an ad delivery model that works

Business 2.0 – Magazine Article – Google’s Next Runaway Success

This is interesting: advertising is the necessary evil of media (more evil that necessary in too many cases). But the bright boys at Google have a new way of looking at the problem that works for advertisers and viewers within their parameters of text-only ads.


But AdWords Select’s real genius is the unheard-of value it provides to advertisers. They pay for actual clicks on their advertisements, not each appearance of the ad. The price of an ad, as well as its position on the page (top, middle, or bottom), depends in part on how often the ad is clicked by users. In effect, the better the ad, the less it can cost and the higher on the page it appears. Yes, that’s right. Google wants to make sure that advertising is relevant to searchers, so it rewards advertisers who draw clicks by giving them better positioning. Average clickthrough is about 2 percent, the company claims, five times that of comparable online ads.

Couple that with the online ad insertion system (a credit card and some keywords gets your ad placed without dealing with a sales type) and this is something we may see more of.

media companies and RSS feeds

AmphetaDesk 0.93.1

CNN
Added: 2002-11-04 16:24:57. Last Downloaded: 2002-11-04 16:24:57
The world’s news leader (By http://www.newsisfree.com/syndicate.php – FOR PERSONAL AND NON COMMERCIAL USE ONLY!)

So, OK, CNN doesn’t want to make the partners/affiliates edgy about paying for things they can get for free. But the feeds already exist: I know of two instances. I’m still of the opinion any media company with valuable content (ie, stuff they use to make money) should do their own feeds, adding value by making them available more frequently or with better quality information (better summaries or related links with the site).

time to look at pyAmazon

Another one of Mark Pilgrim’s little gems. Creating links for the Amazon affiliate program is tedious since you can’t look up the item from the “build a link” page. You have locate the item, get its ID, then login and create the HTML. What a pain.

I’m thinking that, given a title, pyAmazon can run the query and return the properly formatted link.

And it works.

>>>import amazon
>>>amazon.setLicense('get your own')
>>>pythonBooks = amazon.searchByKeyword('Python')
>>>pythonBooks[0].ProductName
u'Perl How to Program, Introducing CGI and Python (With CD-ROM)'
>>>pythonBooks[0].Asin
u'0130284181'

so now to just write a wrapper for this so I can pass it a title and have it return the ASIN with all the other stuff around it.

Thanks, Mark. Again.

when advertising becomes content

Network Tries to Foil Ad Skipping

Now, a new cable network has elevated the practice beyond the occasional, building such anti-ad-zapping efforts directly into its business model.
Advertisement

The entire schedule of the new network, Fine Living, has been specifically set up to incorporate various forms of advertising that can foil the abilities of personal video recorders like TiVo and ReplayTV. Every show, for example, is available for sponsorship, while advertisers are collaborating in the making of certain one-minute segments that run in the middle of programs.

fuzzy logic

The FuzzyBlog!

There is already NO sense of value for software on this country — at least depending on the market segment. If you are a consumer buying a $500 computer then you don’t value software. And you really don’t even understand how a CD-ROM of office can be worth the same as the computer. It just doesn’t “compute” (sorry for the pun). And the blame for this has to go to Microsoft for bundling strategies, hardware makers for including Office so frequently and with Apple which is destroying the sense of value with all the bundled OS X software. And, you know something, markets change. In high tech we’re big on bashing the RIAA for not getting it and realizing that their industry’s economics have changed. Well, guess what? The software industry’s economics have changed.

Huh? Apple bundling the iApps is destroying the sense of value? I could see that if there were other apps that competed with theirs in all segments, but are there? And if so, are you locked out of using the others?

I see this a different way: a person who spends $500 on a computer might now spend more on software. The computer is worthless without application software, and I doubt consumers are having an issue with that. They may balk at the pricing, and rightly so: they’re paying for meaningless features and enhancements.

He speaks to some of this in points 4 and 5 below:

Given that:

1. So much software comes free with hardware these days
2. Hardware prices are now cheaper than software in a way that people not in the high tech business can’t even begin to understand “you mean that CD of Office-X is 40% of my iBook? What are you freaking nuts?”
3. The advent of free software
4. The simple fact that most software makers don’t do a very good job making stable, quality products
5. software has more features than we need OR can even understand (example — I use a 1999 copy of Acrobat regularly to produce PDF files)

our economics too have forever changed.

But I don’t see that the first three support the argument. Bundling (point 1) is a given: I don’t think it’s fair and as we see more and more access to broadband, perhaps we’ll see less of this or at least it won’t matter so much. The switching cost will go down.

Point 2? Well, run your computer with no applications and see what happens. This is like complaining that the brushes are free, why does the paint cost so much?

Point 3 is only valid for people who are willing to tackle something like Open Office (I’m not one of them) or people who run a lot of Open Source, right down to their OS.