Category Archives: advertising

Mark Cuban, the sage of internet video?

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I think Mark Cuban  has more valid points than Cory does on the controversies swirling around copyright and takedown notices delivered by Viacom.     Cory is right that it’s annoying and obnoxious to send takedowns to people who obviously are not infringing, but that’ll shake out soon enough.  What isn’t shaking out soon enough is what I’ve discussed at length before – YouTube and Myspace and other big players are making hundreds of millions by purposing user generated content to their commercial needs.   I’d even concede that commercialism is not the bottom line on these big player/user interactions, and also concede that users like me are agreeing to provide content that in turn gets searched at Google and generates money for them and *sometimes* for me.

However as Mark correctly notes it’s significant to ask within the copyright, content, and user community issue this question:  Who gets the lion’s share of the revenues created by copyright holders or community participants?    I’d like to see more of that cash flow to the community and less to the big players.   But maybe that’s just because I’m a community guy?

Go Mavs!

Zawodny to Beal “Spammer!”. Beal to Zawodny “Get a Damn Clue!”

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You’ve got to love these spats between clever and prominent blog dudes. It’s not only the closest onliners generally come to schoolyard or barroom brawling, but often these debates give huge insight into the future of the online world.

When Yahoo bought MyBlogLog, the clever social community application, it fell to Jeremy Zawodny to help refine the project into the robust and scalable environment demanded by the world’s top website. Jeremy also decided to take on a bit of quality control, and accused Andy Beal, a top marketing consultant, of spamming MyBlogLog. Andy had used as his avatar “win a free zune” rather than using the normal convention of a personal picture.

Andy Beal shot back angrily that he was not spamming and even had permission to run the contest from MyBlogLog’s founders. Cheap trick or not, if he had permission I think Jeremy owes him an apology – or at least an upgrade to “officially approved MBL spammy tactic”.

Although I thought Jeremy was too hard on this marketing “trick” by Andy, I certainly agree with many who think that MyBlogLog is now suffering from it’s own popularity. Popularity that has brought a lot of questionable tactics outside of the spirit of a quality community.

There is no great harm in the win a free zune *except* it defeats one of the nice aspects of MyBlogLog which is that you can see the person’s face. Several prominent and clever SEO’s with great blogs like Andy’s “Marketing Pilgrim”, as well as several junk sites and junk SEOs are resorting to similar tactics. The most common is to plant a pretty woman’s face rather than your own face, encouraging signups to your blog community.

Avatars are the heart of this system since they appear at other sites. Therefore to preserve the integrity of MyBlogLog Yahoo should require that avatars reflect either the person or a highly relevant aspect of the community. I’d even consider requiring that if you want to play with MyBlogLog you’ve got to be the real person in the picture.

Andy’s a good guy and a quality SEO, but his claim that he’s helping MyBlogLog with this type of approach rings pretty hollow with me.

Update:  Jeremy retitled his post and apologized.  But hey, it was fun while it lasted!

Google + Kiosks = Coolness!

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Wow, I sure hope the rumors about a Google Kiosk project are true. I like Google and I like Kiosks. Here in Oregon I was involved in computer kiosks for over ten years. Back in 1990 I managed one of the USA’s earliest multimedia projects using IBM Infowindow Touch monitors, computers, and laserdisc players. That was a US Forest Service partnership with my former employer the Southern Oregon Visitors Association, and we had 30 units in tourism places all over Southern Oregon.

This project led to a new project I designed and deployed as part of a SOVA, State, and National Scenic Byways partnership that put internet connected units in about 15 places. The internet solved many of the problems with the early kiosk project such as real time information availability, though it brought a host of new problems with rural connectivity issues and eventually a lack of enthusiasm for a complicated, grant driven project.

Could Google bring the necessary ingredients to make Kiosks commercially viable? I think they could by deploying broadly and with enough of an advertising footprint to interest national players who would appreciate being both in the programs and on the sides of the cabinets.

Good luck Google, I’ll always root for touch computer kiosks!

