04.13.08
Grandcentral is Down So You Can’t Reach Me
If you are going to provide an essential service you can’t have down time. I can’t recall as long of an outage of my Cellular carrier as Grandcentral has had.
Sorry Google, downtime is bad.
Steve Hodson Needs to Learn About Competition
Steve Hodson at win extra wrote about how advertising for bloggers has to change… Well Steve if you can’t take the heat, get a real job. The problem is not the blogging model, it is having to face the reality that not everyone with a microphone is worth paying to listen to.
Whether you have a talk show on the radio, or an op-ed column in a news paper if you can’t bring in an audience you aren’t going to get paid.
The blog model is the same as the radio or TV model. Your job is to move ads, and sell product, and if you aren’t bringing in an audience you are failing. I will clear well over $150k on my various blogs, before the additional money from consulting, contracting, and my work with Vista Research as an analyst.
Some of my blogs are to sell products, some are to sell ads, and some are to build my brandwidth. I have had to put a lot of hours in to finding the right formula for each of these spaces. This site for example is just for my personal brand and there for doesn’t have any ads. Which is a revenue model I’m more than ok with.
As to your comments about Adsense dominating the space, yes they are my primary source of revenue, but mostly because some of the other sources I play with aren’t as dependable. If I move $20k worth of ads I want to be certain I get paid at the end of the month. Adsdaq by contextweb is a company that has cut me 5 figure checks in a month and I like working with them. More than Google even. Kontera doesn’t earn me as much as Google, but have also been great to work with. (though they both suck a bit because when all of you sign up I will get squat for referring them)
Steve, when you and I got into the blogging space there were very few bloggers. I remember when RSS 1.0 changed the online diary space, and really made it possible to be a Robert Scoble and read 300 blogs on a regular basis.
Then everyone wanted to make 6 figures working from home in their pj’s ranting about everything that came to mind, and that separated the men from the boys, or the people in it for the love, from those in it for the dollars. I compromised. I now have blogs I write for money, and ones that don’t pay as well, but I enjoy.
There is plenty of gold still in those hills. But this is a cut throat space and as it is cheaper and easier to enter the space you have to keep upping the ante to stay on top, and make money at what you do.
This post is in response to:Advertising for bloggers has to change
Extension: In response to Quintura…
Well you guys get "It" in a sort of ironic way. You used your blog to promote your product, got a Techmeme link, and that put will help you move even more of your services. If Steve would attach himself to Affiliates, Sponsorships, and Blogging for a company there would be more jingle in his pocket, and that is before you start looking at alternate revenue streams…. That said I’d have said it was odd that Techmeme doesn’t see this as a Splog.
There is a difference between using your corporate Blog to bring value to your readers, and getting a lucky roll and having techmeme decide your ad is relevant because you wrote one sentence about the article that you are linking to, and two dozen on why your product will help you get 70% more of your audience to leave your site and go some where else.
If you were focused on helping monetize blogs, rather than monetize your install base, you’d offer features that helped drive traffic, keep traffic, and create interactions that outperform the revenue generated by traditional ad models.
04.09.08
Information is Power, and Power Aint Free
Bret Taylor wrote a post that started a whole chain of articles elsewhere… About how there should be a free Online Database of well Data. Data for everything.
I use the CIA Factbook for a lot of the information I just want for myself. It never fails to impress people when I site the CIA factbook on a power point slide.
That said I use all sorts of other bits of data for a lot of my SEO. I mine YouTube, Flickr, Amazon, Google Base, the CIA Fact book, Yahoo answers… There is no shortage of places to get information to be queried molded and made in to content that is of use to an audience. That is how I make $200 before I wake up in the morning. I bend shape, mold, "Pipe" and mash data to create pages that are timely useful, and move product or ads.
If that becomes to easy I get put out of business. I’m not opposed to that in general terms, but here is the problem.
Wikipedia already contains a huge number of gross errors, and gets quoted as fact a lot of times when it isn’t. If that were the case for things like Market Data, or Traffic, or things that we make critical some what automated decisions on, the data would have to be much more accurate than Wiki has ever been.
One of my favorite examples was when a co-worker pulled an entire table from Wiki with out reading it first, and it listed the most watched events in Television History and one of them was "So-And-So Munches the Black Cock". (Name removed for that person’s benefit.
Sure these often get caught, but I know that some of the entries I have made are only about 85% right but are better than the 0% right that they were when I started.
Pulling data that was created commercially, and possibly buying data that you can sleep at night know it is accurate "enough" and that people haven’t maliciously modified it, is worth it.
You get what you pay for, and if you get it for free, it is probably worthless.
Besides just think of the spam sites that would pop up if such a tool existed.
This is a response to:
Sarah Perez: Where to Find Open Data on the Web
Deepak Singh: Web as platform: Bret Taylor on Open Data
Jon : Bret Taylor’s DataPedia
Hash: It’s Always About the Data
Ryan Stewart: Wikipedia for data would be awesome for GPS/Mapping
Dan Farber: Open-sourcing factual data, Wikipedia style
Sample of Free Data in use:
Check the Flickr and YouTube Images on the side of www.xyhd.tv ; www.Yentering.com ; and type any term in to www.makemeaninja.com/news/
04.04.08
Free Isn’t what is killing us, Lack of Innovation is
Hank Williams at Silicon Alley posted a short rant about a topic NPR discussed the week before, entitled "Free" is Killing US– Blame the VC’s
What Hank missed is that he is only write in the VC against VC market. Many small online businesses are growing using a paid service model.
The other thing Hanks missed is that CPM’s are only low if you let them be. I get $15 cpm on my Sites and I am not doing razor sharp advertising based on GEO-IP, age, and gender.
I’m also making plenty on my consulting business, selling services based on the track record I have proving that I can make money on web sites, or make money running ads to sell products. My girlfriend is doing quite well with her services sites as well, her only growing pain is how to go from one person to two, with out starving in the time it takes to go from enough work for 1.25 people to enough for 1.85 people.
Hank the problem is not free, it is that NO ONE HAS A NEW IDEA. There I said it. Facebook is barely better than MySpace, and now you can’t tell the two apart, throw in Linked In. Half the time I can’t tell what service I’m using since everything gives me a blue dash board telling me what all my online friends are doing.
You want to make money online do something other people aren’t, then hire some one that knows something about how to make money for page views. I’m a white hat, and I do $15 CPM there are black hats that are making 10x what I make that could every Ning competitor in to a multimillion dollar a year site.
Look at Hank’s Post…. I bet Silicon Alley is getting less than $1 CPM for it, because it is so far from being optimized to make money that they would probably be better to just run Etology ads for online dating, because with 3 ad blocks they could make $1.50 CPM, and then they wouldn’t have to pay a sales rep to sell the
Sun ads that I’m sure no one is clicking.
Why does everything suck? Because people like Hank think that the problem is where the money comes from not how you plan to get it. The reason VC’s like free services is that the model is proven. If you are going to do a Social network site you are going to have to get users so some of those users will have to be free, but if Hank had listened to the NPR story he ripped off, he would realize that the better model is free for most, pay for some. Loss Leaders have been adopted by everyone from grocery stores, to crack dealers, and Flickr.
Yes, Hank just like we can’t tell your article from NPR, which also uses the loss leader model, the difference between their success and your failure is that they have figured out how to give something away for free to the majority, and stay in business on the minority who pay.
This is post is a response to: