Webby Thoughts

I wrote about a post of mine that was receiving quite a bit more traffic than I normally receive because it got popular on Reddit and StumbleUpon for a couple days. It looked like Google might have been ignoring the AdSense clicks from that post and counting them for any other posts during that hot period.

A couple people commented complaining about similar incidents and how this affecting their income. It is a point that I can’t disagree with as a blogger who uses AdSense on my blogs. If Google is applying any kind of filtering to abnormally hot posts, that is money that I will never see.

The question is whether Google should be filtering clicks from the hot posts.

I’m not sure I whole heartedly agree with the points I’m about to make, but let’s call them the Devil’s Advocate arguments.

What advertisers want

Orders and branding. When people click on an AdSense link it can do two positive things for the company. People can place an order. People can become aware of a company and/or product line that they might someday order or mention to a friend.

What contextual advertising provides

On a normal post on a normal day, the people visiting my blog are interested in the niche of the blog and are either regular readers in that niche or visitors that found an individual post through a search about that niche. These are people advertisers want to reach. If I am blogging about all weather tires, and car fanatics and people searching for “Best all weather tires in Missouri” are the ones clicking on the ads those are pretty legitimate potential customers.

The magic black box at Google will do what it does best and provide ads that are going to be as marketable to these visitors as possible which should lead to the highest click through rates and the highest conversion rates.

What happens when you get Dugg

So a post finally made the front page of Digg, Reddit or blew up on StumbleUpon. Thousands of new visitors land on your post. Who are these people? We all know that the percentage of people that are even going to bother clicking an ad from any of these sources is all but nonexistent. These are casual surfers. They are not looking to delve into the depths of your blog or niche while reading the post. Most of these visitors are one page and done. The best case scenario is that you will get another vote at whatever source is providing the traffic.

Sometimes their are clicks. With an thousand people that stop by, you figure somebody is going to click the ads every once in a while. I have no stats to back this up, but I would imagine that a fair portion of the AdSense clicks from Digg/Reddit/StumbleUpon traffic are either accidental or “tips” that the reader is giving the writer in appreciation for a good story.

Why these clicks are bad for everyone

Let’s assume Google isn’t filtering clicks from hot posts. That means people with virtually no interest in considering the product/company are clicking the ad and probably hitting the back button as quickly as possible. No sale. No real branding opportunity. Advertisers would end up spending money for very poor leads. These advertisers might get frustrated with the lack of return on their investment and abandon the online advertising scene for a while.

That would be bad for everyone.

The best scenario for everyone involved is a post that has relevant content with ads that are properly targeted leading to landing pages for items/services that match the interests of the readers.

While there is a side of me that might believe most of that, there is a wallet that would be pretty angry. My wallet believes that if I write something that sends readers to companies, that I should get paid for that service.

At some point, the companies looking for the sales need to make sure their landing pages are set up for the best conversion rates and their ad campaigns are set up to get the most appropriate customers from my site. I send them. They sell to them.

If they are worried about getting the most qualified leads, then a magic black box that reads my words to determine which ads to display probably isn’t the best advertising vehicle for that company.

There is a lot of excitement about Web2.0 and everybody becoming content producers.  There are also a lot of worries about how much longer that excitement and growth will continue.

We still have quite a long way to go before we run out of content producers.

Just today, I was trying to figure out whether we can afford to have somebody clean the house for us a couple times a month.  A few of the big chain companies show up in Google with links to Google Maps.

But, what about all the people that work independently from any franchise?  I didn’t find any of them in the search engines.

I can use the phone book to get a better idea, but that still won’t include a lot of the independent people.

My dad just started a home inspection business after retiriing from his previous job.  He has started a little website with the help of an old co-worker but has no idea what to do with it besides putting the link on his business card.  Once he gets it set up the way he wants, I’ll try to help him get it to show up at the top of the search for home inspections in his area.
If people like my dad are starting to understand that every business needs a web presence, it will not be long before every parent babysitting out of their home and every kid mowing lawns will start wanting to create online content.

We will still be left with the old problem of having small local businesses compete with big national/international businesses but at least we will have a better chance of getting good information from local searches.

I don’t really read magazines anymore.  I never really liked them much
growing up.  Books are more my thing.  I have subscribed to National
Geographic and Discovery and a couple others over the last several
years.  I normally realize that I haven’t read them in a year and
ignore the renewal notice.

I’m an internet man.  It looks like
somebody has decided to merge the blogging/podcasting excitement with
traditional magazine distribution.  I heard about Blogger &
Podcaster magazine.  It doesn’t officially launch until January, but
they are taking subscriptions now.

I must be pretty cutting edge
to have heard about this magazine and been invited to subscribe this
early, right?  I must be pretty cool.  Won’t Newsome be jealous when Mike and Scoble start mentioning me on their blogs now that I have managed to get into the inner circle.

How
did I get notified of this amazing new magazine?  Well…actually…I
was spammed.  Okay, nobody is going to care about me after all.  Maybe
they got my name through some semi-legitimate mailing list but I never
asked for information about the magazine in anywhere near a direct
way.  They either scraped my email address or bought it.

Who
creates a magazine about blogging and podcasting where every issue will
probably be outdated before the magazine actually gets printed.  And,
then who notifies potential subscribers about it by spamming them. 
Don’t most people who use the internet a lot (presumably their
subscriber base) have a generally unfavorable opinion toward spam and
enjoy mocking such things on their blogs?

Wouldn’t it be more
effective to notify the A-listers about their magazine or maybe drop
comments on people’s blogs instead of spamming my inbox?  Here’s the
part that gets me.

To be deleted from our mailing list, please reply and write “remove” in the subject line.

It
sounds like they are planning to continue spamming me unless I say
pretty please to get them to stop.  I don’t plan on begging.  I’ll just
mark them as spam and let gmail filter them out for me.

Weird
marketting gone bad if you ask me.  The plan to start getting some less
geeky people to get into the blogging/podcasting phenomenon should not
be to send out unsolicited email blasts.

Technorati Tags: magazine, blogging, podcast, spam

There is a big stink going on right not because Jason Calacanis of Netscape is offering to pay top submitters at competing social networking sites.

Kent Newsome says that he thinks “the idea of paying a bunch of people to social bookmark on Netscape … is nutty” but concedes that Jason has made a lot of money doing seemingly crazy before.

The last time I visited Netscape I noticed that they monetize their site with ads. That means they are hoping to get more people to click the ads and the best way to do that is to get more eyeballs on the site.

If Jason really can attract some of those top submitters (and for $1000 a month, he will), then he will have managed to attract people to his site that know how to find articles that attract attention and probably improve the content of the site.

More importantly, he will have attracted a strong group of mentors who can help lead the newbies into the land of social bookmarking. One of the changes Netscape recently made included letting users vote on articles and having the most popular articles get the best real estate space on the home page. A lot of the current users of Netscape don’t really understand how to thrive in this kind of system which would explain the strong backlash to the changes from the existing users.

The new power users for hire might manage to excite the everyday users at Netscape and attract new eyeballs, I mean users. People online like to participate and vote for things once they realize that is what they are supposed to do. 12 of those power users will cost Netscape about $144,000 a year. Can Netscape really make $144,000 a year in ad revenue just by having 12 good submitters on their payroll?

Maybe Jason is nutty. But, Jason is looking at the bigger picture. He is not trying to beat down digg. He’s just trying to improve Netscape. Digg will continue to thrive. People will step up to fill in the spots of the people that leave for Netscape. Jason said, “It really isn’t about Netscape vs. DIGG… in reality the battle is ’social news vs. top-down news.’”

He’s just trying to position Netscape to get in a position to be one of the leaders in social news while there is still time.  A couple years ago, he might look like a nutty rich man, again.

When I go to somebody’s blog and see adsense or any other type of advertising, I barely notice. I’m starting to get disturbed when I see it on service sites. Even more disturbing are service sites that don’t have any way of earning any money.

Having no income stream on a service site tells me that the creators are only hoping to get bought out by Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. Then what happens to the service. In the best case scenario, it will continue to be free but probably with more advertisements on it. In the worst case scenario, the site won’t earn the money the buyer expects and they’ll kill the project.

I like Writely quite a bit. I’m a big fan of any service that let’s me store my information online since I like to be able to access things for short periods of time from lots of different locations. If Google decides that it will take too much work to make Writely fit perfectly in their business plans, what will it’s future be.

Bloglines is a service that I use daily and that I’ve already bragged about here. I would hate to see Bloglines disappear or really altered that much. I like it as a big fancy rss bookmark organizer that I can access from anywhere.

I read a lot of complaints that Bloglines doesn’t handle search very well. I’m not concerned with using them for search. I would prefer if they gave up that avenue for a while and focused soley on making my big, fancy rss bookmark organizer work flawlessly. I would be willing to pay a small fee, probably up to around $5/month to use Bloglines in this manner.

Paying a fee does not guarantee that the creators of a site plan to stick with the project, but if the money starts to roll in, it sure makes it a little harder for them to bail on the project. Plus, if a project can convince people to pay a few dollars a month, that has to look like a better business prospect to the Big 3 when they come around to buy something.

Flickr and Myspace both survive entirely by advertising revenue. I am the last person to suggest that advertising money is going to be leaving the internet. I expect it to be around in various forms for as long as the internet is around. The big monsters of the internet like Flickr and Myspace can make quite a bit of money from advertising and good for them.

The internet is an enormous market place. I think some of the niche service sites would do better to focus on making money by making a product that people love and are willing to spend a small sum each month on. Once people commit their money to a product, they are going to be a lot more loyal to that product as long as it continues to serve their needs.