I’m quite bewildered at these multi-million dollar sites/ blogs that get thousands of people writing for them for absolutely nothing. I’m not sure if I’m troubled because of the financial dimension (exploitation) or I’m simply troubled because I’m jealous and I wants me some of that. Hmmmmmm……
Archives For Web 2.0
I love Drew. Here’s a guy who always puts his 110% into everything he does, and he does it so well at the same time.
More on the Strands blog here.
The Chumby a.k.a The Worlds Dearest Alarm Clock in now available legally in Australia.
Internode is the local distribrutor and has it for $299 here.
I’ve had mine for at least 6 months, and I love it, but the widget/ content side is overated. Why the hell would I wan’t to browse RSS feeds or weather from my alarm clock when I usually have my iPhone and Macbook Pro sitting next to it 🙂
Still, nothing quite like waking up to 977 The 80’s Channel every morning 🙂
(via Core Economics)
So I get an email this morning from a company telling me to take down a post because I’d broken their embargo and that me having the post up would effect their ability to get publicity on other sites.
The thing is I hadn’t broken it. They’d failed to detail the embargo time properly. The original email said midnight, September 11, and was for an Australian site (the intro of the press release read Melbourne, Australia). It didn’t say midnight September 11, US Eastern or Pacific. I posted it at midnight, September 11, Melbourne time, which just happens to me my time, so I sort of knew what time that was.
In retrospect it was probably an unintentional oversight on their behalf, and I won’t name the PR firm, but I take issue with being accused of breaking an embargo and damaging the prospects of their client because they fucked up.
I’ve actually asked the company to please consider removing me from future distribution lists. I would have likely written the post anyway in this case because I love nothing more than promoting local sites (well, as long as they haven’t taken funding from Jordan Green), but the traffic benefits for me doing so were marginal at best, and although it may have been a somewhat interesting story for some, ultimately choosing to write it is doing them a favor, not the other way around, although you’d never know by the way they seemingly deal with bloggers.
I’m really starting to get tired of the whole embargo thing again, although in some regards I guess I never was not tired of it to begin with. I’m tired of getting people asking if they can send things through if I agree to respect an embargo. I WILL RESPECT YOUR EMBARGO AS MY DEFAULT POSITION. STOP CLOGGING MY INBOX.
But there is one exception, and that’s AOL, who I’m guessing will probably never send me a thing again. I’ve had two recent releases under embargo from AOL. The first story involved a 1 hour chat with them on the phone, and a considerable amount of effort into the post. One site broke the embargo by 6 hours, and others followed. By the time we hit the story it was too late. The second time I went to write the story 2 hours before the embargo time, and I found out that AOL had actually broke its own embargo. The last email I wrote to AOL was that while I’m happy to receive their correspondence in future, I reserve the right to randomly post the story at any time before the embargo.
The problem with embargoes is the haphazard way they are enforced. The first company got really shitty with me breaking their embargo (even though it was their fault), but other companies just shrug their shoulders when someone breaks it. And the end result is a complete and utter joke.
I’ll still consider stories under embargo, but from now on I’m going to ignore or request removal from distribution lists where the embargo is not enforced (and regularly broken by others), or as the case may be, I get blamed when I was actually doing the right thing. Life’s to short for these stupid games, and although I’m always interested in story ideas, PR folk need blogs and bloggers in general more than we need them.
No, Steve Ballmer actually did a really good job, but the questions had more than a lot to be desired. I caught this originally in the car, and the News Radio announcer continually referred to Ballmer as Bal-a-mer, and I knew it was just going to get worse from there.
Here’s some choice questions from the ABC’s Ticky Fullerton. I can’t embed the video unfortunately, but if I find a copy I’ll add it later. Full transcript here.
Opening question
TICKY FULLERTON: You are in Australia, of all places, during US election week. What will an Obama government do for corporate America?
WTF? You’re interviewing the CEO of Microsoft, and you ask him about Obama???
TICKY FULLERTON: The next stage for business users in particular could be Cloud. What is Cloud, and won’t it cannibalise some of your existing products?
“Cloud”???? Oh, THE CLOUD….just bizarre. Ballmer responded extremely well
TICKY FULLERTON: Microsoft Outlook has become the lingua franca of communications; you captured the world with it really.
How are you going to keep that loyalty, when you now have companies like Skype, like other telcos going for the customer and going for the directory?
Ummm, Outlook has a 27% market share, and recent numbers show Hotmail is used just as much in business. But comparing Outlook to Skype and telcos? WTF x100???!!!!!
TICKY FULLERTON: Yet you say nothing is given. I mean, looking forward we’ve got voice, we’ve got face and expression, handwriting recognition, and what they call the new wireless direct neural interfaces.
Where do you think the drivers of value will be in these spaces and how is Microsoft going to grab the drivers?
I just don’t get this at all. Looking forward we’ve got voice???
TICKY FULLERTON: How much of a threat is open source code? I know it’s been around for a while. I think the Queensland Government is looking at it now.
But in this time of global meltdown, could we see emerging markets like China and India looking at the free alternative and being a threat to Microsoft?
I think she means Open Source software….or maybe it’s just random parts of free code 🙂
TICKY FULLERTON: The other battleground is the mobile. Windows mobile is growing rapidly as the market grows.
Do you accept the criticism that perhaps once again you haven’t been listening to the end customer as well as say Apple, in terms of functionality and simplicity?
Windows Mobile isn’t growing, and it’s still a small player, unless she’s talking about a specific country. talk about slanted facts though.
TICKY FULLERTON: Back to Australia and the long awaited broadband tender, which seems awfully laboured. Do we seem very troglodyte to you?
WTF WTF WTF WTF. Some Australian angst thrown in with something Ballmer would no little about. He responded like a gentleman though.
If this is the current state of reporting at Aunty….well, OMG
So I was trying to view a post on the YouTube blog tonight here. Simple exercise you might thing, but YouTube has decided that any time I visit it, on ANY browser (so it’s not cookie related), I should be redirected to YouTube Australia. No major deal with video content, given the swap out is just “au” instead of “www” in the www.youtube.com URL. But here’s the REALLY dumb thing. When I try to visit the official YouTube blog, it redirects to the “official YouTube Australia blog” which doesn’t show the same content as the US site, so the URL comes up a COMPLETE BLANK. The only way I could view the post is via a proxy.
Georetardation is bad enough, but this is even more beyond a joke. Youtbe FAIL.
November 5 marks the The Inquisitr’s 6 month anniversary, the first major milestone we set for the site when launching it back in May. The good news per the screenshot above: it’s not up for sale, least yet 🙂
Traffic
October 2008 was a good month for The Inquisitr, and a new record for us of 454,000 page views, up from the 420,000 we did in August, and the 250,000 in September.
The better result compared to August is the reliance on a single post. In August, the leading post accounted for 48% of page views for the month, vs the leading post in October accounting for only 25% of page views. That single post happened early in the month, and had no effect on the second half of the month, which I’m pleased to report did (from October 15-31) 215,000 page views. Over the same period from the 15th, our distribution of daily traffic varied between 8,400 page views and 17,200 page views, with only 3 days dropping below 10,000 page views a day; although we had no “huge” posts during this period, the regular flow of higher traffic across the board bides well for the site in November.
For the first four days of November, The Inquisitr did 104,000 page views. I’d expect the figure to drop before it increases as our election coverage helped during this period, although notably the two largest posts for the month to date (30% of this figure) were not election related.
Relaunch/ Engagement
October was notable for a new look for a site announced October 13, which neatly fits in with our increase in regular traffic in the second half of the month. The new site highlights our content and content outside the site through a partnership with ReadBurner, and has so far been meeting and exceeding our expectations. Traffic to the front page is up, although still only makes up less then 10% of traffic to the site.
The new look also gave a new emphasis to engagement, through the inclusion of visual links to content on each post, and through highlighting popular posts and latest comments. I haven’t tallied the comment figures, but I’d say roughly the average number of daily comments would have gone close to doubling during this period, and page views per visitor are up.
Finances
6 months in and the site has yet to make a profit, however October was our best result since launching. We also would have been profitable had we had not added Steven Hodson to staff. It’s too early to call November, but I’m confident that if we can maintain base numbers along what we did for the second half of October, we will be profitable for the first time this month. I would note though that my definition of profitable does not include my own writing; I’ve never pulled a cent from the site in 6 months, so the aim this month is for me to be able to pull a monthly writing fee from the site along the lines of the rest of the team.
The economic crisis
The news for online advertising isn’t great at the moment, and we will not be immune to it. Our current advertising provider has failed to deliver expected rates to date, and if they had the site would be highly profitable at this time. However, our advertising provider is delivering rates higher then what we were getting previously, and as such our overall situation continues to improve.
The best immunity we can have to the economic crisis is to continue growing our readership, and this will continue to be our focus. Our ad rates are already low, and projections are based on these figures, so as long as they don’t completely collapse, the outlook is positive.
Cashflow
Cashflow does remain an issue for the site. We’re now on 60 days net payment for advertising, so our improving returns don’t flow through for 2 months after each month. The site has burned through money, although conservatively compared to what others may have spent, the site has no external investors and is funded exclusively through my savings. Additional funds are available should we run short of money, and through into January finances will become very tight. The site is financed through to the end of January presuming no income during this time, so although I won’t be having a huge Christmas spend this year, we should make it. A Sitepoint auction while unlikely, isn’t off the table yet.
Technorati Rank
October was notable as the first month The Inquisitr broke into the Top 1000 on Technorati…twice. We did it early in the month then Techonrati did something strange with their index as we broke through 800, and overnight we ended up at 1200 again. As of today, we are back in the Top 1000, and this was a major 6 month target for us. We’re now in the open slather part of Technorati Rank, as we start losing the count of incoming links from when we launched, so we may go backwards before we improve again. Given the 2nd month was low for us, I’d expect the rank to improve in December. Our next goal will be Technorati Top 500, maybe by January or February.
Notably The Inquisitr was completely banned from Techmeme is October. We thank Gave Rivera for doing so, as our traffic has increased significantly from this time, as it did when we were weighed off the front page at the beginning of our 3rd month. It’s just a shame Rivera can’t ban us some more, his petty little power plays have always resulted in good karma for us.
Writing team
The strength of this site continues to be our writing team of who continue to improve with time. Our ability to focus our writing better shows in the monthly numbers. Steve Hodson was our first new hire, brought in to write tech and opinion posts. He has delivered strongly and has driven engagement on the site.
Per our financial situation our ability increase pay rates or bring in new staff is limited by cashflow, so we won’t be considering any major changes until the new year. I’m still getting around 5 people a week contact me about writing jobs, and there’s been a few people I would have loved to have hired but had to pass on. Maybe next year, but our current writing team is my primary focus in the short term.
Content
A few people have complained about our content in October. The emphasis on our new slogan “the better mix” has seen a change in what we produce, but notably we are not doing less tech (the numbers remain steady), we are simply moving into different areas. October was notable for its inclusion of new categories, including Movies, TV, Media Industry and Funny Pics. Our traffic would support the notion that the broader mix is working, but that will be best assessed over time. We continue to maintain specific pages for each category, and recognize that not everyone will like everything we have up. We also maintain feeds for each category as well (see following)
Feeds
Feeds continue to be a weak point for the site, however the outlook continues to improve. Depending on the day I check FeedBurner (which seems to dance up and down on a daily basis) we how have around 5,000 subscribers across 5 feeds. The main feed is up only a few hundred subscribers, but the sub feeds have boomed as we’ve produced more content outside of tech. Entertainment is up 500%, Media has between 130-150 subscribers for a feed that is brand new, Odd and Funny up 400%, tech up 50%.
