Blogads admin pages will be unavailable Aug. 30-Sept 1 as we perform significant upgrades to our servers and software.
Active ads will serve throughout, but no ad purchases will occur, currently running ads won’t expire or be editable, and adstrips won’t be modifiable. Ads already to scheduled to start during the period will go live Saturday and be extended over the originally purchased period.
It seems criminal that Wachovia, which yesterday took a monstrous $8.7 billion loss and already is preparing for another $5.6 billion in losses, is still paying a dividend. The bank has a toxic portfolio of $122 billion of the riskiest mortgages, called pick-a-pay, which allow borrowers to make no payments on principle for an initial period.
$122 billion.
Wachovia currently projects that 12% of these mortgages are going to default. Why should any of these mortgages, most of which are in housing quagmires California and Florida, not end up in default?
$122 billion.
Losses on anything like that scale would force Wachovia to borrow money from taxpayers, you, me, our children and grandchildren. So continuing to pay dividends to shareholders while in such dire straights is akin to seeking to shelter assets from potential creditors.
Congress, busy trying to stop intelligent investors seeking to profit from the stupidity of others by selling short-selling the shares of still-overvalued companies (like Wachovia), should instead be prosecuting money-losing banks that insist on paying dividends with “extra” cash that’s just an accounting fiction.
A dividend is by definition a distribution of profits to shareholders, so how is it legal, or morally conscionable, for unprofitable companies to pay dividends?
Hey, let’s say it one last time: Wachovia’s mighty vaults sit on a $122 billion pit of quicksand.
Watch Joe’s face for the moment when he realizes he’s run out of memory after 20 seconds of filming. Micah was using “qik” and amazing service that lets him broadcast live.
I was walking down mainstreet in Blowing Rock, NC Saturday and noticed a well-dressed middle-aged guy who had paused behind a parked mini-van. His leg was jerking a little and he looked like he was concentrating really hard. I asked whether he was OK and he said, loud and clear and coherently, “yes, I’m fine.”
I sat down on a bench not too far away and watched him. He started to lean on the van’s protruding spare tire and shove it. I went over and asked again, “are you OK?”
He said again, very clearly and in a normal voice “I’m fine.”
20 seconds later, he was flat on his back, looking up at the sky.
“I’m going call 911, OK?”
“No, I’m OK,” he said.
At this point, the guy is sweating and looking pale, so I said cognitive dissonance be damned and ignored his opinions and called 911. A woman stopped and asked the guy if he’s diabetic and he said yes; she gave him a peppermint. Two minutes later he’s sitting up, and the paramedics arrive. I head off to dinner.
Later I learned that diabetics suffering from extreme low blood sugar can become unrooted and report that they’re fine even as they’re melting down. I’m still unnerved by the memory of trying to square this guy’s disintegrating physical condition with his bald-faced statements to the contrary.
Anticipating a lighter, digital future, we cleaned out some shelves and boxes of old videos yesterday. Each group represented a different strata of our lives, and the tattered boxes are themselves chronicles of our loyal patronage for certain videos. The Sound of Music was a particular favorite. Here’s the list:
On our video stand:
Born Free
PBS Home video Liberty, the American revolution 1, 2, 3
Dennis the Menace: Walter Mathau
The mask of Zorro (Banderas, Zeta Jones)
Cats
Annie with Kathy Bates
Annie with Albert Finney, Carol Burnett
Star Wars 5
Harry Potter: Sorcerers stone
The Man from Laramie
Around the world in 80 days
MacKenna’s Gold
Star Wars 1
Alexander the Elephant who couldn’t eat peanuts
Old Box (most circa France):
The Sound of Music
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Mary Poppins
Secret Garden
Monkey Trouble
The Orchestra
The Graduate
Musee D’Orsay
Cousteau
Beatrix Potter Tales
The whole Musi collection
Dinosaur
Oliver
Tintin
Charlie Chaplin: La Gradne Revie de Charlot
Mousehunt
Louvre
Dr. Doolittle
Montee Python
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
The red balloon
The Associated Press sent blogger Rogers Cadenhead a letter Friday complaining that his DrudgeRetort.com was infringing their copyright on some stories.
Over the weekend, bloggers left right and center swarmed against the AP, calling for a boycott of links to AP articles with links instead to Agence France-Press, Reuters, McClatchy, or IPS.
In February 2002 Henry Copeland started brainstorming a service to connect bloggers and advertisers. Here’s the original Blogads manifesto. The Blogads domain was registered March 5, 2002, and after six months of prototyping and programming, the service launched August 13. Things were quieter than expected. The first ad, for $32, trickled in on September 2.
