Quick News Archive

Online advertising optimization service YieldBuild has announced that they now support Microsoft pubCenter in their premium text ad program. Microsoft pubCenter is in beta and publishers need to be approved for entry. YieldBuild notes they can get qualified publishers directly into the text ad program. Microsoft pubCenter is similar to Google AdSense.

Apparently some publishers in the pubCenter beta report better performance than with AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network. I can’t comment on the results as I don’t use pubCenter but as with any ad network, pricing can fluctuate on each individual ad click.

Check out my video interview with YieldBuild CEO Paul Edmondson.

Last December I posted the results of an ad campaign I ran on Facebook. I should change the ran to running because the campaign is still going although I haven’t seen a visitor from the ad to my startup (not CN) in forever. Today I’d like to share the results of an ad campaign I ran on Entrecard, also for my startup.

I reported on the launch of Entrecard’s ad program back in March and figured I would take it for a spin. You can purchase advertising starting at $25 in either CPC or CPM format. You upload a banner sized in the typical blog format of 125×125. From there you select a category — I selected the business category. There’s no targeting past the category selection. The ad went live about 24 hours later.

I’ve posted the results chart below directly from the Entrecard site. Here are the stats for my $25 ad purchase purchased under the 30 cents CPM option:

• 87982 impressions
• 550 clicks
• 0.0063 clickthru rate
• total orders = 0

The campaign resulted in zero total orders – I can use this metric because my startup charges a fee and isn’t based on pageviews like a blog might be. The interesting part that’s not computed at this point is how many of the 550 visitors have I at least opened the door to — meaning they will come back and order at a later date or share my service with someone else who will.

During the campaign Entrecard raised their baseline ad prices – doubling the CPM price from 30 cents to 60 cents. What’s interesting is that they doubled my balance at the time of the price change – a very classy move – so for this campaign the price increase didn’t affect the overall stats.

From my perspective, Entrecard ads seem very similar to buying ads on StumbleUpon using their Sponsored Stumbles program. Entrecard ads are less expensive than Sponsored Stumbles although the StumbleUpon program can lead to additional unpaid traffic via users who hit the "thumbs up" button on the StumbleUpon toolbar.

Of course note that with any ad program there are many factors to consider. My service is a completely paid service – perhaps a free service would work better for the Entrecard publishers and visitors. My suggestion with any ad network you are considering using is to run a small test similar to the one in this example. This gives you a chance to see if the publisher traffic is a good match for your product or service. 

Online ad optimization firm Rubicon Project has announced a new $13 million venture raise today made up of  an additional $5 million in venture funding from Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund and IDG Ventures Asia and Silicon Valley Bank added $8 million in venture debt. The company notes that the funds will be used to, "fuel business growth initiatives including strategic acquisitions, research and development, infrastructure and international expansion."

The company has raised $33 million to-date and is based in Los Angeles. The company opened a NYC office last November. Check out our interview with founder and CEO Frank Addante.

I wonder if any of the money will be focused on increasing publisher revenue for small-to-medium websites. To-date I haven’t heard from any publishers in that category who have seen good results from using Rubicon. The service seems to work well for large publishers, but optimizing those are relatively easy. Especially to get them from where they were to a new level – it’s seeing continued growth that’s more difficult.

One of the things I like that Rubicon does is provide their Ad Market report each quarter. While the data only comes from publishers using their system, it’s a great way to keep their name top-of-mind as some amount of bloggers will post findings from the report each quarter.

The social web spawns a new network every 5 seconds. Roughly.

And every 3 seconds, a new app rears its shiny little head to offer centralization, aggregation, and status- or file-pushing for the dozen or more profiles and sites maintained by the average user.

For profile whores (guilty!), these sites tempt with promises of the ultimate tool for managing your online presence in a cohesive way, assembling the fragments of data into a unified front for your personal brand. Forgoing any commentary on the narcissism and navel-gazing of a fruitless generation, I’ll limit my overarching criticism of these services to two main points: They’re not sticky, and they cause redundancies.

With regard to my first point, it’s very common (for me, at least) to sign up for a still-in-beta site after being digitally flirted with across a few channels, only to discover that the range, scope, usability, and urgency (what I’d call the addictiveness factors) of the offering weren’t compelling enough to prompt return visits.

As for the second point, we’ll get into more specific detail in the reviews below; let it suffice to say that I’m connected to most friends across several networks. If you or I use a status-pushing or file-pushing service, I’m getting the same message from you on Twitter, Facebook, and likely the aggregating site, as well. And no one wants to see your TwitPics of breakfast three times in a row.