Notably the increases in subscribers has followed on from a new emphasis on the site (big RSS buttons basically) and the inclusion of browser auto discovery.
Ultimately we want to continue to grow these numbers, and the trend is good after a long period of stagnant or small growth.
Conclusion
I say this every month but it still holds true: we’re not quite there yet, but the outlook is rosy. The notion that it takes 6-9 months to establish a blog would appear to be holding true: we continue to improve in content, engagement and page views. We may go backwards this month, and historically every second month we do less than the month before, but the start to the month is strong.
The Inquisitr is still a crazy idea. Everything I’ve ever learned, or taught about blogging has said that you target your vertical space and if we had, the outcome may have been better again. But when I started this site, I wanted to write about stuff I enjoyed and liked with nothing more than the thought that my personal interests may be liked by others. Sometimes risks pay off, and we’re getting very close to that point.
Most of all though, we’re having fun. October was great partially because the finances have improved, but most of all our increased mix has allowed me to break out of the myopia of tech coverage into things I’m interested in as well, such as the media industry and even movies. Having to sit through movie trailers is really hard work…. 😉
We’ll be back next month hopefully with more good news. My thanks as always to the many people who believed in the site, its team and me personally along the way. We couldn’t have done it without you.
Update: just a note on the figures, all figures are per Google Analytics. If I were to use Awstats I’d be reporting 1 million pages this month 🙂
Alex Scoble today proved my point in raising the issue of civility on FriendFeed.
For the record, I didn’t say Alex was stupid, I said his hate the rich meme was (and scary, weird and far to the left…which it is), other than that he’s been a great member of FriendFeed and I’ve enjoyed following him. That he can’t separate a disagreement on one topic says far more about him than it does about me. Honestly though, it does make me sad: to this point, I actually thought pretty highly of him, even if we do disagree on taxation policy.
Darren Rowse at Problogger has a great post up today where he asked “10 Prolific Bloggers” to share advice on how they make their blogs more conversational, although the question sent via email read “How do you foster conversation on your blog?”
9 out 10 bloggers talked about tricks in posts, such as being controversial, asking questions at the end of posts, and engaging with readers in the comments.
1 blogger wrote about Disqus and FriendFeed, and the need to make commenting as easy as possible, and facilitating conversations where people want to have them.
If you guessed I was the odd one out, you’d be right 🙂
I don’t disagree with the other 9, and there’s some really good advice there for new and even experience bloggers, but I presumed most of what they say is a given. To my way of thinking, if you write good content, the comments will follow. But if you make commenting easier, and you facilitate it on sites such as FriendFeed (and you can import those comments in + allow users to post directly to FriendFeed from your site so it’s a WIN/ WIN), you increase the odds that people will comment and participate, and with both, you increase the chances that comments turn into long and interesting conversations.
Or maybe I’m just wired differently 🙂
So I told my mother on the weekend to try Google Chrome after life long Internet Explorer die-hards and Firefox haters like Steve Hodson tell me that they’re sold and have switched for life. My mother still uses IE and refuses to use Firefox, no matter how many times I’ve tried to convince her otherwise, because it’s “not the same.”
Next day she tells me she tried but, but she didn’t like it and switched back to IE. I ask why, and she says that Chrome doesn’t have the “favorites” (bookmarks for the rest of us) in the sidebar. I had to get her to explain the concept to me. Basically, she has a left hand sidebar open in IE with all her favorite sites, and she doesn’t like using a drop down menu to access them. In my mothers defence, sight isn’t her strong point and she has a large monitor set to the wrong size (at one stage it was 800×600) so she can see things. For her, the sidebar was easier to read than the drop down menu + she’d become use to it.
That’s a digital divide… of usability. Of all the things to consider, I’d have never thought of that.
PS: happy birthday mum.
