blogads for the opinion makers

Our scheduling and versioning UI just took a nice hop forward. (Nearly a leap?)

After lots of agonizing, things got a lot easier when we realized that our ad units cry out to be displayed horizontally in the admin interface. Having turned the interface on its side, suddenly an ad scheduling calendar suddenly made a lot more sense.

The interface still isn’t perfect, but it is a big improvement over what we had yesterday.

Here’s what you see after you’ve uploaded two versions of an ad. You click on the dates below each version to indicate when that version should run. (You can add as many versions as you want.) This illustration is for a one week ad. If you wanted to run a one month ad, you’d see 31 days. (Click to enlarge.)

If you indicate that three ads will run on one day, the machine automatically distributes the SOV proportionally.

And if you want to change the weighting for a particular day (or all the days with that particular set of versions), you click a day in the list in the left column and get a screen like the following one, in which you can then customize the weighting for that set of creatives.

Obviously this UI still isn’t perfect, so we need your suggestions and critiques… either in the comments or by e-mail.

We launched a new ad format over at DailyKos in April. Called the “Action Tag,” the ad format allows an advertiser to promote a specific action after a post that deals with a relevant topic area. The SEIU helped inspire the ad functionality and been using Action Tags to promote actions around health care and employee free choice.

This weekend, some of the folks at DailyKos started to debate the new functionality, weighing in on its pros and cons. The discussion has been lengthy and inspiring, and has provided some good ideas for improving the functionality, which we’ll begin to impliment shortly in concert with SEIU and Dkos.

Above and beyond the particulars of the debate, I’ve enjoyed the fact that the debate has revived a discussion that began four years ago about an risque ad for Turner Broadcasts’ reality TV remake of Gilligan’s Island. It’s amazing to see the pie-fight meme live on in the Kos community.

Some deep chord sounded in me on reading the NYT’s story about the John Lennon museum display in New York capped with this image:

Near the exit is “Telephone Peace,” a white telephone mounted on a wall, with a card telling visitors to answer the phone when it rings.

“This is something we did at the show in 2000,” Mr. Henke said. “Yoko would periodically call in and speak to whoever answers.”

Ms. Ono seemed amused at the prospect. “Yes, you pick up the phone,” she said, “and it will be me.”

Why?

Having screwed around with Yahoo Pipes and other RSS tools and found them never quite doing exactly what we needed, we’ve built a new tool to robustly combine and permutate feeds. If you’re interested in helping us test the tool, drop me a line.

Thanks to a pile of new code written in Budapest over the last 3 months, advertisers can now run multiple ad versions in a single day, assigning a weighting to each version. Advertisers can use this feature to keep ads fresh for readers or to test which version is most effective. (If you’re a current advertiser, click “versions” link on an already purchased ad and you can start juggling creative!)

We’ll be letting advertisers know about this and updating our Youtube overview of Blogads, but if you’re a blogger, feel free to post about this new feature to get the word out!

Ads make TV more pleasant: First:

In one experiment, Nelson, along with Tom Meyvis and Jeff Galak of New York University, had 87 undergraduates watch an episode of the sitcom “Taxi.” Half watched it as it was originally broadcast, with commercials for the Jewelry Factory Store and the law office of Michael Brownstein, among other ads. The other half watched the show straight through, without commercials.

After the show was over, the students rated how much they enjoyed it, using an 11-point scale and comparing it with the sitcom “Happy Days,” which they were all familiar with. Those who saw “Taxi” without commercials preferred “Happy Days”, but those who saw the original show, Jewelry Factory Store and all, preferred “Taxi” by a significant margin.

In similar experiments, using other video clips and a variety of interruptions, the results were the same: People rated their experiences as more enjoyable with commercials, no matter their content, or other disruptions. The effect wasn’t limited to watching TV; interrupting a massage also heightened people’s enjoyment, one experiment found.

The opposite was true for irritating experiences, like listening to vacuum cleaner noise: A break only made it seem worse, they found.

Second

Skittles.com redirects to its Facebook page. Though their Twitter experiment raised a few eyebrows, this one is fun for a day.

Michael Lewis weaves another wonderful narrative explaining another sordid, smelly corner of the meltdown:

That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”

Keep climbing.

In the week ending Feb. 21, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 667,000, an increase of 36,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 631,000. The 4-week moving average was 639,000, an increase of 19,000 from the previous week’s revised average of 620,000.

Floyd Norris reports:

The government said this week that net purchases of [long term] securities fell to $412.5 billion in 2008, less than half the 2007 level and the lowest annual total since 1999, when the federal government was running a budget surplus.

Money did come in, but it was diverted into the safest investment around, albeit one with almost no expectation of profit, Treasury bills. Overseas investors increased their holdings of those securities by $456 billion, an unprecedented flow.

Relying on foreign investors to fund our deficit is not unlike running a Ponzi scheme. It’s fine as long as new money comes in, but when the money flow stops, we’re effed. As the chart below shows, we’re now addicted to foreigners’ short term financing.

Some of the best reporting in the NYT has been the micro-histories by life-style reporters. Today’s story about the upper East Side restaurant Sette Mezzo is another great snapshot. The restaurant, which serves $40 for pasta and $30 for salad and water, is the family canteen for the likes of Si and Donald Newhouse, Tom Tisch, Jonathan Tisch, William Lauder, Saul Steinberg, George Soros, Lily Safra, Leon Black, Michael Schulhof, Mike Nichols, Donald Marron. Cash only. (Or you can throw it on your monthly tab.)

Even here, though, the recession’s cool breeze is blowing.

starting in November, when fresh black truffles arrive, they can be added to any item at $50 for the first flurry of shavings (subsequent shavings are discounted). White truffles bring any entree price up to $200. “I always cover the top,” Mr. Mania said, adding that at a certain other Italian restaurant, “they give you three slices.”

Not that there have been many takers lately. “Nobody ordered truffles this year,” Mr. Esposito added. “It must be the economy.”

I was wrong to that the Times isn’t conversing. Here’s some chat-back from another NY institution, the 92nd Street Y Tribeca. (Thank you Ken!)

I was the only person in the cab line at La Guardia Wednesday. The line-minder said they’re now doing 300-400 cabs a day, versus 1000 six months ago.

WSJ reports:

“Start-ups are failing faster and you’re going to see a major shakeout,” says Martin Pichinson, a managing director of Sherwood Partners, a Mountain View, Calif., firm that specializes in winding down start-ups. Since mid-January, his firm has shut down an average of three start-ups a week, up from just one or two closures a month in September, he says.

And this is what an silicon undertaker looks like.

Nobody does doom and gloom like the Brits. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes:

Events in Japan have turned deeply alarming. Exports fell 35pc in December. Industrial output fell 9.6pc. The economy is contracting at an annual rate of 12pc. “Falling exports are triggering a downward spiral of production, incomes and spending. It is important to prepare for swift policy steps, including those usually regarded as unusual,” said the Bank of Japan’s Atsushi Mizuno.

The bank is already targeting equities on the Tokyo bourse. That is not enough for restive politicians. One bloc led by Senator Koutaro Tamura wants to create $330bn in scrip currency for an industrial blitz. “We are facing hyper-deflation, so we need a policy to create hyper-inflation,” he said.

This has echoes of 1932, when the US Congress took charge of monetary policy. We are moving to a stage of this crisis where democracies start to speak – especially in Europe.

The European Central Bank’s refusal to follow the lead of the US, Japan, Britain, Canada, Switzerland and Sweden in slashing rates shows how destructive Europe’s monetary union has become. German orders fells 25pc year-on-year in December. French house prices collapsed 9.9pc in the fourth quarter, the steepest since data began in 1936. “We’re dealing with truly appalling data, the likes of which have never been seen before in post-War Europe,” said Julian Callow, Europe economist at Barclays Capital.

Spain’s unemployment has jumped to 3.3m – or 14.4pc – and will hit 19pc next year, on Brussels data. The labour minister said yesterday that Spain’s economy could not “tolerate” immigrants any longer after suffering “hurricane devastation”. You can see where this is going.

Ireland lost 36,500 jobs in January – equal to a monthly loss of 2.3m in the US. As the budget deficit surges to 12pc of GDP, Dublin is cutting wages, disguised as a pension levy. It has announced “Rooseveltian measures” to rescue the foundering companies.

The ECB’s obduracy has nothing to do with economics. It fears zero rates as a vampire fears daylight, because that brings the purchase of eurozone bonds ever closer into play. Any such action would usher in an EMU “debt union” by the back door, leaving Germany’s taxpayers on the hook for Club Med liabilties. This is Europe’s taboo.

In New York Magazine, Will Leach visits Twitter’s offices and captures the company’s wonderful dream-state:

The first day I was in the Twitter office, I sat in the corner, playing with my own Twitter page, taking notes (it feels somewhat silly to write in a notebook there), and waiting to talk to Williams. For lunch, executives, including Stone, hosted programmers in the lounge to talk about some sort of open-source mumbo jumbo I didn’t understand. Their HD television was tuned to a still photo of a fireplace. They were wrapped up in the meeting. I attended to my computer.

And then I noticed something on Twitter Search. The first person was “manolantern,” who, at 12:33 local time, posted, “I just watched a plane crash into the hudson rive (sic) in manhattan.” After that, the updates were unceasing. Some fifteen minutes before the New York Times had a story on its website (and some fifteen hours before it had one in print), Twitter users who witnessed the crash of US Airways Flight 1549 were giving me updates in real time. One of them was a man named Janis Krums. Krums lives in Sarasota, Florida, and happened to be on a ferry navigating the Hudson when the plane hit the water. He immediately took a photo and posted it to TwitPic and sent a “tweet” with a link to the picture and “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.” He then, perhaps coming to his senses, began to help passengers off the plane. (He ended up giving his phone to one of them and didn’t get it back until that night.)

Now think about that for a second. In the midst of chaos—a plane just crashed right in front of him!—Krums’s first instinct was to take a picture and load it to the web. There was nothing capitalistic or altruistic about it. Something amazing happened, and without thinking, he sent it out to the world. And let’s say he hadn’t. Let’s say he took this incredible photo—a photo any journalist would send to the Pulitzer board—and decided to sell it, said he was hanging onto it for the highest bidder. He would have been vilified by bloggers and Twitterers alike. His is a culture of sharing information. This is the culture Twitter is counting on. Whatever your thoughts on its ability to exist outside the collapsing economy or its inability (so far) to put a price tag on its services, that’s a real thing. That’s the instinct Stone was talking about. If the nation has tens of millions of people like Krums, that’s a phenomenon. That’s what Twitter is waiting for.

Of course, no one at Twitter noticed any of this going on. This is the New Communication. There was no screaming and running through a newsroom, dispatching any reporter in the vicinity to the scene. For an hour, the boring open-source meeting droned on. No one in the room knew a plane had crashed. The next day, Stone would tell me that the site didn’t even get a traffic spike. “That’s only for huge shared experiences, like the inauguration, or Mumbai.” Twitter had unleashed something … and its executives were completely unaware, as its system worked on its own, without them. That might be what the future holds for Twitter. Or it might not be. It all depends on whether you’re willing to wait for something that might not come. It all depends on whether you’re willing to believe.

Steve Brill has a way to save NYTimes. Just charge people!

The New York Times newspaper website currently has 20 million unique visitors a month. It is a great editorial product and has done an amazing job building an audience. Now, its time to go to Step Two and make that work to usher in a bright new age for the world’s greatest newspaper.

Getting an average of just $1.00 a month (3.3 cents a day) from each visitor would yield $240m in new annual revenue. This is approximately equal to (it seems, from the Times’ financial statements) two thirds to three fourths of all of the company’s annual advertising revenue for all of its internet properties combined. And, of course, this online ad revenue would not disappear or even necessarily diminish if readers paid a small amount for online content.

At an average of $2.00 a month per unique viewer, the resulting nearly half billion dollars in added revenue would equal 50% of the entire company’s circulation revenue and create profits unseen for years at the Times.

An average of $3.00 a month in five years with 30 million visitors ($1.08 billion in additional revenue for what is currently a $3b total revenue company with year-to-year declines) would completely reverse the fortunes and invigorate the margins of the paper.

Oh the fun you can have with a calculator. Brill didn’t go the obvious next step in playing this game. Translate the Times into Chinese. Let’s see, 1 billion Chinese readers. If ONLY 1% of them will read the paper, that’s an extra 10 million readers. Presto, ANOTHER $120 million!

The problem with all this prestidigitation, of course, is that the minute you make people click more than twice to get to an article, half those readers will turn and run. Make people get out a credit card and another 90% will go away NO matter how cheap the price tag. Note to budding media economists and pundits: the slope of the price curve between 0 and one penny is infinite. You can’t do any safe extrapolating about how consumers behave as you oscillate prices between those two levels.

Six years after the first “bloggers can make money” stories, the press appears primed to serve up a slew of “the death of blogging” stories. At last! Writes Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs:

I walked away feeling burned out and weighing 20 pounds more than when I started. I also came away with a sneaking suspicion that while blogs can do many wonderful things, generating huge amounts of money isn’t one of them.