Related link – HUGE touchscreen with mapping demo – fantastic!

Who, what, which Wiki?

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There’s a new search in Internet Town called WikiSeek that is creating a search within Wikipedia and sites linked to by Wikipedia. It’s an excellent idea though I’m not clear it’ll lead to better results than a normal search engine query. Wikipedia is generally better than the snail paced DMOZ at reflecting “related sites”, but like DMOZ the politics and anti-commercial concerns of Wikipedia often get in the way of good articles. Wikipedia is notoriously sparse when listing “related” sites. Like many open source driven projects there is a “NO COMMERCIALIZATION WHATSOEVER” bias that gets in the way of providing the best available information which is increasingly found on commercial sites and blogs, which are not treated favorably enough by DMOZ or Wikipedia.

As TechCrunch noted today WikiSeek is going to get confused big-time with Jimmy Wales Wikimedia Search project which is destined to become a huge addition to the search landscape. Formerly known (well – sort of formerly known?) as the Wikiasari project and still called that by most, it’ll be a robust, community driven search that used human editing to keep out the junk and bring in the jewels rather than the algorithmic approaches taken by Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask and most other major players. Confusing things further is the fact that projects like WikiSeek above are not primarily a Wiki, they are, wishfully, a way to work with Wikis.

What?

I think somebody might want to clue in the Wiki crowd to the following challenge:

Few people, even total immersion code crazed onliners, are really comfortable with Wikis. Most pretend to be but when it’s time to collectively participate in a wiki I’ve *never* seen it work nearly as well as the collective results from blogs, which reward individuals with attention rather than reward the collective with information. MashupCamp1 and 2 were filled with very capable internet programmers. In fact even the *inventor* of the Wiki, Ward Cunningham, was there (he’s a great Oregonian fellow who invented the Wiki as a collaboration tool for on computer projects). Yet even in this potentially Wiki-rich environment the lack of updating of the Mashup Camp Wiki was conspicuous. Rather it was blogs, Flickr, and huge sheets of paper that kept people well informed during these intense and infoManiacal extravaganzas.

So, I think big Wiki projects like Wikipedia and the upcoming Wikimedia search have huge potential, largely because they constrain the organization of things such that the big project benefits from huge community participation.

Little bitty Wikis? Let’s just scrap them and have everybody crosslink the blogs, OK?

Hey, nice lookin’ website there! Too bad for you.

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Most marketing and advertising agencies are *terrible* at understanding how the internet works – they think that flash elements and print-like approaches are what should drive the projects when the exact opposite is the case.

For online effectiveness in terms of search and usually also for users you want easy navigation, few graphic elements, and most importantly a well-optimized site. The more the biz is online focused the more you want optimization over good looks.

Most SEO sophisticated places are poor at design, and many SEO whiz kids can’t be convincing enough to steer people away from the good looking sites designers tend to do. Yet those good looking sites that sacrifice searchability for beauty should be avoided.

In my opinion the people who say “hey, we can make it look super good and glitzy AND be very well optimized” should be listed online in an “Americas least wanted” list of web people.

Of course you can make sites look “OK” and have great optimization, but it’s impossible to have the classy high falutin’ feel you get from rich, large images and flashy elements and do a great optimization. Disney-like sites can afford this mistake (I think it’s still stupid of them), but most businesses count on good optimization if they are in a competitive field where many companies are trying for many related terms.

There are probably exceptions to this rule of great looks vs great optimization but I think they are *extremely* uncommon. The best simple way to describe it simply is that flash and images almost alway look better than text and almost always lead to inferior optimization than text and hyperlinked text elements.

Elfyourself – have yourself a virally marketed Christmas

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Know any coffee and art lovers?   Give them The Coffee Calendar 
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Viral marketing approaches (not to be confused with computer viruses) take clever little online ideas and try to make them spread by online “word of mouth” which usually means friends emailing other friends.

This year’s big viral winner may be ElfYourself, which is showing nothing less than stunning traffic over the past few weeks – looks like it’s beating out many major sites and might even approach the top 100 sites this week as it spreads. [nope – looks like it peaked near Christmas at about site 250 per Alexa measures].