“But that’s not how it works!” you may cry. “Site X eliminates your need to go to those other sites!”

Welcome to the real world. Like most users, I still occasionally have to visit Facebook; and I even (gasp!) still use the Twitter.com web interface. So until your Super Magical Candy Mountain stream-aggregating site gains critical mass and actually fulfills its brand promise of being “the only social site you’ll ever need to use,” redundancies are an unfortunate fact, both redundancies in content and redundancies in services offered. In other words, don’t pitch your site as “the ultimate contact address book.” I’ve already got one, and it’s already got the critical mass to live up to that promise (here’s looking at you, Zuckerberg). Likewise, building an independent microblogging function into your service is pointless on top of pointless; God already made Twitter once.

Now, let’s get on with the roast!

FriendFeed: Like a Mao Suit for Your Social Streams.

The granddaddy of aggregators, FriendFeed is more commonly known by its street name, “Scoble’s lapdog.”

The ‘Feed pushes updates to Twitter, rounds up links you like, streams activity in any feed reader, and even generates a nice little widget for your blog or site. From FriendFeed, you can post text, photos, or links; you can also grab other RSS feeds and insert them in your stream.

The three problems I’ve had with FriendFeed since the Scoble pimping began are that it’s butt ugly (no objections, right?) and that it totally typifies the two abovementioned overarching objections.

Customization: Gives new meaning to the term “absolute zero.”

Content Posting: You can comment on and “like” posted updates or links, and you can share links through a bookmarking function. You can also post text and photos. Rather thorough!

Mobile Functionality: Email, MMS, and an “iPhone-optimized interface.”

Roasted: Well done, but could’ve been done much better. “Mmmm” for “missed opportunity.”

Chi.mp: Hollered Beta.

Chi.mp gives the best vanity URLs of any social site. Username.mp. So simple. So easy to remember. And the user interface stands out as one of the prettiest, most fleshed-out in its class. Still, customization is minimal; I can’t even suss out how to change my avatar. I’m guessing it’ll change when I update my Facebook avatar, but shouldn’t that be a bit more intuitive?

Also, the idea of “personas” has been employed to some effect here. Mom and your boss and your Friday night crew all get to see different sides of you, on the web as in life. But shouldn’t we have the ability to decide how many personas we get to have? And how do we know which users see which content? O’Dell is confused on this point; it seems like a great and necessary but complicated concept.

I can’t offer praise for Chi.mp’s “mini blog” or photo upload functions; on my profile, they push updates to Facebook and Twitter, but not to WordPress or Flickr, which would be the more intuitive choices and would eliminate the need for visiting other sites to repost redundant content. I also question the usefulness of the email forwarding; I can set up whatever@jolieodell.mp and have those messages forwarded to my Gmail account, but… Why?

And why in god’s sweet name do I have to fill out a profile for personal and professional information when the site’s already syncing with my Facebook and should be able to do the same with my LinkedIn? After bitching on said point on Twitter, Anthony from Chi.mp kindly “hollered beta,” admitting there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Customization: I can pick one of a few backgrounds. Or even a solid color.

Content posting: Mini-blogs and photos which update to Facebook and Twitter.

Mobile Functionality: Uuuuh…

Roasted: Rare, but keep cooking. Put that shrimp back on the barbie, or whatever it is they say in New Zealand.

Retaggr: Thanks for the Widget.

Retaggr is a pure-as-the-driven-snow aggregator. Your custom URL is your social web “business card,” so to speak. Your Retaggr card can be emailed, tweeted, pinged, etc.; and the Retaggr widget makes a handy all-in-one stream feeder for your blog or website. Heck, even I use it. It also gives you a nifty ClicktoAdd.Me URL that allows users to quickly peruse their Internet-stalking options and (in some cases) instantly connect to you across those social sites.

But the widget’s rather ugly, the profile page is useless, and the functionality is limited. As a result, the odds  you’ll forget about the site shortly after you sign up are pretty high.

Customization: Users can choose themes, backgrounds, colors, and a vanity URL.

Content Posting: None; this baby’s a pure aggregator. You can tag images, but only on Retaggr-enabled sites.

Mobile Functionality: See above; so, none.

Roasted: Throw it on the coals and douse it in lighter fluid. It’s done.

Pixelpipe: Actually Doesn’t Suck!

For some cosmic/hormonal reason, I hated the Pixelpipe live demo I saw last week at SF New Tech. After TechCrunch’s review, I spewed some bile into the comments section about how there are already too many value-free aggregating/status pushing services and went on with my life. I now must nibble lightly on my words; Pixelpipe doesn’t suck.