Now others seem to be riding the same downward curve, with euphoria giving way to exhaustion. Michael Arrington, whose TechCrunch blog empire attracts 6 million readers each month, has gone on a monthlong hiatus after three years of nonstop blogging. His break was prompted, he says, by burnout and by the craziness of the blogosphere (he says he’s been stalked, threatened and spat on) and not by the fact that he’s been trying to sell his company for a year and hasn’t been able to find a buyer who’ll pay his price, which is rumored to be $100 million. Gawker Media, a leading network of blogs, recently laid off all but one of its writers for Valleywag, its tech blog, which has struggled for three years. In January Pajamas Media, a collective of right-wing political bloggers, shut down its ad network, which CEO Roger Simon says “was a money loser for three years.”

The Hungarian forint is sliding fast, currently at 233, down from ~200 a month ago. 300 forints to the dollar seems like the right level.

Lucy Kellaway in the FT:

The day after I read about the begging woman I was sent something even more upsetting. A banker at Commerzbank e-mailed me to say that he and 499 other senior colleagues had just been summoned to the bank’s headquarters and told to write their ideas on A4 pieces of paper and stick them on the plastic branches of a tree.

In good times I used to delight in stories like these. Aren’t people silly, I used to think with a complacent air of superiority. But now my thinking is different: if banks’ response to the current crisis is to stick bits of paper on fake trees, then the only rational thing for the rest of us to do is to surrender ourselves to panic.

Lots of fun lessons in here about relying on Google, registrars, customer service, Monday AM QBing, big companies replying in comments.

Wow, this is bad news. What puts NC on the bleeding edge? From the WSJ.

Europeans, with hundreds of years (and wars) more experience than North Americans in weathering the vagaries of financial uncertainty, have driven gold to new highs in sterling (£661.55) and euros (€701.55). (Rubles too, no doubt.) The FT reports.

The total amount of gold held by the world’s gold ETFs last week rose for the first time above the 40m ounce level. Together, such investment vehicles are now the largest holders of physical gold after the official reserves of the US, Germany, the International Monetary Fund, France and Italy.

“The aggressive appreciation in the ETF contracts … is the clearest signal to date this year that gold is one of the limited assets that investors want exposure to during these frantic times,” Ms Tully said.

John Reade, a precious metal strategist at UBS in London, added that the change in ETF gold holdings so far this month, at plus 2.5m ounces, was “impressive”, but he warned that the figure fell short of the 6m ounces achieved in mid-October, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

ETF Securities, which provides commodity-based exchange-traded funds, said it saw record inflows last week, with $500m invested in its products in just two days.

From AFP:

France will offer all 18-year-olds a free daily copy of the newspaper of their choice, President Nicolas Sarkozy said Friday, announcing a package of measures to help the beleaguered press.

In addition to the free paper scheme, Sarkozy announced plans to double the government’s budget for buying advertising in the press, a freeze on the cost of postal distribution and a reduction in payroll taxes for newsagents.

Nominations are in and now it’s time to vote for the fourth and ultimate Suxorz panelist.

Vote here!

For those of you who’ve forgotten, Suxorz is the panel I’m moderating at SXSW Interactive ‘09. Here’s the description SXSW’s site (tweaked):

Bring popcorn and rotten tomatoes! Braving hate-mail from last year’s “winners,” the Suxorz ‘09 panel returns to dissect the ten worst social media and web 2.0 ad campaigns of the year. Together, we’ll shame the marketers who abuse people-powered media.

Everyone on the ballot was nominated through the Suxorz Facebook page and has affirmed their willingness to participate.

Write a blog post, call grandma, twitter your kids, or tell your neighbor to vote & and we’ll release results Friday!

Bloomberg reports: “The hedge-fund industry shrank by about a fifth to $1.5 trillion at the end of the year from a peak of $1.9 trillion, Eurekahedge said.”

Since most hedge funds charge 2% of assets under management and 20% of profits, that amounts to at least a $10 billion decline in hedge fund fees.

That’s $10 billion a year less for yachts, Dalton/Spence/Chapin tuitions, fourth homes in Telluride, donations to eccentric causes, Greenwich McMansions, Lear Jets, trips to Venice. Gosh, where did it all go?

To put $10 billion in perspective, that’s roughly half the total online advertising market in ‘07… money that went to pay thousands of journalists, bloggers, webmasters, hosts, programmers, ad mongers, server manufacturers, and, yes, a few media moguls who live in Greenwich.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.