Category Archives: advertising

My Enhance.com PPC advertising experiment reveals very questionable incoming clicks.

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In 2005 I started experimenting with Enhance.com pay per click advertising. I deposited 1500 into an account, set the daily limits low, and directed all traffic to an affiliate travel site I set up for the experiment. RoadTripsUSA.net. I’m now analyzing the results which suggest almost all the activity from enhance was worthless, and some may have been fraudulent. This is especially frustrating because I’d had similar bad experiences with Enhance’s previous incarnation – “ah-ha.com” but thought I’d give the new Enhance a chance.

I can’t be sure yet of anything other than the extremely low return on the $500 spent, but I’ll be posting more over the next few weeks from my logs about the sites that sent traffic.

I just sent this to Enhance Customer Support:

PLEASE ESCALATE THIS IMMEDIATELY or REFUND MY MONEY IMMEDIATELY.

I’ve had no responses to my request to refund the 1500 I invested in Enhance advertising in 2005 as part of an experiment in using PPC to send traffic to a Travel affiliate website I set up for this purpose.

$1000 remains in my account.

I’ve been examining my log files and it appears that most of the clicks I’ve had from Enhance were from very questionable, possibly fraudulent sources. I’m happy to share this information with you.

What is *certain* is that I’ve had effectively no business come in from my $500 investment in Enhance Clicks.

This Washington Post Article explains the approach taken by “pay to click” schemes. I suspect much of my traffic came from this type of scam, though all that really matters is that the clicks were effectively worthless.

I’d also like your permission to publish your responses to me at my blog: https://joeduck.wordpress.com

Thank you. Please contact me immediately at 800-872-3266 or by email.

Viacom to Google – YouTube aren’t the boss of me now!

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Viacom’s ditching YouTube, and says they are glad they did.   This  FT story suggests that we may seeing the beginning of what could become a monumental shift in content distribution online.   Viacom has forced YouTube to delete Comedy Central and other popular clips, and says these deletions have resulted in people heading over to the Comedy Central website to find the content rather than YouTube.  This was exactly what Viacom wanted.

Key questions are shaking out about online video:
*How much  of the video traffic is to the “professional” content like that produced by  Viacom vs amateur content?

* How important are search engines / major video sites to finding clips?    The Viacom statement suggests that people will seek the clips they want away from YouTube.   However if they are using Google search to find the alternative locations of the clips Google may have successfully covered both these bases with the YouTube aquisition.

* The most important question is about $money$ and it is simply this – can video be monetized well?   Nobody knows yet.   I predict the answer is going to be somewhat complex, but basically no, you can’t monetize it nearly as well as pay per click advertising, where the information experience can be integrated well with the buying experience.    With Video this match is going to be more difficult and usually impossible.   Somebody watching a “Daily Show” clip is primarily interested in a quick laugh, and seems unlikely to wind up clicking off on an advertisement and almost totally unlikely to buy something as part of the Comedy Central clip watching experience.

Sure there will be some room to market clip specific advertising like Comedy Central hats, but that type of thing is not much of a market for the burgeoning video content industry.    Even junky clips take a lot more time to produce and and bandwidth to distribute than text content, so the revenue equation is simply not as favorable and probably will always be a challenge.

I think a major challenge with Video is that many think the online video experience and advertising will be similar to Television content and monetizing.   It won’t.   Decentralized control and the fact almost anybody can and will produce content are changing things rapidly and globally.

The video fun, junky content, and advertising experiments have only just begun.

Wired buys votes on Digg, Arrington calls for lawsuit?!

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This story at Wired Magazine is a fascinating glimpse into manipulating social media.    Mike Arrington isn’t impressed though, and suggests Digg should sue Wired because Wired owns Digg competitor Reddit.com.

I don’t agree, and frankly would love to see hundreds more of these “sting” operations which help everybody understand the challenges facing social media and hopefully will pressure sites to clean up the fraudulent stuff going on.

Mike’s right to point out the conflict of interest issue and everybody in this biz could use a transparency injection, but overall we need *hundreds* of times more investigative “sting operations” to show how problematic things have become with payola of various kinds, PPC, and other online scams like Ringtones.

The best response for Digg is to do an insider investigation and root out the abuses and publish it themselves, not pretend it doesn’t go on as they and Mike appear to be suggesting.   Violation of the DIGG TOS by Wired reporter does NOT mean the study isn’t valid.  These are almost entirely separate issues.

Soon I’m hoping to publish my own expose of PPC scams –  I’m trying to get Enhance.com‘s attention right now about the bogus traffic I’ve been paying for and will soon publish the list of the sites from my logs over the past year. If enough of us did that it would go a long way to help clean things up.