During the ‘04 election, Blogads ran hundreds of ads for different candidates and causes, more different political ads than any other single online media. Henry “makes blogs possible,” said leading bloggers.
Henry, 46, grew up in Wooster, Ohio and in 1984 received a BA in history from Yale University after nearly failing classes in economics, math and computer science. After working on Wall Street (’84-91) and in Budapest as a journalist (’91-’98), in 1998 Henry founded Pressflex.com, the parent company to Blogads. Pressflex today serves as the webmaster for nearly 100 newspapers and magazines across Europe.
Henry is on the advisory board for SXSW 2009 and serves on the advisory board of George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet. Here’s a video of Henry evangelizing blogs to TV execs at Promax.
Department of dubious distinctions: Henry’s blog is the sixth oldest by an American CEO, according to this list. And Henry is one of Gawker’s New Dorks of All Media.
Favorite business books: The Innovator’s Solution, The Loyalty Effect, Emergence, Sam Walton: Made in America, Fooled by Randomness, Only the Paranoid Survive, Crossing the Chasm, The perfect store: eBay and Linked.
Nick Denton noted that tech bloggers don’t make extra money on “Apple day” when geeks go into a feeding frenzy for droplets of news from The Steve Jobs’ mouth. Denton blamed poor advertising inventory management tools — how to budget ad placements for 10X traffic?
But I think it’s also that few advertisers want to share the spotlight with Apple, lest they look wan in comparison. Taking a quick scroll around Engadget.com and Gizmodo.com and you see house ads with an occasional Microsoft Zune ad tossed in. Seems fitting that Microsoft is too clueless to be worried about being overshadowed by Steve Jobs.
Writing in the WSJ, Russell Adams dissects the failure of the Washington Post’s foray into “hyperlocal online publishing,” Loudon Extra.
The Journal sites three problems: a) lack of links from WPost itself when a big story breaks b) huge geographic spread (520 square miles) and diversity in Loudon county and c) lack of engage and d) hiring nonlocals.
Two other things to consider. The Post hired the guy to create Loudon local based in part on his success building “the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World’s KUSports.com, a site dedicated to University of Kansas sports that grew during Mr. Curley’s three-year reign from 500,000 monthly page views to a one-time peak of about 13 million monthly page views.” Didn’t anyone tell WPost UKansas sports audience a) is a lot bigger and more fanatic than school board audience and b) isn’t local?
And it also doesn’t help that Posts “Loudon Extra” site doesn’t seem to be Google friendly enough (though I can’t see exactly where they’re failing.) My evidence: if you search Google for “site:washingtonpost.com loudon extra” you get only 2200 results and “site:washingtonpost.com loudonextra” you get only 1 result. Their URLs are Goog-friendly (see below), but they seem (on quick inspection) to lack an index page that would make it easy for Google to do a comprehensive spidering. Yep, that was too easy. Someone from the Post wrote to point out that I mispelled “Loudoun.” Ding. Using the correct spelling, the site ends up with 33,000 entries in Google.
Remember when Goog spent the first quarter tanking, trending lower in sync with Comscore analysis of declining paid clicks, analysis that turned out to be wildly misleading in the end?
Well, GOOG jumped this week in trading leading up to Comscore’s release of a very bullish report on Google’s paid click growth. After being down Monday, Google opened Tuesday at 548 and spent all day trending up, closing at 560. The stock gapped higher the next morning and opened at 568. That night Google closed at 568. After trading closed, Comscore released its estimates
and Google jumped to 575 the next morning.
So anyone who had an inkling Tuesday morning that Comscore’s release Wednesday night was going to be very bullish for Google made a quick $27, a profit that would be vastly multiplied by playing in options.
The prices paid for online ads bought through ad networks dropped 23 percent from March to April, according to PubMatic, an advertising-technology company in Palo Alto, Calif., that runs an online-pricing index. Large Web publishers fared the worst in PubMaticâ’’s study, with the prices they received through networks dropping 52 percent.
The article also noted that AOL’s display revs were down 19% in the first quarter, and a downward revision in earnings guidance at WebMD.
