Rafat Ali and Staci Kramer over at paidcontent.org have added a Finance tab to their site and along with it launched a financial index of the top 100 new media sites. Dow Jones has quite a nice little business from licensing its various indexes to financial firms and mutual funds that wanted to benchmark themselves for their clients. Could this be a new source of business for paidcontent?
Year: 2007
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paidcontent.org gets into finance
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Nutrition education lunch boxes have high levels of lead
In an ironic twist of fate, 56,000 lunch boxes distributed by California’s Department of Public Health with the logo Eat Fruits & Vegetables and be Active were found to contain high levels of lead paint. Yes, these were manufactured in China.
A full recall is underway.
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Long Journey West to the Farallons
Photo by Todd Sampson
Our first trip on Todd’s sailboat out beyond the Golden Gate was very relaxing. There was pretty much no wind so we ended up motoring almost the entire 90 miles out and back to the Farallon Islands. Not that I mind – I was a bit nervous having never ventured out in open water. Seas are quite a bit rougher than the Long Island Sound that I’m used to and the fog in the morning was a bit creepy. The emergence of a warship slipping out of the fog like a silent warrior was a wake up call for everyone. On board along with Todd was my brother-in-law Dav and co-worker at MyBlogLog, Chris Goffinet.
It was the perfect dry run in preparation for another trip sometime when we have some wind. We did get a chance to see some wildlife. Seals, dolphins, pelicans, whales, and even a sunfish. We also learned a very valuable lesson that, for some odd reason (maybe practical joke?), is not written up in any of the books we read about the Farallon Islands. Never, ever, anchor off the Farallons in calm seas unless you want to be covered in flies for the entire return trip.
It was so nice to spend time on the water and even spending the night on the boat the evening before our 5am departure was a reminder of trips I used to take with my father. It was great to get away, just 24 hours on the water but I feel like we went on a long camping trip. We went somewhere and saw things you don’t normally see and have stories to tell about it.
Thanks Todd, I look forward to more trips and explorations and hopefully a tad more of a breeze next time!
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The Wall Comes Down
Everyone wondered if the New York Times would be able to pull off their Times Select premium news experiment. Despite projections of up to $10 Million in annual subscription revenues as of Wednesday morning most areas of nytimes.com will be free of charge. This is excellent news for bloggers who will now be able to point to articles on the site and know their readers will be able to follow their references with our having to pay a subscription fee.
Back when Times Select launched almost two years ago there was talk of driving subscriptions via an affiliate program. I guess that never really took off and now Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of nytimes.com admits that, “What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google and Yahoo,”
It’s widely known that more traffic comes into the site via search engine links and blog referrals than via the front door and if you’re not converting successfully via these entry points then you’re better off monetizing the traffic via advertising.
It’ll be interesting to see if this puts pressure on wsj.com to open up as Rupert Murdoch, their new owner, has hinted.
I still think that the optimal combination of free vs. premium is the one that I outlined two years ago when Times Select launched.
Restricting access during the period when these pieces are the most valuable will drive subscriptions to TimesSelect. It makes less sense to keep these pieces under lock and key throughout the time when people are mildly curious to see what all the fuss is about and have the time to sample a frequently referenced article without having to commit to an annual subscription. I would prefer to see the program re-jigged so that TimesSelect members get first dibs on grokking the perspective of the day but after 48 hours the doors are open for any and all up until the 3 month mark when they drop back to a view which restricts non-subscribers to only the first few paragraphs.
Open access to popular pieces for a three month period would help move low cost advertising inventory and allow for the fence-sitters to properly experience the quality of the Times’ news stream should they later decide they want to get access to this stuff prior the 48 hour embargo for non-subscribers.
Call it Kennedy’s Rolling Window of news & perspective. The cheap seats only let you see what’s directly in front of the window while subscribers get to see not only what’s coming down the pike but also dig back and review what’s gone by.
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Climbing back up the rankings
One of the most frustrating things about moving your blog to a new domain is watching your various rankings drop off a cliff and the associated loss in all the things that come with it. Despite all the attention to detail (301 redirects, revisions on all your various social networking profiles, re-writing URLs) you basically cease to exist as far as the search engines are concerned and here we are, now a month later and I’m still crawling my way back to relevance.
Reputation and influence is not portable.
SEO is just a passing hobby of mine. Feeling inspired after the last Webmaster World conference in Las Vegas, I experimented a bit on my old domain and tried to see if I could get myself ranked for “social media advertising” and was pleasantly surprised when it only took me a few weeks to reach the #1 spot for the phrase on all four major search engines. I later realized that the term was not as popular as “social media marketing” so I shifted to focus on that term. I soon ranked highly for that term as well. That was back in January.