My friend and neighbor Ilana sent me an Elfyourself and within 30 minutes I’d sent out one myself even though I usually avoid sending people anything “fun” online to avoid cluttering up their boxes.

Expedia vs Elfyourself traffic per Alexa. Alexa is not very reliable but it’s good for generic approaches like this. Note that it’s “today’s” measure rather than the three month average that is of interest here since the site just startup up a few weeks ago: Alexa traffic comparison

More Tech Memes

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here

Yikes – I leave town for a few days and can hardly keep up with all the interesting tech news items. In addition to the fun Jeremy v. Matt copycat debate we’ve got:

Jason on Digg Rigging This is just a tiny part of the HUGE number of upcoming stories which will showcase how complex the relationships are between SEO, social networking sites, and …. money.   I actually contacted the Digger Jason is effectively accusing of abuse and it does not appear to me he’s taken any money at any time.   Here’s a great summary of that “Digg Ban” case.   But his innocence does not suggest to me that there is not a huge and growing issue with Social media SEO uses and abuses.  At PubCon many were discussing how powerfully social networking can help with organic optimization as well as straight traffic generation to a site that gets “dugg” or creates a compelling (including stupid but popular) YouTube video.

Jim at Microsoft apologizing in a very web 2.0 way. Scoble would be proud of this “naked conversations” approach to corporate blogging. Too bad Microsoft didn’t see how making Robert the semi-official corporate blogmeister with the huge salary increase he deserved for “getting Web 2.0” before the suits did (most MS suits don’t even get it now) would have returned 100x on the investment.

… and speaking of “getting Web 2.0”. Yahoo does but can’t seem to get the mileage they deserve for retooling the corporation as a community internet extravaganza. This set of leaked Yahoo internal documents about the potential Facebook aquisition provides a fascinating glimpse into how big deals are analyzed. As a Yahoo shareholder I think they should save the billion and just get their stupid ass in gear with the excellent social network stuff they already own like Flickr (which should be the template for other social applications, Del.icio.us (OVERHAUL the INTERFACE and yes, you can rename this URL monstrosity! ), Yahoo Video, Yahoo 360, Answers, groups, etc, etc. As I’ve noted before Yahoo suffers from giving people so many options they tire of the decision making and go to Google’s simple interfaces, search, and simpler suite of choices. Google expects us to act like the sheep we are. Yahoo expects us to do too much mental work choosing how we relate to the internet.

Going Techno Postal?

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here

OK, I’ve really missed ranting about technology things for the past few weeks so I’m going to take a look at what’s going on over at TechMeme.

Jeremy over at Yahoo is always very honest about Yahoo’s shortcomings so it’s good to see him get to take a shot at Google even though the transgression is not exactly earth-shaking, more just a funny oddness that gets internet people all worked up. Google copied Yahoo‘s IE7 pitch page. (It was changed to this today or last night). Here’s a great graphic which shows the smoking gun evidence: http://chir.ag/stuff/yahoo-to-google.gif

Matt Cutts is a totally stand up guy and this is not his department but he’s Google’s ambassador to the blogging masses so it fell to him to address this. Now, you don’t dis Google or Matt may go Inigo Montoya on you. Matt’s lackluster “apology” sounded more like an attack on Yahoo’s own copycat behavior even though he noted that it was Robert Scoble‘s excellent advice – which was totally not taken – that led him to post about this. Robert suggested the Google peeples take out the Yahoo peeple for a fancy lunch in a limo, which would have been a neat PR gimmick.

This is superficially trivial but actually has deeper significance as a measure of the overall online sentiment about Google. Google is still in the driver’s seat with respect to most things internet but I’d suggest that we are now seeing a tendency for the knowlegeable users to reevaluate their relationships with Google, Yahoo, and even Ask and MSN. This reminds me in some ways of the days when Yahoo was totally in the online driver’s seat and Google – with clearly superior search – started to eat Yahoo’s lunch but still had only a tiny market share. Had Yahoo bought Google back then, rather than just using their search algorithm and helping to make Google the online behemoth it is today, the online landscape would sure look different. I’m glad they didn’t though because Google’s new approaches and “techno centric” business models have arguably done more to change the way we all do business than any other recent global business developments.

