04.21.08
Posted in Site News, Technology News at 10:35 am by Brandon Wirtz
www.isayhello.com went live last night. The front page is ugly, I don’t have as many human edited pages as I would like, but it is day one, and this is the first step. In the coming days you will start to see better and better results pages, and more "Category" templates.
Not all results will be hand edited, but more and more topics will get classified into a category which will give results tuned to that category type.
What is ISayHello.com?
It is a hybrid of traditional computer generated results, human classifications of results, and human generated content. Keep in mind that ISayHello.com was built in about 150 hours by one guy. (Brandon Wirtz).
What isn’t ISayHello.com?
A replacement for Google, Yahoo, or Live.com Search results. Because we don’t index specific pages you will never be able to find a specific phrase on a site, but you will find specific phrases in titles, topics, and categories.
A Mahalo.com clone. The biggest difference between our results and Mahalo.com results is that we have results for pretty much everything on the planet. Mahalo.com only has results for topics that people have written results for. Much like Mahalo, iSayHello.com creates relevant links to sites that we think would best help you find answers to your searches, but our results change dynamically based on trends for the topic. For example if your favorite actor gets hit by a bus, we will switch from being 100% links to that actors works and biographies to a blend of links about that actors works, and news results about the recent incident.
What will ISayHello.com become?
ISayHello is working hard to add features almost hourly. Things like Game Walk Through / Cheat Data Bases, and Biographies of everyone on the planet. Some of these will just be willed in to existence and improve all of the results they are tied to, and others will be a process. (we can’t have a biography of everyone until you submit yours now can we?)
ISayHello is also working on relationships with other "engines" so that we can bring you results for the best price on products related to your searches when appropriate.
How does ISayHello.com work?
ISayHello.com works like many search engines, but is a "Just in Time" search engine. We Scour a huge number of places based on the type of search we think your topic is, and return results on that topic. We cache those results for a time, but if you come back in a few days you may get different, likely better results.
Our results take a little longer to "come back" than other search engines because of this, but we think we get better results because of this extra time. If you are doing a search that someone else has done recently you will be served a cached results and should get a fast response. As this is the beta very few speed optimizations have been made, so expect that results will get faster over time.
How can I help with ISayHello.com?
We will be posting various ways you can contribute. So check back every so often. We will also be running contests, and posting full time positions.
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04.18.08
Posted in Site News, Technology News at 2:57 pm by Brandon Wirtz
For a long time I was competing in my own way with Mahalo.com Jason Calacanis’s human powered search site. The formula was simple, take the Google.com/Trends data, then sort through the most "ownable" terms which was basically defined as anything with fewer than 10k competing pages and have a girl in India create a blog post about them. This is not quite Jason’s model, he was creating pages for every term, but as he has Sequoia’s VC money behind him, and I only have my own money, I had to generate revenue to pay for the content creation.
The model worked. I could recoup about 10% of the pages the first day, and 40% the first month, and the rest I’d lose money on, but taking a 6 month average all pages would break even and begin earning money. The problem is I don’t really have the bank roll to sponsor 6 months worth of posts to make $5 on each of them. The model doesn’t work that well.
If I write the posts most of the time I can make $5 the very first day, and for several days after that, but my time is worth more than $15 an hour.
So I needed a solution that would create pages at least equal to the quality of a Mahalo.com post, and created at zero cost.
Using nothing more than my server and content that is available through various web API’s. The results are a bit slow if you are the first person to search a term, but caching makes the results fast for the next person.
If you’d like to be in the beta, contact me (Brandon at XYHD.tv) I’ll point you to the site.
I’m still in the process of picking a domain, all the good ones are taken, but likely I will have several, each tuned for different types of searches.
I was blown away that there is not a good "classification" tool on the web, basically just to sort, this X term is of type Y. Like Britney Spears is a Person, Paris France is a Place.
My results could be a lot better if I had this because then I’d know where to look for types of queries. No worries I can build that in to the logic later, or make that part of the human part of the equation.
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04.13.08
Posted in Responses at 10:02 pm by Brandon Wirtz
Philip Parker is almost my idol. There are a lot of black hats that use computer generated content to make money. Most of them don’t use them to game Amazon.
The problem is as is often the case that they suck. You see most legit uses of computer generated content create tools which the user knows are generated. Google is computer generated content. Wikipedia is not. I think when you boil it down, this is the difference between computer and human generated content. Google points you in the right direction, and Wikipedia for all of its inaccuracies about hard topics is at least generally complete for the menial stuff.
Parker’s works which cover medical topics on the other hand strike me as border line dangerous. Some of my computer generated services return fun information, like singles who have expressed interest in the topics of a given webpage, which I bill as your readers might look like this…. Has little practical use, and no one is likely to be injured by their use. Parker’s books on the other hand are simply compilations of other reports and compendiums of non-copyrighted materials, but are also not fact checked.
Parker has 200k books, I know black hats with 200k websites each with 200k pages. Parker is just more willing to take individuals money, where as black hats prefer to take that of online advertisers. A quick Turing Engine, some starting keywords, and you have as many pages on what ever topic you want. Throw in a Thesaurus and you have the makings of a $100 a day website.
I find both practices distasteful, but atleast the blackhats are trying to fool the computer, not unwitting shoppers.
All of that said…. It does lend to the Public Data conversations of earlier this week.
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Posted in Google at 9:07 pm by Brandon Wirtz
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.
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Posted in Money, Responses at 12:08 am by Brandon Wirtz
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.