The suprisingly simple three-click process for adding most “pipes” is among the fastest processes I’ve seen yet. Unfortunately, it’s giving me unidentifiable technical problems with pushing status updates to Facebook (mystery error message FTW?), and double-posting to TwitPic/Twitter (see the all-important redundancy note at the beginning of this gargantuan post). And I still can’t get the background image upload form to work.

Customization: Allows for custom or colored background/headline on a hosted page; but so far, I haven’t been able to make that work.

Content Posting: Uploads status updates/microblogs, photos, videos, audio, and other files; then pushes the content to any relevant social sites you’ve linked.

Mobile Functionality: Email, MMS, an iPhone app, an Android app, etc. Seems poised for mobile greatness.

Roasted: Medium rare. Stick a fork in it and send feedback to @brettb.

Cliqset: Back to the Drawing Board, Kids.>

This is literally the profile I forgot I had. I tried to sign up for a beta invite, only to discover my username had already been taken… by me.

Even the Cliqset blog seems confused on what the hell Cliqset is supposed to do. The product is unfocused and, currently, it doesn’t… do… anything. Wait, is that even possible?

Oh, right, it’s the social web. Ninety percent of these “revolutionary platforms” don’t do anything.

Cliqset, however, is particularly offensive, spurning existing aggregation services and data portability while offering the most grandiose and amibitious plan to offer users a single social identity on the web.

Unfortunately, Cliqset neither gathers data from my other social sites, nor does it push my updates to my existing profiles. Guess what it is? Just another microblogging service, but with less functionality and no mass of users.

Customization: None.

Content posting: Status updates that go nowhere outside Cliqset.com

Mobile Functionality: Kill me now.

Roasted: You can’t roast a turd.

Posterous: Emailing Like It’s 1996.

The setup process (sending an email to post@posterous.com) was delightfully novel, leading me to a super simple two-button service-adding process for linking my Posterous account to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, the ol’ blog, and… and…

Oh, wait. I guess that’s it.

No support for Last.fm, YouTube, Vimeo, Plurk (hah, ok, that was a joke), or anything like that. Users can send email to help@posterous.com to suggest more services.

Posterous offers an interesting bookmarking function for quick posting and commenting, and users can control what gets posted where by specifying an email address (Twitter-only posts go to twitter@posterous.com; but what if you want an update to go only to Twitter AND Facebook without having to send two emails?).

Overall, the functions are all tied to email and limited accordingly (good luck uploading that 3 minute video clip, dude!), and the “meh” factor is high.

Customization: I get to choose my avatar.

Content Posting: Borderline CMS-y. Can post videos, audio, photos, and text to a blog.

Mobile Functionality: If you can email from your phone, you’re golden.

Roasted: Medium. The blog part is tasty, but the constant repetition and redundancy can be a bit tough and chewy.

And that’s the lot!

Who did I miss? Did I leave out your startup? Do you have a better idea?

One of the most popular questions I am asked is if a startup should give their news to one outlet as an exclusive or if they should go to everyone. My response always starts with, "what if they get it wrong?" When you give your news to one outlet and they get it wrong, you are screwed. I am not talking about whether it’s a positive or negative story, but rather that they get the actual story wrong. It’s the reason why I think Y Combinator startups are continuously making bad decisions by going to their one outlet for all of their news.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a number of stories that were just plain wrong. We saw it with the distributed user information by Last.fm. More recently we saw it with Jeremiah Owyang making claims about Mzinga which he had to later publicly apologize for. But the damage was still done – to what level is unknown.

This morning I read a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick from Readwriteweb which is titled, "How to Sell Your Soul on Twitter and Who’s Buying". The post describes that major Internet companies like Apple and Google along with Internet startups like Box.net are buying Twitter messages in a paid post style using the Magpie service. Marshall notes, "These popular companies just couldn’t resist paying off Twitter users to put advertisements into their Twitter streams using the new pay-per-tweet service Magpie." And he concludes with, "And to the advertisers out there – is this cynical scheme the best you can do to engage with all the new ways people are communicating online? That’s pretty bad."

Just one problem with his post that I caught immediately before I even finished and it seems his commenters also picked up on immediately as well. He is wrong. Very wrong.

It’s not the actual companies buying Twitter messages. The messges are bought by affiliates who try to grab quick income by pushing out their affiliate codes everywhere they can. There’s no real way for anyone running an affiliate program to catch all of the bad affiliates before they start spamming the world with their affiliate code. I know Commission Junction spends a lot of time on making sure they remove as many of the spammers as possible. You can’t hold what affiliates do against the company except in some very rare circumstances.