Ironically in this little debate is the fact that when Yahoo FINALLY figures out how to effectively copy the gist of Google’s contextual ad matching systems (adwords and adsense) we could see a huge change in the online search game as publishers would have more choice in who they align with.

Disclaimer: I’ve got some Yahoo Stock so I root for them to succeed even though I try to post honest comments about what’s up.

$350,000,000 for Hitwise? Wow, statistics don’t lie about … cash? Do they?

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This Hitwise asking price sounded way too high at first, but Hitwise has about 1200 customers. I think their charges range from a minimum of about 1000 monthly to what would not be more than 5000 or so monthly (I’m guessing wildly here).

Any company that’s counting on the unreliable reporting of the big analytics firms should be ashamed of itself, but putting that aside let’s assume Hitwise is taking in an average of 2500 monthly from those 1200 clients. This is a cool 3 million per month or 36 million per year. For an established and growing internet company asking 9-10x annual revenues is not outrageous. I’m guessing they’ll be thrilled to get half that, but… I say rock on Hitwise dudes!

Mathew Ingram is seeing 2.0 bubbles and thinks I have a high threshhold for outrage

HeadOn alternative remedy – Wal Mart Candles

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ABC’s reporting on how successful Head On has been: Six million tubes of wax at $6-8 per tube. Since the product obviously has no medical value, is this a marketing miracle? You bet it is! There’s a HeadOn sucker born every minute!

Let’s do the math:
Wax sells at about $2 per pound I’m sure HeadOn paid less but that number will do for now. That amounts to 12.5 cents per Ounce of wax.

HeadOn tubes have .2 oz of wax and a few tiny amounts of other effectively worthless ingredients. Thus their cost for the HeadOn itself is no greater than 2.5 cents per tube of HeadOn. Packaging and production costs? Let’s assume it’s 5 times the product cost, or 12.5 cents per tube.

Therefore a tube of HeadOn costs HeadOn approximately 15 cents.

HeadOn tubes sell for about $8, though there are discounts so let’s use $7 as the average sale proceeds per tube.

$7 proceeds from a $0.15 investment in the product and packaging! This is a markup of 46.67 times. A “four thousand six hundred sixty seven percent” markup. Microsoft Xbox 360 eat your heart out.

Their largest cost is likely the advertising campaign, but you can spend a lot for ads when your product is marked up over 46x your cost. I’ll try to find out more about what they spend on advertising later.

ABC Report:

With no science to back it up the ad was changed to stop implying (something?), though it seemed to me HeadOn has always been careful not to claim much of anything.

Cooling sensation may distract people from the pain. A doctor at the headache center suggests.

HeadOn claims to act homeopathically, with the wax containing tiny amounts of some homeopathic extractions . Homeopathy is one of the silliest and most ridiculous approaches to medicine, based on the notion that water imbued with unmeasureable amounts of substances has it’s molecular structure changed into powerfully curative “extractions” (hey, is there one to stop me from gagging on pseudo-science?) Like any quack remedy you’ll get placebo effects which have “real” curative powers.

The debate over quack cures is clouded by this placebo effect. Unlike real medicines which generally have potential side effects and rarely work in all cases, placebos, which only need the gullible participation of the user, can offer real relief, especially from minor symptoms.

I’m confident that HeadOn does nothing medical, but that does not mean it’s worthless.

However, prudent shoppers will choose my alterative “even better than HeadOn” emedy – one of those short stubby 29 cent Wal Mart Candles used for religious offerings. This will save you over $7 AND give you a religious infusion (but only if if you BE-LEEEEEVE!).

Send the $7 you saved vs buying a “real” tube of HeadOn to the charity of your choice, and you’ll not only get the benefit of the placebo effect you’ll actually do some good.

Digg this?