Ringtone Scams are about 99% of that business … so beware!

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I  *hate* the ringtones business because it represents so much of what is wrong with the internet and wrong with people.   Here’s one post about some of the millions of problems that plague the Ringtones Scam industry – a very sad excuse for a business enterprise.

However, with Apple jumping in to the Ringtones biz I’m hoping Apple may bring some standards because they don’t seem like a company that would do the Ringtones “business as usual” scam which is to offer what looks like a free ringtone and then hook unsuspecting or stupid teens into  a “contract” that dings their parents cell phone bill indefinitely.

I’m ranting about this after running into a banner I clicked on out of curiousity which led to a “Zoltar Ringtones” scam with the fine print below the fold that, to the extent I could figure out what the heck it was saying, was going to bill me 5.99 per *week* plus other charges.

This is a dispicable industry, and it’s amazing to me that it has not yet been regulated appropriately.    The solution is simple – nobody can enter into these contracts without a *written* signature from the credit card holder.

Blinkx

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Blinkx is a brilliant video search program that allows people to search *within* videos for specific content.  This has become one of the holy grails of search because the internet is now awash in video content. Tastes vary but almost everyone would agree that most of the clips out there are garbage. With routines like Blinkx users can rapidly search the tidal wave of video that pours online every day for things that interest them.

Check out the Blinkx home page with it’s “wall” of tiny video clips reflecting content they have recently indexed.   It’ll keep the attention of even the most stubborn A.D.D. sufferer.   Some cringe at the sensory overload of dozens of videos, but massive input reflects the new ethos of the internet, and I predict we’ll see desktops and applications become increasingly overwhelmed with content.    As a superb tool that will manage the most rapidly growing and complex part of the digital maelstrom – video clips – Blinkx has a rosy future indeed.

The New York Times reports on this today.

Bald Britney Spears busts out of Britney Spears rehab

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Some time ago I was testing how terms are getting ranked by search engines here at the blog and I noted that blog traffic spiked from a simple post about Cicarelli, a famous model.   Time to test Britney Spears which is often at the top of all the world’s internet searches.

This is testing what happens when I mention Britney Spears in a blog post.   I apologize – sort of – to those of you who actually carefully follow Britney Spears news on a regular basis.  I’m not immune to the prurient interest in Britney that has captivated *billions* worldwide, but it really is a sad commentary on the state of our cultural well-being that Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan garner far more news time than, say, Global Health …

….. gee whiz Britney Spears, you’ve done it again!

Britney Spears Shaves Head, scream the headlines, and then in the small print if at all… millions die from lack of oral rehydration therapy.

We should be ashamed of Britney Spears, and ashamed of ourselves.

Google News? Not!

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Today’s big news is that Google is not allowed to put out the news from a European news outlet that sued them. As usual, silicon insiders are 1) waxing argumentatively in favor of the virtuous wonder of Google and 2) forgetting the big picture which is *long term content control*. Here is the story, and here’s an example of the siliconized logic from TechDirt. Here’s Google’s view on the case.

Of course it’s probably stupid and shortsighted for the Belgian newspapers to insist Google remove them because they’ll lose reach and they’ll lose some potential for advertising revenues. This is especially true for an American audience that, without online exposure, is far more likely to encounter a Belgian waffle than a Belgian newpaper.

However, the news flash that Silicon Valley is always so reluctant to read is that Google’s spectacular success has not been primarily a function of *Google’s* own efforts, rather it has been their brilliance monetizing *other people’s content*. Google, as they themselves are fond of reminding us, does not do content. That’s fine and even appreciated by those of us who do do content. [Hmm – I said do do as in “Yes, I doo doo content” said Chico the Wonder Dog].

However the key question about content remains – how should content cash be divided between those who produce it, those who monetize it, and those who expose it to the world? Google can reasonable suggest that they are now doing much of the monetizing and the exposure and therefore deserve most of the cash. That fits well with the fact they are *getting* most of the cash. Google might also note that they are providing publishers with adsense program and then sharing about 70% of that revenue with the content producers themselves.

On the other hand, Belgium papers or other content providers can reasonably argue that when Google pulls up snips of their stuff and shows them in Google search results page, and the a user winds up clicking an advertisement at the side, the content folks don’t see a dime of that even though they were a key contributor to the Google profit equation.

Who is right? I say let the market decide.

Steve Jobs’ down with DRM campaign could get him elected….