The article blames the slump on the looming recession, but there’s definitely something else at work. The online ad marketplace is suffering from the dreaded TMPFAST syndrome. That’s “Too Many Pigs Feeding at the Same Trough” for those of you who haven’t lived through past bursting bubbles. Since the press started proclaiming a couple of years ago that “any idiot with a site can make billions,” new idiots have been lining up to line their pockets. In building their business plans and seducing their eager to be seduced investors, these pigs have focused on the inarguable growth of online advertising (”how can you go wrong in a market that’s growing 30% a year?”), while ignoring the grim reality that millions of similar idiots have been engaged in the same fantasy.
The result won’t be too surprising… and there’ll be lots of sausage to go round for those with an appetite.
Ian Schafer looks around online for ads for the Smart car and finds none.
… it seems that that support would logically come from some tech-savvy, highly-connected, vocal groups of people that use the web to find each other. So if the Smart car is so smart, where’s the love of the people that it needs to succeed? Where’s the embrace of the (measurable) medium that can jumpstart a revolution?
As a driver of a ‘92 V240, I know horsepower from horsemanure, but DO read the Sunday NYTimes, where the car got trashed.
As Smart tries to jump on the Mini’s bandwagon, some myths need to be addressed. First is that the Smart has been a smash success in Europe. In fact, Smart has been a small but weighty millstone around Mercedes’s neck, never reaching sales expectations and posting more than $3 billion in losses over a decade.
The second myth flows from the first: that the Smart is arriving to show America how small cars should be done. But the Smart isn’t the sophisticated runabout that people might expect.
Sure, the Smart is cute, if you enjoy cars from the Weebles school of design. And it’s ridiculously easy to park. My only pleasure came from slotting the Smart into spots that would have discouraged a St. Bernard.
But the Smart’s diminished size brings diminishing returns. From supermarkets to metered spaces, American parking slots are sized for the biggest cars and S.U.V.’s. Because you can’t straddle the lines at the mall or double up at meters, the Smart offers no advantage there.
The Smart’s only edge is its ability to park motorcycle-style by backing or nosing perpendicular to the curb. Oops, strike that: New York’s parking department said that move is off-limits unless signs specifically allow angle parking for all cars.
Compared with suburb-dwellers, the urban single or family is also more likely to rely on one do-it-all car. That means the versatility to carry friends, escape for a weekend and deal with cargo.
That’s where the Smart gets really dumb. For roughly the Smart Passion’s well-equipped price of $15,510, one could have several pint-sized models ‘ the terrific Honda Fit or Nissan Versa come to mind ‘ that are sportier, hold twice as many people, up to six times the cargo and get nearly the same mileage. (Fold the Versa hatchback’s rear seats, and there’s 50 cubic feet of storage, compared with just 7.8 cubic feet for the Smart).
So maybe Mercedes is intentionally avoiding the instant avalanche of cruelty that advertising in a networked marketplace might bring. If networking multiplies success, does avoiding networked media stifle or at least postpone failure?
I had a short piece in the SXSW quarterly mag that just came out. It was fun to try to carve the thing down from 400 words to 200. Here she is:
My favorite hour at SXSW ‘08 began with boredom. I was watching a panel on social media metrics gum its topic. I shuffled my feet, opened my laptop. Twittered. Stewed.
Ian Schafer leaned over. “Get on Meebo.” I wasn’t alone in my frustration!
– guest439761: “20 minutes in and haven’t really heard anything.”
– Christen: “don’t tell me that there are metrics, tell me what they ARE, how to measure them, what the benchmarks are.”
Michael Bassik went to the mic: “To give the panelists a heads up, Meebo chatters are demanding numbers and names.” The moderator responded: “We’ve still got 30 minutes, we’ll get to metrics.” Ten more metricless minutes passed.
– mvp: “someone hack the system and get this up on the screen.”
– mediastorm: “i say we all walk out.”
– nancy: “don’t laugh! the panelist will think they are interesting.”
We started plotting. Strip and storm the stage? A sweater flew, then a sock. We synchronized hand-raising. We coughed in unison. We riffed on metrical drink names and games.
Suddenly our hour was over. So soon? Awww. We’d net-worked a sixty-minute revolution, transforming private anger into collective action and a humorous new culture. And we were ready for Sarah Lacy.
Kudos to SXSW for publishing something critical of itself in the house publication. But I guess not that critical, because the hour was the most fun I’ve had in social media in a while.
Clay Shirky ties together gin, sitcoms and lolcats:
It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some fancy sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.
I’ve been arguing for a while that blogging and web 2.0 grow out of a surplus of spare time/energy people have in the office — and that smart companies can recycle the energy thrown off by that “spare” work. Shirky takes this to the logical extreme, saying society can do the same. Hat-tip to Gmarch on twitter.
As you may have heard, Blogads is once again repping Wonkette.com. More here, here, and here. The latter link, on the LA Times blog, is particularly good on the nuances of what’s going on.
To answer a question that came up a number of times yesterday: Blogads has zero ownership interest in Wonkette. We’ll be the exclusive ad rep for the blog and our webmaster sister, Pressflex, which hosts sites like TheBanker.com and PerezHilton.com, will serve as its webmaster.
Blogads repped The Wonkette throughout 2004 and 2005 and had a mutually profitable relationship. As Blogads aficionados know, we’re very reluctant right now to accept new blogs in the network; we’re focused on serving our current blogging partners, the bloggers who’ve helped build Blogads, thrive. We’ve committed to represent Wonkette, a blog that’s favorite of DC insiders and boasts a thriving community of commentors, because we believe the addition will add net dollars to the mix of bloggers we already represent.
Like Nick Denton, I think a brisk cold wind is blowing across all media. During the looming depression, times will be particularly tough for new social media companies. Many late arrivals to the field, still flush with cash and pheromone$ injected by VCs eager to hop aboard the Newest New Thing, don’t yet feel the wind or see the snowflakes falling. (As in all gold rushes, a few glimmers of gold dust quickly swelled into golden boulders in the popular imagination, and the greedy and the needy flocked to the promise of gold laden with giant earth movers, leased Porsches and giant Excels stretching into hundred million dollar profitability in 2013.) Now, even as reality turns against the newbies, these folks happily starve or borrow for a while believing they, specially and uniquely, deserve to hit it big. But that willful fantasizing (they patience for now) won’t last forever. We’re beginning to hear rumors that several high valuation VC-funded companies — blog networks, blog publishers, blog whatevers — are almost out of cash, and will need to do down rounds (when early owners find their shares significantly diluted) to raise more cash and stay afloat. More on this in coming weeks. (As Mr. Drudge says “Developing!!!”)
As the social media winter looms, the winners will be the folks with strong relationships, low overheads, a strong commitment on innovation rather than coat-tail riding, and, most of all, a indelible passion for the business. We’re looking forward to seeing you after the bust. Meanwhile, we’ll be mining bronze, silver and some gold with Mr. Denton, Mr. Layne and our many blogging friends.
We’re thrilled that Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection is spending some of its $300 million ad campaign on blogs.
(BTW, we’ve lobbied hard for multiple links, better images, more information and sizzle. I wish the ad and its landing page were about more than harvesting e-mails. Oh, wait, that’s all The Internets are good for.
TV is the place to deliver message right? Afterall, 100% of the candidates who’ve won elected office in the US in the last 30 years have relied on TV advertising, so TV must be essential and effective.
Jeannine and Kevin took a bunch of great photos at the party that Blogads through with our friends at Deepfocus, Indiewire, IndieLense, NPR and PBS.
SXSW has posted the podcast from the Suxorz panel I organized and moderated.
Former Ad-tech chair Susan Bratton called it “the best panel” at SXSW in ‘08. Thank you Susan.
But I disagree vigorously with Susan’s critique that the “lack of preparation is palpable” at SXSW and “poorly moderated sessions go on and on for more than an hour without a single, actionable insight delivered to the patient crowd.”
I loved this year’s gossip and black technology panels, both of which sparked spontaneous combustion between members of the audience and panelists. Actionable insights aren’t what SXSW is about for me… it’s connecting with people I love, a bunch of great experiences, glimpsing some new dimensions that don’t necessarily arise out of a pre-baked moderator agenda but out of the mood of the room. I thought the Lacy/Zuckerberg interview was fantastic at a meta-level… watching Sarah fall on her face and witnessing the crowd’s merciless twit-heckling was one of the most interesting social media experiences I’ve had in a long while. Ditto the Metrics panel.
A reporter quizzed me about what’s ahead for advertising in coming years. Here’s a summary of what I told him:
a) Shilling. Social media, p2p publishing, crowd-sourcing, blogs, comments, video, Netflix ratings, social networking… nearly everyone online is creating content in one form or another. As “audiences with audiences” become the norm and conventional one-to-many media is dwarfed, companies will increasingly seek to buy or co-opt individual spokespeople to carry their message covertly or overtly. The temptation to do this covertly is huge, since non-disclosed proselytizing has a bigger impact. But obviously this is horrible civics, and shilling rots the public discourse. Companies nudging the industry down this slipperly slope include Payperpost (recently renamed to hide their business model) and BzzAgent.