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04.09.08
Posted in Responses at 8:26 pm by Brandon Wirtz
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/
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04.04.08
Posted in Responses at 12:16 pm by Brandon Wirtz
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:
Free 2.0: Don’t blame the VCs
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03.26.08
Posted in Leadership at 11:17 am by Brandon Wirtz
I worry about Hillary’s recent Misspeak. I have misspoke before, when I thought I was quoting someone and flubbed what they said, or I misspoke and inverted or changed some numbers unintentionally. But the difference in my view is intent. Like when you misstep, you didn’t mean to fall off the roof you misstepped. Remembering the girl who greeted you at the airport as a sniper who you ran for duck and cover is not so much misspeaking but lying.
As an engineer I often find that is can get caught up in misspeach when quoting a specification. EIA-708 and EIA-709 are related but different spec’s, but 708 is about captioning and 709 is about color space, so if you mis-speak you can find you sent someone on a wild goose chase.
If you quote some one 6 milliamps when you mean 6 amps they may have a very bad day.
Or if you ship something to Las Vegas, NV instead of Las Vegas, NM. These are all mis-speach.
When a CEO says that his sales will be up 15% and he meant 1.5% that becomes a bit harder of a call.
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03.01.08
Posted in Google at 1:37 am by Brandon Wirtz
CTR’s are down 7% Google says that this is because Google has "Improved" the quality of the ads that are returned when users do a search. If that were true then CTR’s would be up because Ads would get served to more qualified better targeted customers. But they aren’t.
Searches are up 9% and blog traffic has risen with them. But many of us have seen our CPM’s fall steadily. More traffic and 5-15% less money.
If ads were better targeted, Google’s revenue would increase because you would get more clicks based on being more relevant, and they would be able to charge more per 1000 impressions because they would serve the best ads, and even if they didn’t get any more money per click they would get more clicks.
What we are seeing instead, is more Pay Per Impression ads. Ads that don’t need to be clicked to be of benefit to the advertiser.
I have had to take to blocking these types of ads as competitive to keep my CPM up.
I can’t say I haven’t done similar things with the ads I buy. I cram them full of the information I need to get a sale, and the information the user needs to not be a window shopper.
For example:
Buy a Widget
Our Widgets are the best click to see them now!
This type of ad gets clicked. But the below ad gets more sales per click.
Widget $29.99
Our best widget is now 50% cheaper and can be shipped overnight
This ad gets clicked less, but has a much higher sell-thru.
I’m ok with either of these running on my site, they are "Fair" enough.
What I dislike is the ads that are like this.
Get $10 off Widgets
Call Us now at 1877-4AWidget and use offer code DIDNTCLICK
These types of ads monopolize my site with $2 click numbers, but no reason for a user to click.
As Google tries to ratchet up its earnings it works harder and harder to raise it’s commissions by helping customers optimize their sell through it must balance what it does to publishers. Online advertising has plenty of room to grow, but the way to increase profits is not to do more with CPM ads, it is to remove more of the spam blogs.
Here is the scenario that every Splogger knows…
Write a post with spammy text, Google Bomb it until it glows, it sits there in the top 10 results for "Widgets" and gets 1000 hits a day. The site has no content, it just "pretends" to. And it has no outbound links. So a user just blindly clicks on anything that might take them to the next place on their search. The Splog gets a click no matter what the ad is for, doesn’t matter if it is relevant, the Ad Buyer is out a few cents, and everyone but the splogger loses.
Search result ads don’t suffer this the exact same way, but they do suffer. If you are willing to pay you can run an ad against anything, even things that you have no business advertising against. If you set your Cost per Click to $5 you can run an ad for your 900 number fortune telling service against any number of keywords. Using the ad I outlined with the phone number and setting your daily budget to extremely high numbers and you will see CTR’s that are less than 1 hundredth of 1% but will have an amazingly low CPM.
Whether Google will admit it or not Adsense is broken, not so broken that they aren’t making insane amounts of money, but enough that there is a lot of money to be made buy bending its rules. And a lot of money to be lost if you don’t know who’s breaking the rules and how.
7% fewer clicks on 9% more traffic = 16% fewer clicks per thousand users.
Want to make a small fortune? Buy ads on words that there are no Ad Search results for, and sell something. Or just arbitrage some clicks.
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02.14.08
Posted in Technology News at 2:35 pm by Brandon Wirtz
Reuter’s says PS3 is going to lead growth in 2008…. but then you read past the headline.
Worldwide sales of the PS3 are expected to be 10 million units this year, compared with 12.2 million units for Nintendo Co Ltd’s (7974.OS) Wii and 7.5 million units for Microsoft Corp’s(MSFT.O) Xbox 360, iSuppli said.
(The Analyst at iSuppli didn’t seem to have read Sony’s own projections. They lowered their estimates from 11 million units world wide to 9.5 million.)
But I read 12.2 Million as more than 10 Million, which would imply Nintendo is going to lead growth. If you look at it by percentage increase you could call it growth. But you wouldn’t say a baby mouse outgrows a baby hippo.
My readership grew 1Million percent yesterday. I went from no readers to Me, Dave, and a Splog reading my posts. I didn’t have Industry leading growth.
Sure if you look at January and February Xbox is lower than PS3, but I actually believe Jeff Bell, when he says Microsoft misjudged demand and that the 1.3 million units sold in December left them short handed.
The Analyst at iSuppli didn’t seem to have read Sony’s own projections. They lowered their estimates from 11 million units world wide to 9.5 million.
Related to this story: Microsoft acknowledges Xbox 360 shortages in US
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