
Poor ROI is easy to understand, to those who are actually measuring ROI, that is.
Donna also reasons:
“What are Schmidt, Sullivan, Scoble and Malik missing? Google’s unprecedented gross margins and a seemingly unstoppable bid price inflation are derived from the Google-centric auction system which is economically dependent upon price inelasticity of demand“.
Meaning that people don’t care much about the price of clicks, until they get close to a negative ROI position. Certainly, the clicks will top out - there’s no way anyone can make money on, say, ringtones if the CPA is, say, $1000 via PPC.
Perhaps Google aren’t telling us something. Perhaps they know that most keyword inventory isn’t bidded upon? There’s near infinite headroom? And perhaps they will increase page views i.e. increase the traffic pumping through the system?
Posted by Peter Da Vanzo @ 12:55 am PS
Jan 08
Adsense has a
new banner sized 200×200….yawn….
It’s barely worth mentioning. I used to be quite bullish on Adsense, but since smart-pricing and content bids came out, it hasn’t been as much fun as it used to be. “Fun� a euphemism for “wildly profitable�, of course.
I can’t wait for a Google CPA network. An ultra-wide, deep, efficient, reliable affiliate network. It raises the bar. And the income possibilities to those SEO/Ms who can deliver genuine conversions (difficult), as opposed to click traffic (easy) or rankings (dubious).
Meanwhile, Adsense stumbles along. Is it just me, or do I get the impression many Adsense publishers are running to stand still these days?
Posted by Peter Da Vanzo @ 11:18 pm PST
Jan 03
This post looks at how to keep Digg visitors. It could be said about Digg that it is a) a timely democratic news source or b) little more than a vacuous popularity contest lacking in substance.
Not that I’m saying that, of course.
“A lot of people consider digg traffic as being useless because they think most digg visitors will never come back to your blog. This is not necessarily true, especially if you do a few tweaks to your blog so you can actually get some benefit from the traffic. These tweaks will not only help you retain visitors from digg, but also will help retain regular visitors as well“
Jan 03
Collective Intellect has a goal: Make bloggers work for The Man.
But who is being paid? As Google has shown, there is much value in aggregation and sorting, less value in some forms of content production:
“(Collective Intellect) has created a service that combs through thousands of blogs, news sites, chat rooms and other Web sites every day and then surfaces rumors and news reports that might be of interest to traders or corporate public-relations executives….Collective Intellect can charge several thousand dollars, Springer said, because it filters out the critical information for its subscribers“
Content is king? Some content is king. Audience is the real king. If you’ve got that, chances are you are making the real money.
“Google Blog Search and Technorati look only at blogs. There really is no good search engine that I know of for bulletin boards,� Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research“
Perhaps there’s an opportunity there for AI/Search gurus.
On a similar theme, Donna Bogatin wonders: “How has Google managed to get away with selling billions of dollars of ads against content that it has not paid for?�
Googles answer is usually: “if you don’t want to appear in Google, opt out�. Whilst webmasters receive more value in being indexed, then they’re not going to look the Google traffic gift horse in the mouth.