b) Pay-to-play. With online content doubling every 18 months (Google estimate), we’ll see the volume of information grow 100 fold in the next 10 years. If you think our infosphere is noisy now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. To penetrate the chaos, more companies will pay carefully targetted consumers to get their attention. Here’s $500 to test drive this car. Here’s 20 cents to listen to this song. It’s the model folks use to market time-shares, but with lots more algorythms and subtlety built in.
c) Advertainment. We’ll see more advertiser-authored fictions that seek to entertain even as they deliver a kernel of a commercial message. This means ARGs like AudiA3 and Beta7, or videos like Tea Partay and Subservient Chicken, or more serious stuff like BMW films.
d) Networked advertising. Advertising will become network-based as opposed to channel or individual based. Background: advertising was previously conceived and delivered either per channel (for example via a particular publication or TV show) or per individual (ie through direct mail or micro-targetted online ads.) The emergence of millions of vibrant and interlocking social networks — everything from Facebook to DailyKos to PerezHilton to Twitter to Boingboing to WorldofWarcraft — means that marketers can aspire to connect with people as social beings. Why is this revolutionary? Many purchases are made socially: you decide what car to buy based on what friends are saying; you pick your t-shirt based on what certain friends are wearing. I’m not sure how that translates for your article, but it’s the Big Picture. The ad for Secret Lives of Women, now running on PerezHilton, is a stab in this direction — an advertiser’s attempt to connect with a particular very densely networked community of 22-30 year-old-women in exactly the community and style they already inhabit on a daily basis.
e) You build it, you buy it. We’ll see more companies work with the reader/audience/consumer to build a brand or product. The premiere example of this is threadless.com; the threadless community creates t-shirt designs, votes on t-shirt designs and then buys those same t-shirts. Blogads.com’s logo was created by our users and voted on by our users in 2005. Though at the time I hated the design, today its a huge hit and people beg for our t-shirts. Think Move-on’s Obamain30seconds. Or in a stretch, think Amazon Kindle, in which Amazon has consolidated all the market intel it has gathered peddling other people’s products to build its own sellout gadget. People are more excited about buying things they’ve built AND stuff they’ve built usually fits their needs far more powerfully. The marketing and the manufacturing become a continuum.
One of Blogads’ biggest supporters just forwarded a link to an article I wrote in 1993 about an entrepreneur named Paul Panitz. It brings back lots of great memories. Here’s the lede:
Asked about his black Converse All Stars, Paul Panitz, a 46-year-old millionaire, volunteers that they cost $19 five years ago. Later, he recalls buying an office chair for $50 at a 1981 auction. And on a given afternoon, he may be found in a copy shop not far from the Danube River, reminding employees that a copy machine uses six times less toner when operated with its lid closed.
Michael Arrington surveys the VC and angel craze for investing in blogs and blog networks:
In short, I believe the money is being, for the most part, wasted. If a VC hands you a check, their intention is not to hang around for 20 years while you build a nice lifestyle business for yourself. What they want to see is an exit, preferably a 10x or higher exit, within 3-4 years. But something tells me that few of these networks are going to be able to grow quite as easily as they think and reach those liquidity events.
Try this thought experiment and see if your head (or wallet) explodes:
Hedge funds use borrowed money to finance their nearly $2 trillion in assets. With no way to value those securities and with banks refusing to lend against anything but gold and treasuries, many of those hedge funds will soon be forced to liquidate. The Fed can’t let that happen, so it volunteers to take all those securities as collatoral.
The taxpayer ends up owning $100 million worth of ugly securities that it has effectively “bought” for $2 trillion.
And we thought the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 80s, in which taxpayers ate a $90 billion loss, was ugly.
No wonder gold is at $1000 an ounce. It’s looking like the only way out of this mess is 15% annual inflation for 5 years.
In a big red box right now on CNNFN.com: “Dow soars 417, biggest point rise in nearly 6 years, as investors cheer Fed’s move to pump $200B into the banking system.”
It’s amazing to me that this Fed move comes as a relief to anyone. This reminds me of some kind of sad joke that would go like this:
Patient goes in to the doctor’s office thinking he’s got a nasty cold. Doctor diagnoses cancer, prescribes chemotherapy. Patient goes home and tells his wife, “Good news honey! My doctor’s given me really strong medicine for my cold.”
Maybe all this buying is short-covering? Or maybe the down market has had far more rotten rumors built into it than we’d all guessed?
Or maybe the market will go down 10% in the coming month.
