Monthly Archives: October 2006

Yahoo – maybe they should change the exclamation point from ! to ?

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It’s getting harder to be bullish on Yahoo even though I personally remain bullish on their long term prospects. Yahoo remains the number one website in the world, the number one video streaming site, and has the best and coolest picture posting community (Flickr). Yahoo has the best understanding and support for the new web aka “Web 2.0” and a robust developer network.

SO WHAT’S the PROBLEM YAHOO ?

Unfortunately for Yahoo and for shareholder me, Google and not Yahoo has been the overwhelming beneficiary of the swelling pots of online advertising money. Google’s contextual matching of websites and searches to advertisements has yielded better returns for publishers and advertisers, creating a very profitable win-win scenario that has made Google the hottest advertising agency…whoops I mean technology company, in history.

Yahoo’s Panama was released yesterday and may help reduce the contextual matching advantage Google has enjoyed for years.

Wall Street doesn’t seem impressed so far, but what do they know anyway?

Picasso’s “La Reve” $139,000,000. Hole in Picasso’s La Reve: Priceless.

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OK, so I’m not a fan of Picaso and really should not think it’s kind of funny that Las Vegas Mogul Steve Wynn wound up elbowing his own masterpiece, planting a large hole in the middle of one of the world’s most valuable paintings.

In fact one of the most enjoyable things I did in Las Vegas last year was tour Wynn’s Bellagio Museum of Art, at that time showing a fantastic impressionist collection with a nice audio tour covering the history of impressionist paintings.

Phew, lucky I kept my Elbows to myself.

Wal-Mart. I like ’em!

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Non-disclaimer:

I have NO stock in Wal-Mart.
I don’t work at Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart is NOT paying me to blog about Wal-Mart.
I don’t Work for Edelman, Wal-Mart’s Advertising Agency.
I’m not getting paid by Edelman to Blog about Wal-Mart.
I’m not getting paid by Wal-Mart to say I’m not getting paid by Edelman.
I did buy several gallons of paint and some brushes at Wal -Mart, and …
I plan to shop there … again.

Hey, I like Wal-Mart, mostly just for the selfish reason that they are convenient, open most of my waking hours, and have many products at very low prices. I also like the fact that it’s much easier to return things to Wal-Mart than to mom and pop shops.

I’m intrigued that none of the many Wal-Mart detractors I’ve read seems to come up with criticisms that take all factors into account. I want to see people in China, Canada, and Mexico working as well as my fellow Americans. Clearly Wal-Mart’s low pricing, somewhat low wages, and hyper-efficiency make products, and jobs, accessible to those who would otherwise have less. Does the Wal-Martification of commerce lower our averages here in the USA? Perhaps a bit, but not nearly as much as it raises them elsewhere. I’m happy to give up 10% of my standard of living so that India and China standards can rise by 50%. If somebody can direct me to a study showing that Wal-Mart *just looking at the USA job market* puts more people out of work than into work please let me know.

Yes, Wal Mart is going to put some businesses that would charge more for the same stuff out of business, but I think that’s part of the grand plan that’s been working well in the USA for over 225 years. I’ll take a Wal-Mart to a Kim-Jung-Il-Mart any day, any time.

With all the furor surrounding the disclosure that Wal-Mart, via Edelman, funded the “already planned” cross country trip by some bloggers you’d think they’d funded Bonnie and Clyde in a murderous rampage.

I reviewed the controversial blog (now taken down) using cached pages in Google and found it was not only tame, the blog was a high quality, nicely done travelog that reflected the spirit of the road and of American Travel. I’m sorry it’s been taken down!

I think I’m basically in agreement with the points made here by Andrew Young who *does* work for Wal-Mart.

Hey Andrew, when you have a minute can you mix a couple of cans of paint for me?
Whoops – he wound up resigning over wilted lettuce.
I’ll be shopping Wal-Mart, and guess what? So … will …. you.

Guerilla Travel Tips

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A great post by Paul K, who looks spookily like Adam L, with some travel tips. I liked the one about parking yourself outside of an airport lounges for a hit of WIFI access, though if you traveling in more enlighted places like PDX Portland Oregon or MFR Medford Oregon notice that there is WIFI throughout much of the Airport and is … free.

In a little known study – in fact unknown study – it was found that God actually blesses free WIFI Airports with fewer accidents, less terrorism, no crying babies, and happier travelers.

Paypal – now I know where all those usurious fees go!

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A few years back, when I was making more money online, PayPal was a great way to receive payments from advertisers, especially if they were out of the country which otherwise meant you had to wait a long time for checks to clear. But Paypal charged a lot for this – a $1000 dollar transaction from England would cost, as I recall, something like $60 in fees.

The New York Times explains where some of my hard-earned-by-the-sweat-of-my-online-brow money went. After hitting the pockets of Paypal insiders it’s now spreading the gospel of YouTube, LinkedIn, and other Web startups.

I guess that should make me feel better about my little part in feeding funding to the PayPal behemoth, but somehow…. it doesn’t.

Wal-Marting Across America or RVs parking their blog ethics at the door?

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I’m still confused about what seems like a significant overreaction in the blogosphere to Wal Mart’s PR agency Edelman’s decision to sponsor a couple in their RV trip across America. The blog, now called a “fake” by many but not the authors, is WalMartingAcrossAmerica

Onliners, especially bloggers, get more pissed about this type of thing than about, for example, thousands of far, far more significant issues of global significance and ethics, death and destruction and I find that upsetting, intellectually narrow minded, obsessive, and superficial.

So, a big PR firm sponsors a blog that they see will wind up being favorable to Wal Mart? This is surprising? Unethical? If they’d set up the whole thing I’d see it differently, but that does not appear to be the case. They simply were not transparent *enough*, failing to have the bloggers disclose their financial relationship to Wal Mart.

Sure, they deserved to be chastised and called out on this as a breech of transparency, but is this more of a breech than, say, downloading illegal music and videos? Or, for that matter, building entire companies around concepts of illegal downloading? Those guys get cheers and applause and hundred-million dollar paydays.

That said maybe I’m just not reading this right and it was some major ethical breech by Wal Mart/ Edelman.

Here’s my reply to Edelman’s (too thin) apology about all this even as it becomes the top online story by far:

With all due respect this apology seems too thin, and ironically itself sounds like part of the PR-driven rather than the “blog community” approach to the issue which would outline the scoop for everybody and explain how this got so out of hand.

It’s not even clear to me that you seriously defied WOMMA guidelines assuming that things are exactly as described over at the WalMarting Across America blog. Rather it looks like somebody at Edelman saw an excellent and legitimate opportunity and then chose to fund it in a way that turned this into a blog that was too sponsored to retain credibility.

Sheesh – I think I’m articulating your position at greater length than you are?!

Online Sheep get the revenue shaft. Hey Google, when you gonna show *Average Joe’s* the money rather than Rupert Murdoch?

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Business week is fretting over how Google will monetize the YouTube content and whether they’ll share with Myspace owners News Corp. Myspace users have embedded tons of YouTube video content in their personal pages so this is potentially a big stream of cash for somebody. Poor Rupert Murdoch doesn’t have enough money as it is, so heaven forbid that the content producers or the users would be put first in line for a piece of the action that *they generate*.

Business Week:
Google could soon have the ability to stream ads to MySpace users who are viewing YouTube videos embedded onto their MySpace pages. The question is whether News Corp. will get a slice of that revenue, and if so, how much …

I think a more relevant question is how much of that revenue should go to those generating the content and the billion daily page views.

Sites (like Google) are doing a fine job of making it possible for Average Joe’s to find the web pages of other Average Joe’s over at Myspace who in turn does a fine job helping people build silly pages filled with videos and images from other infrastructure sites like Flickr and Youtube. They should be well compensated for this and I think 25% is a good number, with 75% of the total revenue generated going to the “users” who are generating all that content and all those page views.