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Wow, when Steve Jobs suggested music producers effectively getting rid of Digital Rights Management in his post “Thoughts on Music“, a few people were interested in that. Since blogging may determine the outcome of the coming presidential election, I recommend Jobs run for US President on the “A chicken in every pot and free music in every pod” platform.

 

 

Here, from TechMeme, are some of the people who are talking about it: Technovia, InformationWeek Weblog, down the avenue, A Copyfighter’s Musings, The Tech Report, confused of calcutta, Paul Colligan’s …, The 463, Things That, PaulStamatiou.com, TechBlog, Macsimum News, i-boy, The Last Podcast, The Digital Edge Blog, The Workplace Blog, Rex Hammock’s weblog, Forward Thinking, Seeking Alpha, WeBreakStuff, Business Filter, Change Is Good, Paul Kedrosky’s …, BuzzMachine, The Future of Music …, The Viral Garden, Medialoper, Fast Company Now, Jeremy Toeman’s LIVEdigitally, Blogging Stocks, The Gong Show, DeWitt Clinton, Blackfriars’ Marketing, Listening Post, Geek News Central, SearchViews, rc3.org, A VC, Life On the Wicked Stage, PSFK Trend: PSFK, Buzzworthy, robhyndman.com, Slashdot, Ministry of Tech, Joseph Scott’s Blog, Podcasting News, Paul Thurrott’s Internet Nexus and UNEASYsilence

 

My first reaction is that internet people tend to talk too much about music news, but DRM is a very significant topic both in terms of the impact on the industry in terms of money and innovation and perhaps will have broader influence in the coming debates about who owns what and why. So, squawk on dudes!

Putting my money where my Yahoo is?

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My post of about an hour ago, “Yahoo’s big day” convinced me I should put more money where my mouth is on Yahoo’s prospects so using the justifications below I just bought about $1000 in Yahoo March 30.00 calls. (in options “bought” is functionally equivalent to “bet”).

My kilobuck effectively gives me the right to sell 2000 shares of Yahoo anytime between now and March 17. For example if Yahoo falls after today it’s likely I’ll lose *all* of my bet. However if Yahoo rises to, say, $35.00 per share by March 16 I could “exersize” the options for a cool $10,000. Unlikely, but I think the market does not incorporate online advertising revenue and profit information very efficiently. In theory this means … opportunity!Today Yahoo fully launches the new ad matching routine, an artistic program formerly known by the name of “Panama”. My understanding is that if they can even come close to Google’s quality matching ads to searches Yahoo will make quite a bit more.

Yahoo’s a much higher traffic site than Google though Google still has the big search share.

Thus my bet is simple here – that people will realize this week that Yahoo has the *potential* for much higher revenues and profit, and his will bump them up 10+% by next week which would put these options in the money.

Options have “time value” which reflects the chance the stock will go up or down in value and they have “intrinsic”value which is the difference between the stock price and the option price. I paid .52 per share in the hopes the stock price will increase soon. Somewhat counter intuitive is the fact that even a modest increase, if it happens this week as I predict, could double my money without the stock ever reaching the strike price.

YHQCF
CALL YAHOO INC MAR 30
Quantity 20 Contracts $1054

Disclaimer: I also have Yahoo Stock. I could have bought about 40 more shares vs betting on these 2000 shares worth of options to rise quickly. But this’ll be more fun to watch for the next month.

Instant Update:
Wh00t Yah00000t! I’m up $120 after 15 minutes. So far this is fun.
Last Trade [tick] 0.58

Yahoo’s Big Day?

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The NYT reports that today is of great interest at Yahoo as Yahoo fully launches their new contextual advertising matching routines. If successful, Yahoo’s profits could soar this year. Ironically it was Yahoo that aquired the company that effectively invented the pay per click ad model (GOTO renamed Overture now renamed Yahoo Publisher Network). This happened many years ago, but Yahoo failed to capitalize on the head start and it was Google that created a brilliant ad matching algorithm. This ad matching routine allows Google to make a lot more money per visitor than Yahoo and other search engines. Since Google also has a lot more search visitors, their profits have been skyrocketing while Yahoo and Microsoft search profits have languished.It’s interesting to think how little tweaks can quickly impact the amount of money flowing through these systems. Google makes over ten million per *day* from online ads, Yahoo much less but still millions per day. Thus if, for example, the matching routine screws up for a *few hours* and shows irrelevant ads Google can lose millions of dollars in revenue. Conversely if Yahoo can match Google’s ad matching prowess with the new system there’s a lot of money they’ve been effectively leaving on the table that’ll flow into Yahoo’s revenue stream and profits.

Disclaimer: I have some Yahoo Stock.