News

Yesterday I was on MSN and read this article which deals with people in their fifties, sixties, and even seventies that, instead of retiring soon, will be putting off retirement for another five plus years or even indefinately due to the current economic downturn. Most site the fact that the plunge in the stock market has cratered the value of the their 401(k)s. Gone (mostly) are the days when a pension was guaranteed upon retirement, some government jobs still offer them but for the most part employers have shifted to 401(k)s which place almost all of the risk on employee instead of the employer.

I’m not knocking 401(k)s per se, if your company contributes funds then it would be crazy not to take advantage of free money, but the old analogy “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” has never applied so transparently.

Don’t let your retirement be dictated by the whims of (sometimes irrational) markets, be they US or global, start a business of some sort. Not just only, but anything, to put you in the driver’s seat.

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The eBay Partner Network announced some changes as of August 1st affecting their ACRU (active confirmed registered user) payouts. There are two ways publishers make money with the EPN, sending traffic to eBay that results in successful purchase or signing up new eBay users. If a user signed up via a referral from your site you would get a flat amount for that sign up. Under the new policy the quality of the account created is taken into consideration, by judging the expected lifetime value, in determining the payout for the account signup. All publishers will be put into tiers based on the quality of traffic sent with the tiers ranging from $0 - $50 dollars. When I logged into my eBay Partner Network dashboard I saw the news alert concerning the change but couldn’t find a link showing the actual tier structure and where each payout threshold lay. I’m sure there will be some grumbling about this as the ACRU payouts always seemed pretty ripe for gaming by scam artists, I just started working with the EPN so this doesn’t negatively affect me.

Which brings me to a little status update concerning my EPN / McJiffy websites, discountroombas.com and joshhamiltonmemorabilia.com, both so far have brought in a little money. The discountroombas.com site has been doing much better earning $14.08, and I’ve only paid out $12.35 in PPC campaigns. On the other hand joshhamiltonmemorabilia.com isn’t performing quite as well, it has made only $4.44 after spending $19.63 in PPC campaigns. Not exactly encouraging. But I do think I can improve the Josh Hamilton site by tuning the landing page, it’s currently using the McJiffy default, maybe embedding a video of him from the home run derby and putting some better graphics will excite people more and result in more conversions. I’m not overly concerned yet, with eBay’s 30 day look back window for conversion tracking the site could start to move towards positive ground soon, I’ll need to do some link building to improve organic traffic with that site.

Seeing the success I am already having with the Roombas site I decided to try another high margin product that does well in the aftermarket, Apple MacBooks. I purchased discount-macbooks.com this morning on godaddy.com, I plan on having the site up this afternoon.

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The OpenX team has been staying on top of their game with a security update to the 2.4 branch. The fix includes bug fixes and improvements to various features including, of particular interest to me, geotargeting. If you haven’t moved to 2.5/2.6 then you should definitely update your 2.4 branch.

Which brings me to 2.6, which I mentioned previously. I installed it tonight for nichebuilder.net to finally start running in house campaigns for 2goware.com and solostream. While the API functionality is the most important feature in 2.6 as far as I’m concerned, the polished UI is very nice, the previous 2.x interfaces were the very definition of Spartan and while the engine under the hood is what determines the success of any ad server if you or your users spend any significant amount of time trafficking ads or setting up campaigns a nice UI makes things a little more pleasant.

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The OpenX team is on a roll with new functionality, just over a week ago user improved user management functioanlity was released. Now they have gone even further with their release of an API. The API (application programming interface for you non code wonks out there) will allow administrative functionality such as adding clients, banners, zones, etc… this will greatly reduce the time and human intervention needed to get new advertisers set up in OpenX. I immediately went to the OpenX beta page to try and download the new functionality as it is only available in 2.6 but download page has version links to 2.5.7 I’ll keep an eye out for the updated download and install it as soon as I can, for a programmer like me this feature is like cat nip.

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This morning the new .ME top level domain (TLD) became available via Godaddy for registration. Apparently Godaddy was ill prepared for the rush of domain name speculators. I tried to register fla.me at about 10:15 this morning, the first try timed out but I was able to register it successfully about 40 minutes later. I was a little surprised the name was available but figured I just got lucky.