“Professional” users like me already get a piece of the action from Google – about 60-70% of the ad revenue I generate at my websites comes back to me via Google Adsense payments, and I think that’s probably a fine relationship. At least until Yahoo or MSN wake up to the fact they can jump start their contextual advertising services with a temporary 100% revenue share with publishers. Then I, and a large chunk of the 43% of Google’s Adsense Revenue, will be jumping ship. Booking services only give me about 50% of the commissions I generate but that’ll trend upwards over time (ha – it used to be only 20% revenue sharing).

However it’s very intriguing how the big players in the mega money deals leave out the key people in the equation – the Average Joe user. Part of that is simply scale. An average myspace user is only generating nickels and dimes (literally) per month in ad revenue. Collectively it’s a truckload of money but individually not much and Myspace does provide a good service to the user. Win Win? Maybe, but I think the trend will be towards people valuing their own content and their eyeball time more selfishly than they do right now.

The problem with all this great people-generated content — clearly the heart and soul of the new internet — is that the people generating it are getting left in the revenue dust. There are exceptions who manage to turn a few bucks here and there from the crumbs dropped by the mega monetizers like Google, but the average Joe who blogs and posts pictures and has a Myspace page with his Youtube videos gets nothing but the use of the online tools. That searchability and infrastructure is worth something. Arguably it’s worth a lot and clearly Average Joe is happy so far getting sh** for all his content effort.

However, I think over time Average Joe will become more demanding, perhaps even having the audacity to suggest that the collective fruits of all that online labor should be shared not just among Google and friends, but shared with those who watch it all and who make it all worth watching.

Blogs are killing journalism? So what’s the bad news?

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Wow, talk about missing the point and the future.

Kent has a post about the running “blogs vs mainstream journalism” debates which seem to be heating up again lately, but he suggests that bloggers have their place and it isn’t an honored place as citizen journalists.
>>> It will be the same journalists who get paid for doing it now <<<

I think he’s really missing the key blogging advantages. Most importantly, this is not about ONE journalist vs ONE blogger, it’s about ONE journalist vs TEN THOUSAND bloggers.

Even the most virtuous journalist:

1) Needs to sleep. Expert bloggers are collectively around 24/7/365

2) Makes far more than is needed to get quality informed commentary from bloggers, who work for … hmmm, let me go check … oh, that would be ZERO dollars per hour.

3) Does not live in the affected areas and can’t get there the instant news happens. . This personalization and localization is a key reason blogs are already replacing mainstream, and rapidly.

4) Is not even remotely as good as people like Kent suggest. My god, try spending 15 minutes watching the jingoist FOX babes or even the very competent CNN world reporters. They cannot possibly match thousands of citizens who speak the language and are smack in the middle of the line of news fire (and gunfire).

Sure, I’d take an Ed Murrow in New York City over Joe Sixpack in New York City, but not when reporting on Hawaii earthquakes, or Peoria, or Berlin, or Kabul, or Tashkent, or Baghdad, or …

Carnival of Marketing … October 15, 2006

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This week is the last where I shall host the Carnival of Marketing. For future hosting and posting go over to the blog of Noah

Sadly, I only had one submission but happily it’s the best of the 12 articles that were sent in over the past two weeks.

Nedra Kline Weinreich presents:
Norms in Dorms (Social Marketing)

Following are the articles sent in last week that did not get posted along with a link to a page with all articles sent to me over the two week hosting period:

Barry Welford presents Late Is Rude And Customers Notice
posted at BPWrap – Internet Marketing From A Different Point Of View.

Phil B. presents Phil for Humanity: Top Ten Reasons Why No One Clicks on Your Ads posted at Phil for Humanity.7 Golden Guidelines For Having Meetings
http://www.gameproducer.net/2006/10/03/7-golden-guidelines-for-having-meetings/
Brief blurb: “Article that gives 7 practical guidelines on arranging better meetings.”

Lickhau Loo presents Know your Market in Internet MLM
posted at Internet MLM Development.

All Carnival of Marketing articles of the past two weeks.