Author Archives: JoeDuck

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About JoeDuck

Internet Travel Guy, Father of 2, small town Oregon life. BS Botany from UW Madison Wisconsin, MS Social Sciences from Southern Oregon. Top interests outside of my family's well being are: Internet Technology, Online Travel, Globalization, China, Table Tennis, Real Estate, The Singularity.

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.

Iraq Death Study indicates a staggering new death toll but needs clarification

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Here’s an excellent summary of the very alarming new medical study on Iraq War deaths by the BBC’s Paul Reynolds. This study indicates that some 655,000 *more* people have died in Iraq since the beginning of the war than would have died without the war.

The study has really been bothering me because if true it means the toll from the war is far, far greater than even the harshest critics of the US Iraq policies have been suggesting. If true it defies reason even for the most Machiavellian nationalist to suggest that this scale of death is justified under the circumstances. If false it shows a remarkable lack of quality in a scientific, peer reviewed research project.

Reynold’s points out the key aspect of the study that is very confusing and must be reconciled by the researchers:

That supposes a huge failing by the Iraqi health ministry, a failing the report did not hint at, because it said that death certificates were readily available for most of the reported deaths in the households surveyed.

For the study’s conclusion to be valid it seem that the death certificates they say were produced 92% of the time [I’ve also seen 80% ] *were not counted* by the health ministry. This seems highly unlikely. If they were counted and the count reflects much lower numbers (as I think it does – trying to find that out) then the study is internally inconsistent. The study cannot note 92% certificated death among those interviewed and then reject certificates as a good proxy of actual deaths.

I hope Reynolds and others with key contacts are able to follow up on the Iraq report. If true, it’s a horrific finding of great historical significance. If false, it challenges our reliance on this type of high level, academically supervised research in other sectors.

Why this matters: Ironically, many people who hold strongly held beliefs both in favor and against the Iraq war are suggesting “hey, the numbers don’t really matter”. Those supporting the war think that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and collateral damage is something to sweep under the rug. Those against the war seem to feel that USA should pull out without much regard to the fate of Iraq or to the potentially catastrophic civil war that could follow a US withdrawl.

The death toll is hard to review but it is arguably the best measure of the costs of a war. Ignoring death as a key measure is fundamentally immoral.Also, suggestions to make decisions without taking count of the death toll are not only naive and irrational, they dangerously support the status quo of making decisions without enough information. The world is complex and many life and death decisions must be made every second. Precious lives and resources are being deployed daily to build hospitals, fight wars, teach, drill wells, etc.

Sadly, these allocation decisions are almost always made politically and emotionally rather than being rooted in a careful examination of the costs and the benefits of various courses of action. It’s human to make this mistake, but it’s algo tragic, and results in millions of unnecessary deaths, especially due to the lack of rational allocations in favor of health care in developing world.

Update:  This is an outstanding analysis by the Iraq Body Count, an organization very unsympathetic to the war, of why the findings must be viewed with skepticism.  If the Lancet and the study are to maintain credibility I would hope these concerns will be addressed.

Related links:

Iraq Body Count

BBC on Iraq Body Count project counts

Some Iraq Health Ministry Numbers. Lower than the new study would suggest.

USA Today: Iraq Health Ministry told to stop counting deaths in December 2003 but it appears they started again after this controversial decision which came after they were coming up with counts that are consistent with other studies but do not appear to support the huge tolls in the new study.

CNET – the tech canary in the internet coal mine?

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Mike Arrington points out over at TechCrunch that CNET’s traffic is going down, and fast.
For many years CNET was the top spot for tech news and it still is a superb source for technology news, reviews, and more.

Yet as the web moves to what you could call “power niches”, e.g. Technology news, where a certain group of sites dominate and thousands of other sites participate, the traffic is logically getting spread among a rapidly growing number of “good” blogs and websites.

I haven’t looked to see how the growth in viewership compares to growth in number of blogs, but I’m guessing the later is happening at a much greater rate, especially in the tech sector where you’d have pretty much every tech person now online and spending a lot of time online.

Thus the potential total tech page views are levelling off as the number of tech blogs skyrockets. The result? Less traffic to *former* key tech resource and more to the new kids on the block, though this may indicate they can never attain the status, or traffic, CNET once enjoyed.

This is really speculative but if it’s true then we might expect similar things to happen in other sectors as the number of participants levels off while the number of resources and blogs increases.

