twopointouch

Judging from the comments and trackbacks on this site, a fair proportion of blog readers have a blog themselves. But how many of you regard that blog as your day job? There’s an interesting article about your chances of making money from blogging in the new Business 2.0, with a bold promise in the subheading: “here’s how to turn your passion into an online empire”.

The article goes on to focus on how TechCrunch, BoingBoing and Fark are earning a substantial amount of money, together with blogging networks like Weblogs and Gawker. These are, the article says:

Real businesses, with real revenue streams from real advertisers - not overhyped next big things with pick-a-number valuations based on selling out someday to some overenthusiastic big-media sugar daddy.

(you may recognise what looks a lot like a snarky reference to the recent story about Kevin Rose being worth $60mn in 2.0’s rival publication, BusinessWeek)

Lanjut →

People are upset about Click Fraud. But I think advertisers have never had it better. What is Click Fraud? Wikipedia to the rescue:

Click fraud occurs in pay per click [PPC] online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating an improper charge per click. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key beneficiary of the fraud whether they like it or not.

So basically, advertisers are paying Google, Yahoo and other publishers money for every time someone clicks on their advert. Obviously, if you’re an advertiser, you’d hope that someone clicking on your advert means that person is interested in your products and services. Unfortunately, there are people who click on adverts or write software to click on adverts that have no interest whatsoever in whatever you’re selling. This has led to some very bold scare stories about PPC being doomed, the end of western civilisation and other such tosh.

It’s annoying to waste your advertising budget in any way whatsoever, but it’s part of the game. Advertising is about speculation: you can’t avoid it. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half,” said Lord Leverhulme (or David Ogilvy or John Wanamaker - it’s a bone of contention). That statement has been true for a long time and it’s only PPC that’s ever helped business owners pick the right 50%.

Lanjut →

Yesterday, I spoke with Mark Opzoomer. Mark was the MD of Yahoo! Europe between 2001 and 2003. Now he’s involved in a number of ventures, but I was talking to him about his participation with Garlik. Garlik is set to launch as an online privacy service later this year. The idea is that they’ll scour the web looking for the information that’s stored about you or connected with you: your old MySpace profile, those posts you made to a newsgroup and the items stored in other public databases. Having compiled a report, they’ll give you an option to try to have your tracks erased or hidden. “People don’t realise quite how much you can discover about themselves from public sources. We want to raise that awareness and also hand back a little control.”

I asked him about MySpace’s apparent victory over Yahoo! in the recent Hitwise ratings. “Well, MySpace should make around $350mn in sales revenue this year. Yahoo! will make about $4bn. That’s quite a difference. And it means that Yahoo! will have the investment opportunity to add better content and services.”
Lanjut →