heisel.org

Online ads are priced right

Monday | February 25, 2008 | 8:28 pm  

There’s a good interview with the CEO of an online ad firm at Silicon Alley Insider that raises a very good point about Internet advertising rates:

Moore: The fact of the matter is the Internet has been either dramatically underpriced or offline media is dramatically overpriced. Right now a reader of the Wall Street Journal might be worth a dollar, but for someone reading the online Journal you get a nickel. That’s 20 to 1 offline versus online pricing. You need 20 online readers to replace one offline reader. So when you talk about pricing overall I think the web is dramatically underpriced already.

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)

While I think most of us in the Internet publishing business would like to think ads are underpriced, my gut says no.

• Unlike print, very few folks go online specifically for advertising
• Those that do, go to a business’ Web site directly, or to a free listing site.
• Studies show that users are in a “seek” mode most of the time online, so they’re likely looking for the content that’s near the ads
• Eyetracking studies confirm that users very rarely look at the ads once they’ve found the content their looking for

Long term, the Internet is going to prove disruptive to the traditional display advertising model — users can get to advertisers’ information directly without the middleman of a content provider.

What does this mean for content publishers on the Internet? What business model(s) will emerge to reign supreme?

I. Wish. I. Knew.

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Business, Technology

Quote of the day: NITF

Thursday | February 21, 2008 | 2:57 pm  

“OMG I can hear the clunking sounds coming from the NITF website” – IM conversation with Zellyn

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Journalism, Programming, Technology

My first Django snippet: Another Memcache status view

Thursday | February 14, 2008 | 5:50 pm  

Hooray! I posted by first Django snippet today. It’s a status view for your memcache server(s).

I had originally used this snippet, but the regex and socket thing never quite sat right with me.

Turns out that django.core.cache has a _cache object with a nice get_status() function. It returns a list of tuples — one for each server in your CACHE_BACKEND setting — the first item of each tuple is the server name/IP and port, the second item of the tuple is a dictionary with all the relevant stats you could need.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Django, Python, Technology

Yelp.com missing the boat on RSS

Monday | February 11, 2008 | 1:57 pm  

So Yelp is uh, totally missing the boat on RSS.

They’ve got a a page listing their meager RSS offerings.

I’m not sure why they’re rolling feeds out city by city, in most systems if you’ve built in the ability to serve RSS feeds it shouldn’t need extra effort to apply that to a different set of data.

For the cities where they do have feeds, it’s rather disappointing:

You can’t get a feed of just restaurants, or just stores.

I’m not sure why they haven’t allowed users to create an RSS feed from any arbitrary search within their system. That’d allow folks to limit by content type, neighborhoods, cuisines, etc.

In this day and age it strikes me as odd that such a (shudder)Web 2.0-ish(/shudder) company would not adopt RSS thoroughly.

(I know it’s like the pot calling the kettle black, but I’d argue that we’ve really expanded our RSS offerings at work and we’re trying to get better. But, hey, who would call a newspaper a (shudder)Web 2.0(/shudder) company?)

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Business, Technology

My favorite Web development laws

Saturday | February 9, 2008 | 7:25 am  

From the great list over at Blue Flavor:

Lister’s Law

People under time pressure don’t think faster.

Hofstadter’s Law

A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Management, Programming

Open Source means you can create content, right?

Tuesday | February 5, 2008 | 6:30 pm  

I know it’s a CMN but I thought this was too funny not to share:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Technology

For journalists, it’s less about business, more about audience

Monday | February 4, 2008 | 1:35 pm  

Yelvington is talking about a bias against the business side of journalism and a class called Business and Future of Journalism.

I would tend to agree that too many members of the Fourth Estate are phobic when it comes to dirty words like: profit, return on investment, and revenue.

I applaud the idea behind teaching more journalists more about the business side. Why wouldn’t you want to know everything there is to know about your profession — at the very least it’d make it easier for you to argue a point to management.

If you can’t know it all, know your audience

If you don’t have the time or the interest to learn about everything, then the most important thing for aspiring and practicing journalists to learn about is the audience.

In my limited travels it strikes me that a lot of journalists either don’t know, or don’t care about the audience research being conducted. The “don’t know” camp can be helped, but the “don’t care” camp scares me. If we’re not here to write, shoot, design and code for our audience… then who are we doing it for?

If you write a perfectly crafted, exquisitely shot and artfully arranged multi-part public service piece about your local government abusing it’s power but no one read it, did you every really serve the public?

(Snarky comment: If we’re not serving the public, and we’re not making money then what are we doing?)

Obviously the business of journalism can’t be summed up as “get lots of readers, get lots of page views” — niche products, advertiser interest and the long tail all serve to make it more complex than that.

However, if you can only know one thing shouldn’t every journalist in a newsroom know about their audience?

In my twisted brain it’s easier to express the idea in code:

while profit > 0:
    knowledge = conduct_user_research()
    newspaper.staff.improve(based_on=knowledge)
    profit = newspaper.revenue - newspaper.cost
 
    if profit = None or knowledge = None:
        raise GameOverMan

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Business, Journalism, Management