Mark Hopkins has similar thoughts regarding the story.

Marshall has since added a note that has no highlighting nor is an apology for jumping the gun without researching. I sure hope he (or Richard MacManus, the blog owner) will fix the story to, at a minimum, make the update stand out. Frankly the story should be deleted or completely reworked.

Now here’s where it gets worse for the affected brands. Marshall’s story hit the Digg frontpage (which means massive traffic for RWW) and has since been linked to by a number of sources. For example, CBS Interactive’s BNET site has a story written by Erik Sherman where he continues the misreporting. It’s shocking that a MSM site like BNET didn’t actually check out the links before they posted their article.

Update: Erik notes in his post that he did click the links, "Allen, but I spent a chunk of time clicking through links and seeing where they ended up."

So even if Marshall deletes or makes major changes to the story, how do we make sure all of the other writers also update? Everyone get a story wrong from time to time, the key is how it’s handled.

With more and more blogs needing more and more pageviews to stay afloat, will this trend of pushing out stories as quickly as possible continue? I certainly hope not.

Now let me get dead serious for a minute… what if it instead of Box.net, the story was about your startup?

I am going to work on a list of tips on how to handle when a blogger or journalist (including myself) gets it wrong.

These days you can’t move around the Web without encountering a person claiming to be an expert in something. Let’s take a look at the buckets of Web experts and where they have setup a shingle over the years.

HTML Experts

First we had HTML experts. This batch of experts started appearing in the mid-90s and claimed to be able to code any webpage to the provided design specifications. This was also the time when many WYSIWYG programs began to appear including Microsoft’s Frontpage. It was always interesting to meet people who said they were experts and when you asked if they hand-coded their webpages, the answer many times was that they use Frontpage. Naturally any expert should be able to code HTML by hand.

My favorite story from this expert era was during an interview I was conducting to hire a HTML coder for the agency I was at. I wrote several exams for recruiters who wanted to test their candidates before sending them onto an agency or company for hire. One morning I met with a man who told me he had been coding HTML for 15 years. I explained that HTML wasn’t around for 15 years but he remained stern in tone that he was sure he had been practicing his craft for over a decade. I gave him my beginner exam and he failed. He then explained that he was an expert at Frontpage and that he could code any webpage using the tool. We never heard from him again.

It seemed like HTML experts were mostly located in the U.S. initially and then towards the later years the offshore crowd joined in.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Experts

The next crop of experts popped up in the very late ’90s and early ’00s. This was a much more vocal group of experts because they would send you emails explaining how they can raise your ranking in Yahoo, Altavista, Excite and Google. From the stories I’ve heard over the years, most times the shingle would go up, the company would grab some quick cash and then move on to a new shingle.

It seemed like many of the SEO experts operated from outside the U.S. from the beginning. Unlike HTML where offshore started late, with SEO they got to the gold quickly. We still see many expert SEO workers these days but the count has certainly dropped from the peak.

Social Media Experts

This is our current crop of experts – the social media expert. This seems to be the youngest batch of experts to-date in terms of age. So far, social media experts seem to be following the HTML expert trend with a heavy presence in the U.S.

It seems like if you can get a story on the Digg frontpage, you can slap the expert tag on your online profiles. If you slap a camera on your head for a day and get some press, you are a social media expert. If you can make a video that gets some views, you are a social media expert. If you use Tweetdeck, you are most certainly an expert!

Try this experiment – go to Twitter, randomly pick a person. Then starting from that person, randomly select another person from the profile icons on the right side of the page. Do this 50 times and see how many profiles include the word expert in them. It’s a fun experiment which should open your eyes to the massive expertise out there.

Next week I will share my "test" to see if the person your company or startup has engaged (or plans to engage) to help with social media marketing is actually an expert.

Conclusion

When I met with Scott Monty from Ford yesterday, one of the things we agreed on is that you should never call yourself an expert. Let others think and talk about you as an expert. It will be interesting to see where the experts pop up next online although I am pretty confident the social media experts won’t be going anywhere for the next 2-3 years.

There’s been a lot of talk the past couple of weeks about URL shorteners and the new DiggBar. Even Leah Culver, former partner to Kevin Rose on Pownce, has come out against the methods of the DiggBar. One of the issues with the DiggBar is that it "frames" the content of the site which can lead to a variety of issues. Daring Fireball has laid out his concerns with the DiggBar yesterday.

So what does Jason Calacanis, founder of Q&A service Mahalo, think about the concept of framing? Appears he hates it when Facebook does it but loves it when Digg does it.

Facebook:

Digg: