At blist, we rounded up last Friday afternoon to look at the product together. With our small team, it’s great to focus our scheduled social time around a productive purpose that is still fun rather than saying: “Okay, mingle.”
Anyway, I was really impressed with the progress that we (okay, not really me) have made in the product over the last 2 weeks. Like I’ve mentioned before, it really feels like we are taking big steps forward over every interval – and that’s exciting!
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Monday, August 20, 2007
Pubmatic Ad Toggling
It's ReadWriteWeb Day at Mattishness. A post about Amazon PPC ads just sparked my thinking, and now it's a post about Pubmatic - about which I have something at least not completely valueless to say, which I initially posted in the RWW comments:
"this is a solid idea because many more-sophisticated websites have been building this exact type of ad-toggling system in house and it is valuable - so pubmatic extracting and productizing the functionality is a good idea that is similar to the behavioral targeting providers like A.K. that have sprung up to offer Amazon like personalization to other web retailers."
So there you have it! Every good writer knows that one essential key to success is 'write once, sell twice' and that is advice that I want to take to heart.
"this is a solid idea because many more-sophisticated websites have been building this exact type of ad-toggling system in house and it is valuable - so pubmatic extracting and productizing the functionality is a good idea that is similar to the behavioral targeting providers like A.K. that have sprung up to offer Amazon like personalization to other web retailers."
So there you have it! Every good writer knows that one essential key to success is 'write once, sell twice' and that is advice that I want to take to heart.
Amazon Pages With PPC Ads
Alex Iskold, of Brad Feld's instant classic "giant brain" description, has an interesting post up about Amazon's experimentation with PPC ads on their product pages.
I wrote a comment on that post that was longish by my standards (and also not a throw-away joke!) - so I thought 'what the hell, I'll just republish it on Mattishness'. Here goes:
"i dont think it sounds unreasonable at all that adding ppc contextual ads would capture some incremental revenue from visitors who are not interested in buying at that time, and the display banners add a little incremental revenue as well. obviously, the key is to optimize how the distracting ads are promoted so they only distract the correct amount from amazon's core salespitch(es) - and so the average revenue is slightly higher than without 3rd party ads
including the ppc ads is a little cynical, in that amazon only wants to send visitors who will not buy, but that's a well-known strategy in the affiliate world."
I wrote a comment on that post that was longish by my standards (and also not a throw-away joke!) - so I thought 'what the hell, I'll just republish it on Mattishness'. Here goes:
"i dont think it sounds unreasonable at all that adding ppc contextual ads would capture some incremental revenue from visitors who are not interested in buying at that time, and the display banners add a little incremental revenue as well. obviously, the key is to optimize how the distracting ads are promoted so they only distract the correct amount from amazon's core salespitch(es) - and so the average revenue is slightly higher than without 3rd party ads
including the ppc ads is a little cynical, in that amazon only wants to send visitors who will not buy, but that's a well-known strategy in the affiliate world."
Friday, August 17, 2007
Truth In Advertising
Ads for financial products often catch my eye as I have been known to write a fair bit of financial ad copy myself.
When I saw this ad, I thought "Gee, what a relief, the risk of those oil stocks with actual underlying value has really been getting me down. I wish some unregulated bookmaker would offer me a completely opaque and proprietary bet on oil." And now one has!!
Google Thinks I'm A Facebook Expert
In the last few days, I have gotten a bunch of organic search traffic for these Facebook related keywords:
does facebook really work?
face book, how does it work
facebook +invite friend +how to
facebook invite
facebook invite friends
how does face book work
how does facebook work
how does mutual friends work in facebook
how to invite a friend in facebook
how to invite a friend on facebook
invite a friend to facebook
Maybe now I'll get some more :)
Since Google never lies, I am available to help you get $3M for your FB app.
does facebook really work?
face book, how does it work
facebook +invite friend +how to
facebook invite
facebook invite friends
how does face book work
how does facebook work
how does mutual friends work in facebook
how to invite a friend in facebook
how to invite a friend on facebook
invite a friend to facebook
Maybe now I'll get some more :)
Since Google never lies, I am available to help you get $3M for your FB app.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Sexy Widget Hot Blog
(this is (one of) my favorite blog post titles yet!)
SexyWidget is a smart blog that I have been reading lately. Definitely worth subscribing to - subscribe to Mattishness as well, if you haven't already!
For example, here is a good post about modeling widget distribution.
Here is another good post, this one is a review of local company Shelfari's widget.
One particularly astute observation:
Shelfari is, however, facing a couple of significant challenges. All I have to do to keep my iLike widget loaded with fresh, self-expressive content is to listen to music. Unfortunately, with Shelfari, my completion of a book doesn’t automatically add it to my shelf. I have to log in, search for the book title, and explicitly add it to my shelf. This is a big deal, and there’s really nothing that Shelfari can do about it.
SexyWidget is a smart blog that I have been reading lately. Definitely worth subscribing to - subscribe to Mattishness as well, if you haven't already!
For example, here is a good post about modeling widget distribution.
Here is another good post, this one is a review of local company Shelfari's widget.
One particularly astute observation:
Shelfari is, however, facing a couple of significant challenges. All I have to do to keep my iLike widget loaded with fresh, self-expressive content is to listen to music. Unfortunately, with Shelfari, my completion of a book doesn’t automatically add it to my shelf. I have to log in, search for the book title, and explicitly add it to my shelf. This is a big deal, and there’s really nothing that Shelfari can do about it.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
A Compete Coincidence
I actually like the Compete.com metrics quite a bit, but this gives me pause - What's so magical about July '07, anyway?
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