I later lost interest and didn’t really think of it until I moved everything over to this new blog on this new domain on August 5th. Right before I pulled the plug on the old blog, I took a snapshot of my rankings on various services and have been tracking my comeback and it’s been pretty slow going.
Here’s a summary of the highest point I had reached on cavitate.net and where I am now on everwas.com:
Rankings for “social media advertising”
- cavitate.net – either 1 or 2 for Google, Yahoo, and MSN. #6 for Ask
- everwas.com – not even in the first 50 results
Rankings for “social media marketing”
- cavitate.net – in the top 30 for Google, Yahoo and MSN, #5 for Ask
- everwas.com – #31 for Google, nowhere on Yahoo, MSN. Ask still has my old domain listed at #17
Technorati Authority. Stowe Boyd had a series of posts where he tracked his rise back up the rankings after he moved his blog which is interesting for comparison except that that was back before Technorati calculated an authority value.
- cavitate.net – 56
- everwas.com – 12
Google Pagerank
- cavitate.net – 4
- everwas.com – not even rated yet, must still be in the “sandbox”
Yahoo! Site Explorer Inlinks – I didn’t measure the inlinks on cavitate.net but I’ve been watching the inlinks climb up and am now at 866.
Google Webmaster Tools Inlinks – I also never got this on the old site but just saw it jump from just a handful to 4, 593 on 9/4
MyBlogLog
- cavitate.net – 126 members in its heyday
- everwas.com – only 5 members have discovered this new site
It’ll be interesting to see if these numbers change much over time. If you feel like giving me a little boost, feel free to link to everwas.com using the phrase “social media marketing” or “social media advertising” and see if that will change things.
Photo by Todd Sampson
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Squitters
Some internal discussion here on people that grab brand name Twitter handles so they can later sell them to the highest bidder. Like the domain squatters of old. Remember Joshua Quittners mcdonalds.com stunt? Yahoo colleague Ryan Kuder came up with the term.
squitter n. an individual who grabs a brand name twitter handle for future profit.
Let’s see how long these stay open:
- http://twitter.com/chevron
- http://twitter.com/citibank
- http://twitter.com/boeing
- http://twitter.com/sears
http://twitter.com/mcdonalds is taken.
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Apple Price Drop: It was all part of the plan
Steve Jobs ain’t no dummy. Robert Cringely writes,
Apple introduced the iPhone at $599 to milk the early adopters and somewhat limit demand then dropped the price to $399 (the REAL price) to stimulate demand now that the product is a critical success and relatively bug-free. At least 500,000 iPhones went out at the old price, which means Apple made $100 million in extra profit.
Had nobody complained, Apple would have left it at that. But Jobs expected complaints and had an answer waiting — the $100 Apple store credit. This was no knee-jerk reaction, either. It was already there just waiting if needed. Apple keeps an undeserved $50 million and customers get $50 million back. Or do they? Some customers will never use their store credit. Those who do use it will nearly all buy something that costs more than $100. And, most importantly, those who bought their iPhones at an AT&T store will have to make what might be their first of many visits to an Apple Store. That is alone worth the $50 per customer this escapade will eventually cost Apple, taking into account unused credits and Apple Store wholesale costs.
Not only that, think of all the free publicity this stunt created. All eyes will be on what gets put into the next version of the Apple OS, due to ship next month. . .
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Google Reader adds Search. Why Competition is Good.
Just a few days after posting about the new Bloglines beta and how it was nice to re-discover their search your feeds feature, Google announced that they’ve finally added a search box to their Reader.
I’m staying with Bloglines right now for the novelty of it but I’ve noticed;
- Things that get marked “read” don’t seem to always stay that way, still trying to figure out the pattern
- I’m missing not having a decent mobile access (i.bloglines.com doesn’t really do it for me) to read feeds on the go
Competition is a wonderful motivator. There was a whole lot of hoopla around the Google Reader API that was going to allow developers to extend Google Reader in all sorts of intersesting ways. Niall Kennedy did a whole dissection of the API and reverse engineered the Google Reader so people could see how it was put together. That was in December 2005 – now I can only find one example of a product that uses this promised but yet to be released API. I guess things got re-prioritized – we’ve all been there.
At least there is OPML which makes it easy to jump around. It sure is nice to have the freedom to experiment and walk if something better comes along.
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What is a Product Manager anyway?
My 5 year old daughter just started Kindergarten this week and she asked me to explain to her exactly what I did at Yahoo so she could convey this to her class. She barely uses a computer so I was a bit challenged but then I remembered a great post by Susan Mernit that summed it up nicely.
When I describe my job to non-techie friends, I like to say it’s like being the executive chef in a big restaurant because as big piece of my job is deciding what to send out when, and another is to review and roll up all the possibilities and then recommend what we actually build and empower the teams that build it.
We’ve been washing the pots and pans for the past little while but once that’s done, the chefs are chomping at the bit to put out some great new stuff.