Then the bad news started showing up in forums, Twitter, and various blogs. Multiple people were allowed to register the same domain names, over on Mashable Adam Ostrow reports that the aweso.me domains is proving to be especially popular.

Considering that .COM domains can sell anywhere from hundreds to literally millions of dollars there are bound to be lawsuits flying when the dust settles and a single owner per domain is crowned, there’s no cutting these babies in half.

Personally I’m not big on domaining, I have a small collection of domains and have a hard time parting with any of them so I wasn’t going to do much speculation with the .me TLD. But it will be interesting to watch the feathers fly from the sidelines

Image credit: mashable.com

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A lawyer, surprise surprise, is attempting to bring a class action lawsuit for deceptive advertising and “unjust enrichment” against Google over their AdWords product. Hal Levitte filed a federal suit in California, claiming that by placing AdWords on parked domains.

After starting an AdWords campaign to increase business Mr. Levitte discovered that 16.3 percent of his AdWord spend was going towards parked domains and “error” sites, none of this traffic resulted in conversions that would have normallay been generated had the ads appeared on a higher quality content site.

As of March, 2008 Google offered a way to exclude ad placement on parked domains and error sites. Mr Levitte is seeing class action status for everybody that has held an AdWords in the last 4 years and served at least one impression.

If, and it’s a big if, Mr. Levitte can attain class action status the lawsuit could be huge. AdWords contributes the lion’s share to Google’s 16+ billion dollar revenue stream so the suit, if designated class action, could be on par with those lodged against major auto manufacturers warranting large scale recalls (think Ford Explorers and Firestone tires.)

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Today wrapped up my acquisition of 2goware.com that I mentioned in a previous post. There were some issues with the hosting that had to get sorted out relating to the security script PHPAudit and dreamhost.com (af). I was lucky the seller was so professional and worked through the issues for me, if he had just left me to sort through the issue with ionCube and dreamhost.com (af) myself my lack of php knowledge would have made getting the site transitioned successfully very painful.

2goware.com sells an arcade script for hosting flash games. Flash games sites are very popular niche sites right now because of the large amount of games available and the booming casual gaming market. I have a long list of things I would like to change including improving the landing page of the site itself and the template that comes with the arcade script.

As I mentioned in the previous post relating to this purchase I will now have another possible revenue stream outside of display advertising (CPM), text advertising (PPC/CPC), and affiliate marketing (CPA). Diversification is always a good thing, having multiple revenue streams shields you from sudden down turns in one particular market as we are currently seeing in display advertising.

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OpenX the, open source ad serving solution, anounced that expanded user permission levels will meet the needs of advertisers looking for deeper integration with their publishers and agencies that require trafficking privledges for users not normally entitled to such functionality under previous versions of OpenX.

Introduced in version 2.5, currently in beta, the following functionality has been added.

• Each user will be given their own account rather than having mulitple users piggyback on a single account.
• Control visibility and updatability via individual permissions set the user level rather than the publisher or advertiser level.
• Audit history of individual account permissions to see who can do what and when they were able to do it.
• Allow users to switch between multiple accounts so they are presented with different functionality upon log in.

I’ve used OpenX previously for another site but will be setting up a new instance to support nichebuilder.net so I’ll be digging into these new features soon.

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When Google acquired DoubleClick earlier this year they got Performics, an affiliate network, they have since rebranded it as the Google Affiliate Network. Affiliate networks work with Advertisers to develop CPA campaigns. CPA, or Cost Per Action, advertisers usually pay the highest of the various monetization methods: CPM, CPC, or CPA. Advertisers only pay a Publisher when an specifc action is taken such as a user sign up or download of trial software.

Advertisers tend prefer CPA campaigns over other types because they only pay for actual results, after the conversion has taken place. CPM and CPC advertising requires the user to not only take an action to initiate an interaction between the visitor and the Advertiser but must then compel the visitor to take another action such as signing up.

Some of the other players in the affiliate network space, Affnet.com or Commission Junction, need to worry. Google has the scale to immediately contend with the established affiliate networks, and as small publishers look for ways beyond AdSense to monetize their audience “graduating” into Google’s Affiliate Network will be a natural progression.

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