You are currently browsing the Blogads for opinion makers blog archives for July, 2003.
Buyers of ads above $25 can now pay for their blogads purchases with their credit card. PayPal will remain an option as well. For a discussion on the rationale and a few of our users’ opinion, please see this recent posting by Henry.
Log in, go to your adstrip manage page and check out the last two columns in each row. You will see how much you can expect for each ad sold. If we have paid you already, the payment date is also shown. To access payment information for ads that have expired, look for the link at the bottom of the ad manage page.
Yes, there is no aggregation of past earnings. Yes, we are not adding up how much we will transfer you next month. These are to come. Treat this little development as a first step.
I’ll be on the road for the next two weeks, passing through DC, Black Mountain and Chapel Hill. If you need anything urgently, please contact Miklos in Hungary. His number, from the US, is 011 361 328-0602.
WSJ.com: “Even the biggest marketers are struggling with the tough economy, the sharp increase in ad clutter and audience fragmentation. Now some see boutique agencies as more nimble — and cheaper — alternatives. Sun, for example, has used J. Walter Thompson for the past three years to craft its ads, but the company is eager to cut costs and believes smaller agencies may help it generate more buzz with its advertising.” Ahh, so that is why we’re getting calls. 
We’ve identified a complex bug in our ad expiry processes, which means that some ads have not expired quickly enough. We originally misdiagnosed the problem. Net result: free page impressions for some advertisers. Most of the ads are fixed and the rest should be fixed by tomorrow. Thank you to Atrios, Moxie, David and Hugh for flagging the bug.
Great database of old advertising. Ads are the economy’s diary. And speaking of advertising, Time Out New York now has ads on our New York blogs. This is our first metro-specific order. Expect lots more.
Jeff Jarvis edits an editor and the reader wins.
We’re moving towards adding credit card payments for Blogads. As part of this process, we’re considering a couple of tweaks to our terms. Your comments welcome.
Our ideas:
a) if a blogger rejects an order that has been paid for with credit card, the blogger will be charged the processing fee charged by the company (Worldpay) we’ll use to process card payments. On a $50 payment, this might be $2, but we hope any potential losses are far outweighed by higher sales volumes.
b) we’d like put a $15 floor on ad sales. This will help keep us from getting chewed up by processing fees. If you’d like to remain open for really cheap advertisers, you could consider making your one week price $0.00.
Kind words from friend Steve Locke. With Steve and Gina, we’ve stayed full of pizza and wine and laughter through Amherst’s bleak winter, no-show spring and glowing summer.
I’m convinced blogs will help us stay close, just as blogs have kept me happily in contact with wonderful people like Amy, Matt, Emmanuelle, Ken, Nick,Ben, Rick and Doug who I last lived close to a decade or so ago.
Pixels don’t beat proximity, but they can augment the heck out of it. Which reminds me I’ve got to post something soon about blogs as a personality prosthesis, a neat metaphor offered by Lee Barstow.
Hey, that reminds me it’s time for me to make my annual plea to college friends to each get a blog. OK, enough rambling. Back to work.
Lee Barstow quipped recently that a “conversation is worth a thousand e-mails.” Wise words. I’ve been having fun using the phone more recently. Using Vonage for calls (free in the US and 5 cents to UK and France) has certainly lowered the cost of talking.
Sitting at the table after dinner last night, we heard our son in the living room fiddling around. He came in and said, “I’ve learned a new song.” Frowning slightly and pausing occasionally to correct himself, he played Gavotte by Martini, a violin tune he’d heard ten times on his CD player and had never practiced before. This is the first time we’ve seen him do this. Amazing.
I’ve told my wife that in patiently and persistently shepherding our kids through music lessons she’s accomplished something far more valuable and tangible than anything I’ve built in business.
Cameron Marlow, creator of Blogdex, writes: “Webloggers are a great leading indicator of trends in the news simply by being part of a group that intends to keep each other informed.” And adds, “As a community, this is the first time researchers have been able to track the spread of ideas through an informal social network in such a large proportion. I’m hoping to describe the process by which information spreads by epidemic proportions, namely the properties of the information itself and the social structure that enables it.”
It’s a new world.
Bond yields have jumped 1.10 percentage points in the last six weeks. In relative terms, the rise is equal in severity to the rise that led to the stock market crash of October 1987.
Unfortunately, the NYTimes article I’m citing doesn’t mention Japanese arbitrage sellers or the rocketting the projected Federal deficit. Both mean lots more bonds for sale, but myopic economists ignore these factors because they prefer to think “interest rates” are driven by “economic variables” and not raw supply and demand for debt instruments.
Since June 13, the US Treasure ten year note has risen from 3.11% to 4.21%. That 35% rise in yield is nearly as severe in relative terms as the rise in ten year note yields (from 6.98% to 10.23%) that occured in the nine months before October 19, 1987… known to many as Black Monday. Go read this Black Monday chronology. Here’s the entry for January 1, 1987: “The year opens with bond yields near their lowest levels in nine years.”
Stocks may well get hit this time around too as the rate at which investors discount future earnings rises, but the dividend tax abatement may counterbalance this effect.
Another asset is more likely to get gored now: homes. Falling federal borrowing and rising tax revenues meant rates could tumble in the 1990s, and falling rates boosted everyone’s house price as buyers could afford more house for their money.
Now that the government will be issuing $1.4 trillion more securities in the coming two years than the prior two years, borrowing costs will rise and housing prices must fall. Here’s the math: if the rate on a 30 year mortgage rise from 4.5% to 5.5%, a family that can afford a $1013 monthly payment will pay only $179,000 for a house rather than $200,000.
If I were a Democratic Presidential candidate, I’d jump all over the escalating deficit (”driven by reckless Republican fat-cat tax cuts and defense industry sweetheart deals”), since it is going to crush housing prices.
“Influentials,” the 10% of the population that leads the other 90%, are over-represented online, according to a Roper survey commissioned by WashingtonPost.com. (If the Post is trying to influence web influentials, why put the findings in 1.2MB PDF?)
The numbers are grim, if you’re stranded in print. When “online influentials” wanted to “learn more about topics that interest me” 87% turned first to the web, with 50% turning second to magazines. For “sharing views and opinions” 51% turned to the web and 19% turned second to newspapers.
But the numbers can be read as negative even for traditional publishers like WP with strong online strategies, says entrepreneur Arnold Kling. He points out “The Roper study appears to be commissioned as a way to help convince advertising agencies to buy on the Web. But the typical Web ads are Old Media, and my guess is that they do not affect the ‘influentials’ very much.” Too bad the Roper folks didn’t think to ask about blogs. (Thanks Hylton.)
Edward Rothstein, reviewing the new three-volume, $385, 1,873 page Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising in the New York Times, writes“…the ordinary academic model of advertising and its effects is inadequate. Advertisements are a form of communication, not mere manipulation: they help make sense of the world, defining its differences and essences, filtering through its variety, making claims and constructing images.”
For a limited time only: Blogsearchengine.com is offering free one week Blogads. He’s got 1700 visitors a day and growing fast. (Update: the free ad offer is now closed.)
Great day in Boston. A blur of caffeine and syllables.
David Weinberger introduced me to Zaftigs. I’ve wanted to chew the fat (or as things turned out, an egg sandwich) with David since meeting him briefly in Vienna at Blogtalk. His Small Pieces Loosely Joined expresses the genius of the Internet’s imperfection and he’s an author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, one of the sparks that lit my first blog post. David showed me the Palm pilot he’d just run over.
Next I had coffee with Biz Stone in Wellesley, where he’s designing and sneaking blogs into that Ivory tower. Damn, Biz is a genius and his name is Biz. Turns out the only thing not to be taken seriously about Biz is his blog’s photo.
Next I dropped by the office of a Pressflex investor who shall remain surnameless. (Welcome to blogs, Glover. Here’s the Gelernter post I mentioned.)
Finally, I hung out with Hylton Jolliffe, the micropublishing impressario of Corante. We compared notes at the Miracle of Science Bar and Grill near MIT between runs to stuff coins into parking meters. We brainstormed about how blogs might leverage tactics from newsletters and conferences.
As I mentioned at the outset of this post, the day was a blur. My lasting memory: bloggers are, as a group, smarter, wittier, humbler, more social, more articulate and more ambitious than the average Joe. Bloggers together make a formidible army.
Offline in Boston today. Reachable on mobile at 413 441 3098.
Some economists say we shouldn’t worry that interest rates have jumped a full percentage point in the last six weeks. They rationalize: while this rise will undoubtedly stifle the booming housing market — the only sector keeping the economy afloat for the last 18 months — rates must be up because the rest of the economy is finally recovering. No worries.
What these guys don’t appreciate is how much the rise in rates may be driven by other forces. First, the federal budget has swung to a massive deficit: the Treasury will need to borrow nearly 1.4 trillion dollars more in the next two years than the last two years. That’s a boatload of bonds, and plentiful supply means lower prices: higher interest rates.
Second, much of the recent jump is driven by massive Japanese dumping of long-term US treasuries. Over the last decade of Japanese depression, Japanese banks have made a habit of borrowing yen at nearly 0% and buying US treasuries.
But the Japanese stock market is up nearly 30% since June. As Japanese ten year bond yields have risen 100% in recent months, from 0.5% to 1%, the yield arbitrage from Japan to the US has become less secure, and a major buyer of treasures becomes a big seller: ergo higher rates.
My bet is that Greenspan is more worried than ever.
Reading today’s Wall Street Journal article about the no-frills inhouse advertising produced by budget airlines Ryanair and Easyjet reminded me that part of what makes a blogad good — spontaneity, cheapness and even a little human roughness — can be part of what makes a company good.
