Not all the benefits of advertising can be directly tracked from click to sale. If you buy a banner on TechCrunch and don't make your money back on direct sales but everyone interested in startups has heard of your product, that is not necessarily a loss.
Also the author was not suggesting that we switch from CPM to CPC/CPA:
"CPA and CPC have their appropriate time and place, but let’s recognize that those situations are limited."
He is advocating the development of new advertising metrics that are more closely aligned with engagement and other marketing goals that have nothing to do with sheer impressions.
Maybe your visitors just aren't interested in any of those offers. Or maybe you don't know how to convert your visitors into buyers. There are many people making a killing with CPA offers who know that statement is flat out wrong.
You are missing the point. CPM != Brand Awareness. The author's main point is that paying for impressions leads publishers to drum up loads of garbage impressions. If there was a better way to measure and pay for brand engagement, then publishers would be incentivized to increase that.
Another factor to consider would be the domain name of the site. Would you want to build your company on top of the domain name? Is it suitable for the broader niche that you want to apply it to.
If the site is a good fit, buying an established but underdeveloped site can be a great way to gain a foothold in an vertical without toiling for months in obscurity.
"37signals' Fried, by the way, is a rare case in the Internet industry, in that 37signals has never had to raise a significant amount of venture capital."
That statement really shows how ignorant the business press is of the reality of business on the web. The vast majority of web companies never raise money. They are not glamorous, are not written about on the blogs every day, and many are very small, but some of them do become very large businesses as well.
Ringtones are also notoriously the subject of rebilling scams. Download ringtones for $.99! Get charged $20 per month automatically for the rest of you life or until you notice and cancel.
That's a pretty ignorant statement. Domain names can go a long way towards achieving great search rankings, which is why the better .net and .org domains sell for 10's of thousands of dollars. Though, I would agree that for those types of meaningless web 2.0 names you better get the .com, since all the marketing you do to build your brand will be pushing lot of direct traffic to someone else's domain.
Anyone else tired of these business-advice-self-help blog posts? It's all this feel good generalized advice that just seems to reiterate the same points over and over again. Anything with concrete examples (data is even better) is so much more useful than this sort of stuff.
Well, now that FriendFeed is a lame duck he has to have something to rave about. This is textbook Scoble. How he ever became "a thought leader" is beyond me.
The advantage the web gives to writers is that it drastically the reduces the barriers to becoming a publisher and reaching a massive audience. The writers who take advantage of this are the ones who benefit from the web, while those who don't are worse off than before. The web doesn't cut out the middle man automatically, but it makes it a lot easier for writers ambitious and savvy enough to do so.
To add to this, this statistic is also misleading because it doesn't mention HOW LONG viewers watch for. My guess is the average Hulu visitor watches 1/10-1/50 (or less) the amount of programming that a Time Warner subscriber does. Think about how much video the average person watches on their computer vs. on their television.
Good novels don't have to be hard to read, but they can be, and some of them should be. This either/or argument is pointless. Of course extremely difficult (and rewarding) novels like Infinite Jest and Ulysses will not be for everyone. But saying the opposite, that the mark of a great work of fiction is an easy to follow plot, is just ridiculous. Sometimes it's worth it to read something very difficult.
Those 5 sites are a plague on the internet. They toss poor workers pennies to churn out reams of forgettable content which clogs up the search results because of the huge authority of those sites. Most of the writers simply research the content at other websites and rehash the exact same ideas. If they even attempt to credit their sources with a backlink, those links are always nofollowed, with pagerank only allowed to pass to related internal pages. The ones that do allow followed links (Squidoo) are relentlessly spammed. The result is bad for users and smaller competing sites. I remember reading on the eHow CEO's twitter page how they produce the amount of words equivalent to War and Peace every day, as if flooding the web with more watered down garbage was doing the world a favor.
You could substitute basically any group for "highly creative people" and the article would still be the same. Like if you substituted "power twitter users" this would be ready for Mashable. You could also write an equally namedrop-filled article from the opposite perspective touting the benefits of abstinence. Clearly the creativebait worked though. Sigh.
I knows it's fun and all to hate on managers, but they do perform a valuable function within an organization. If you're successful enough as an entrepreneur, it's almost guaranteed that you'll end up as one. Just because most people here identify more with the maker does not mean manager types should be disparaged.
Not to say that the ad campaign is a winner, but this conclusion is dubious logic at best. A bad ad campaign is responsible for the revenue drop you say? Nothing to do the with the deep global recession and plummeting consumer spending? This type of stuff makes me hate pageview driven publishing.
The facts clearly cannot be copyrighted. What can be copyrighted (or at least leveraged for monetization) is editorial voice, brand recognition, and timeliness. TMZ broke the Michael Jackson story, and their reward for being first was huge levels of traffic and citations. If anything, this was INCREASED by citations around the web.
The "copyrights" the newspaper industry is trying to claim are more an irrational death rattle than any sort of sensical business plan. The newspaper giants are done for and everyone knows it. Even if they could get these laws passed and enforced, would anybody pay to link to or cite a news source? Of course not. You would either cite a source that waives these ridiculous fees or start calling up sources yourself. Mark ignored these claims because they will never amount to anything.
Mark Cuban's argument about the economics of Free is much better than Anderson's original thesis or Gladwell's retort, which both rely heavily on convenient anecdotes and clever phrasing. I guess that's the difference between a successful businessman and pop-economics writers who sell ideas to the masses.
Yea, I've had the same thing happen to me with a name that I posted on Sedo :)
For what it's worth, owning a domain and not developing it is not "domain squatting" which is defined by law as "registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else."
There is nothing wrong with owning a domain and not developing it. It's the same as making a speculative investment, just like in real estate or any other asset. We all wish we were there in 1990 to scoop up the best names, but just because we weren't doesn't make the smart people who did unethical.
Exactly. I'm sure this was really useful at the time, but SEO and the web as whole has changed drastically since 2002. It's gotten a lot more complicated and competitive.
It's easy for him to say "just write passionately and the money will come" because that was more true 4 or 5 years ago when he first launched Daring Fireball and Merlin launched 43Folders. Since then the market has become overcrowded. People starting out today don't have the same early mover advantage. Even a passionate and well written blog has to fight for attention against thousands of more established competitors. Bloggers have also gotten more competition conscious and stopped linking as freely as they used to. Twitter, Facebook, et al are sucking up a lot of the attention that used to go to blogs. The reason you see so many Digg-bait type articles isn't necessarily because these bloggers lack passion, but because sensationalism and social media channels are one of the few remaining ways to gain a foothold.
I find it a bit ridiculous when successful people say "just do what I did and you'll be just fine". It's just not true. Today is a different market and the strategies that worked a few years ago won't work today.
That being said, I do agree with the overall premise that success comes from passion and differentiation. Your best bet is to own a specific niche, even if it's small, and write with a strong editorial voice.
What this leaves out is Taleb's advice from the book -- to pick a non-scalable career that is guaranteed to pay a high wage. His reasoning is that scalable careers are at the mercy of Black Swans. The vast majority of rewards are distributed to the lucky few at the top. This is not due to any remarkable talent, but luck and the nature of scalable success (it builds upon itself). If you hope to become an author who sells a million copies of a book, you will almost certainly wind up never selling more than a few thousand, while the guy at the top who is no more talented sells millions upon millions.
Definitely some good tips here, but the real challenge is building an ecommerce site with 6 million backlinks and 1 million pages indexed. Aside from that SEO is easy . . .