Freemont Street Light Canopy, Las Vegas

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Freemont, Las Vegas

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.

Just booked for WebmasterWorld Las Vegas coming up next month. These Freemont Pics are from that trip a year ago and make the downtown area look spiffier than it does in person. I’m glad I saw the spectacular light show but the Las Vegas Strip hotels and casinos and general “feel” is much fancier and “cleaner” than the downtown area.

You call mainstream “news” Journalism? I call it an intellectual wasteland.

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Over at Jeff Jarvis‘, as well as all over the world, there’s a debate about how online news will affect offline news.
An anonymous comment notes:
>>news organizations AREN’T the ones keeping democracy alive. And maybe they haven’t done so for awhile<<

Exactly correct. “News organizations”, even at their best, reflect a highly commercialized, narrow focus on events of usually superficial and passing interest. More time’s been given to the Yankee pitcher plane crash than, say, the recent study suggesting an enormous death toll in Iraq or developments in Darfur.

Even politics is covered by almost all major outlets as scandal and personalities more than issues and substance. The stories of the century, often in the developing world and rooted in the life and death struggles facing *hundreds of millions* are eclipsed by Michael Jackson and Madonna. A notable exception has been Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN with an outstanding effort by that team to cover the African nightmares of war, famine, and AIDS.
The journalistic high road, for the most part, was left far in the distance decades ago when Ed Murrows were replaced by Geraldos and Bill O’Reillys.

Modern “journalism” … isn’t journalism. It’s a wasteland of superficiality and celebrity ruled by ratings, circulation, and money.

The internet may not make things better, but it can’t get much worse.

More on this story from:
Dave Winer
Dan Blank
BuzzMachine

Time Warner to Google: We spell your merger “SueTube”. Battelle to TW: Lookout!

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John Battelle thinks Time Warner is mistaken to attack Google on copyright, writing over at Searchblog:

a shot across the bow may bring a broadside from the other side

I usually agree with John Battelle but I don’t really follow his logic here. I agree with him and Bob Dylan that “The Times They are a Changin”“, and that we need a new song to show how the old media empires don’t get the internet. I’d call that song “The Time Warner’s .. They Aren’t a Changin’ “.

However, I don’t see how bringing out the big legal beasts will hurt Time Warner. Frankly, I think they just want Google to throw money at them. As the Napster buyout proved all this has little to do with “rights”, it’s a money grab, sung as usual to the tune of that great O’Jay’s tune of years and years ago “The Love of Money” :
Money money money money ….. money!
The HUGE winners in this are the clever YouTube founders who really just created a very clever distribution system at an opportune time. The user community, and then the GoogleBucks, followed. One thing that irks me about all these mega deals – including Google itself – is that they are built on the backs of the swelling supply of (mostly) user generated content and in the case of YouTube a lot of illegally obtained copyrighted stuff. There will be little or no compensation to the *key components* of the YouTube environment other than a distribution vehicle. Now, one might argue that that exposure is enough compensation for an average YouTube uploader but it still seems…”wrong” to me.

I’d agree that those who create and then monetize these efforts should make a lot, but it’s unfortunate that people, like sheep, choose not to aggressively explore all our online alternatives. I think if we did do more exploring and innovative thinking we’d have a stronger ecosystem of companies rather than a few big players and a plethora of “also rans” standing around drooling at the prospect of a Google or Yahoo buyout.

$1,600,000,000 + 100,000,000 videos = lawsuit!

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Mark Cuban must be snickering “I told you” even though he’s already posted a note suggesting the initial lawsuits will be against small video players to set precedent for an attack on Google.

However Time Warner  is already threatening to sue over videos at YouTube. Presumably Google knew all this was coming and I’m guessing they think they can sweeten the advertising revenue pot enough to keep all the copyright hounds at bay. As the best monetizer of online content I think Google will be able to buy their way out of almost all the lawsuits simply by offering to either 1) remove the offending videos, which are currently making nothing or 2) monetize the content and give the copyright holder 70% of the revenues. In most cases Google’s 70% is going to be more than 100% of what the producer could get with their own efforts.

That said, many producers are going to see this as a great legal way to shoot for Google’s deep, deep pockets. They’ll have no interest in small payouts per download or ads or anything related to their own content, though they’ll disguise that in the complaints.

I’d be very interested to know how the Google team factored this cost into the YouTube equation.