“‘Amateurism is definitely part of [a budget airline's] charm,’ said Guy Abrahams, director of strategy at media-consulting firm Carat Group. ‘[Cheap advertising] is to maintain their brand-name image as a no-frills airlines as much as or possibly even more than to save money.’ Although companies in other sectors are starting to do ads themselves, David Fletcher, head of research at mediaedge:cia, says he doesn’t see it as a major trend. Do-it-yourself advertising is for companies — such as mail-order firms or direct-response advertisers — that don’t need to produce high-quality ads and have business models in line with a no-frills philosophy, he says.”
It’s worth remembering that eBay and Google have always gone out of their way to appear simple and human-scale. No doubt, advertising on blogs — p2p, cheap and cheerful, spontaneous, risk-friendly — can help reinforce a brand’s association with those qualities. In short, glitz and blogads don’t mix.
Lee Barstow pointed me to Ben Franklin’s Apology for Printers, something Franklin wrote in 1731 after an advertisement he’d taken in his Pennsylvania Gazette offended some churchgoers. He wrote: “Being frequently censur’d and condemn’d by different Persons for printing Things which they say ought not to be printed, I have sometimes thought it might be necessary to make a standing Apology for my self….”
Franklin continues, “I request for all who are angry with me on the Account of printing things they don’t like, calmly to consider these following particulars: 1) That the opinions of men are almost as various as their faces… 5) … that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former almost always is an overmatch for the lattter: Hence [printers] chearfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute.”
Finally, my favorite part: “That I got Five Shillings by [the ad]. That none who are angry with me would have given me so much to let it alone. That if all the People of different Opinions would engage to give me as much for not printing things they don’t like, as I can get by printing them, I should probably live a very easy Life; and if all Printers were every where so dealt by, there would be very little printed.” (Franklin’s essay linked from this page.)
Today’s WSJ profiles the Google’s awesome power and leads with analyst comScore’s estimate that Google does 32% of the roughly four billion searches done online each month.
The only problem with this: Google itself says it does “more than 200 million searches a day.” Which means Google accounts 150% of each month’s searches.
Frankly, I think that the 200 million number is still low, but I guess it serves Google well to leave its competitors and analysts so deeply in the dark. No doubt, Google will make a nice splash declaring that “the search market is actually twice as big as you think” when the company eventually goes public.
For a brief chronicle of the trouble journalists have had thinking critically about Google’s numbers, read this post.
Tim Bray urges software developers to avoid being sharecroppers, people who farm someone else’s land using tools and seed provided by the owner. The sharecropper gets a share of the crops, but has little control. “It’s a lousy position to be in, because you’re never going to make much, and if the land’s owner finds something better to do with the land, you’re history.”
Are You a Sharecropper? If you’re developing software for the Windows platform, yes. Or for the Apple platform, or the Oracle platform, or the SAP platform, or, well, any platform that is owned and operated by a company. They own the ground you’re building on, and if they decide they don’t like you, or they can do something better with the ground, you’re toast. They can ship their own product and give it away till you go bust, then start charging for it; and use secret APIs you can’t see; and they can break the published APIs you use. All of these things have historically been done by platform vendors.
On the other hand, “You’re not a sharecropper, especially not a sharecropper, if you’re building on the Web platform. If you can define your value-add as a series of interactions via a browser, or an interchange of XML messages, nobody can whip the land out from under you.” (Thanks to Kevin Burton of Newsmonster for pointing Bray’s article out to me.)
This metaphor is very relevant for content providers now getting paid per click to run Google-mediated text ads. Google is turning publishers into sharecroppers. Google owns the relationship with the client — the advertiser — and has reduced the value of content to its “clickness.” Whether you are the New York Times or Joe Blog, you don’t have a brand anymore as far as Google advertisers are concerned, you are an anonymous provider of clicks. You can’t demand a premium for the quality of your reader — he’s just another anonymous clicker. You can’t demand a premium of the quality of the community you’ve worked so hard to meld — its just a disaggregated bunch of eyeballs.
You are only as good as your clickthrus and Google can always find someone else’s reasonably relevant content to piggyback if you don’t like the terms Google offers. After all, where else are you going to go to find 100,000 context-relevant advertisers?
How much did Google tell you they are sharing from that clickthru? They didn’t say? Oh, sorry.
Welcome Lee: “I am excited to have this new facet of identity. I’m also excited to have the forum since, as my family, friends, and acquaintances will tell you, I have more to say than anyone wants to hear.”
Greg Beato writes: “One of the great benefits of blogads is that they essentially democratize media buying. It’s expanding the number of venues where small advertisers can afford to run ads.”
Oliver Griswold writes: “Thanks for all this amazing technology!”
After ordering an ad, Ginger Mayerson writes: “This was great fun! Blogads are so cool, they need sweaters.”
Finally, a blog my father might enjoy: Crooked lumber. Now, if I can find something for Mom.
