The numbers recession we’re not having

admin —  March 10, 2009 — Leave a comment

Just a short(ish) note to anyone who is following our numbers at the moment.

Over the weekend (Friday US time to be precise) I upgraded to WP 2.7.1 and we started having problems with our stats.

At first, I thought that OMG our unique visitor count was crashing. Indeed, if you look at the data, you’d conclude the same thing. Our unique total dived, and yet our pages per visitor number doubled. Indeed, we’d normally do roughly 1.5-1.8 pages per visit (a recent high was 2.4). Instead, we’re doing 3.0-3.3 at the moment. I’d love to believe that this is true, but it isn’t.

The story is that something with Disqus and Facebook has caused the referral data to go haywire. I’ve been working with Daniel Ha at Disqus to sort it, although at the time of writing it’s still borked. Also thx to the team at Clicky for getting involved.

Basically, our unique data is flawed, but our page view data is good. How I know this? The ad count has been in line with the page view data from Clicky and Google Analytics.

My very real concern is that we’re heading south in Quantcast at the moment, and the page views don’t match that line. The primary line in Quantcast is visitors, not pages views. It also sucks from a personal view point because I can’t accurately track live stats at the moment: half of our referrals show up as Disqus or Facebook Connect.

We did experience our usual beginning of the month slump…without fail the last 6 months, we start slow, but it’s not nearly as bad as some public stats show. For example, the US Monday March 9 at the time of writing was just shy of 100k page views (I hope it slips over 100k for the full day). That’s our biggest day since Feb 12.

Hopefully fixed soon.

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Job ad reporting: you’re doing it right

admin —  March 10, 2009 — Leave a comment

Latest job figures out today show more bad news for the Australian economy. Notable though was how they were reported.

News.com.au grouped newspaper ads (5-6% of the total) with online, and didn’t offer split figures:

The ANZ survey found total job advertisements slipped 10.4 per cent in February, the largest recorded monthly fall since the series began in 1999…..

In the year to February the number of job advertisements in newspapers and on the internet has backpedalled nearly 40 per cent. This was also the worst outcome in the history of the survey.

Fairfax grouped as well, initially at least

Jobs advertised online and in newspapers fell 10.4% in February alone, the most in any month since the survey began, to an average of 161,583 a week,

but then went for the split with newspapers first

Online ads drop too

Newspaper ads alone collapsed 25.2% in February, ANZ said, taking them 55.4% lower than a year ago.

”But newspaper advertising is down 27% over the summer and 44% since the collapse of Lehman Brothers,” ANZ’s Mr Hogan said in a statement, referring to the collapse of the US investment bank in September.

Jobs posted online dropped 9.4% in February, or 38.6% lower than a year ago.

The slump is ”the largest monthly decline since the combined internet and newspaper series commenced in 1999,”. ”The annual rate of decline, at 40%, is also the worst outcome on this record.”

Interestingly, neither offered a raw number split, only percentage declines. Finally they’re doing it right, well nearly, but close enough for my liking. The drop in newspaper ads probably deserved a separate mention due to the size of the drop, although primacy in order reported is arguable.

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Pacific Brands lynching

admin —  March 5, 2009 — 3 Comments

As is not unusual when backed by a media that likes nothing more than pitting company owners against a presumed proletariat, the Pacific Brands lynching continues.

For those outside of Australia, Pacific Brands announced recently it was shutting down its Australian manufacturing plants. The company owns brands such as Bonds, Hard-Yakka and more. It was then disclosed that (ZOMG) the CEO had a pay rise last year along with the board. The Federal Government, along with the media and unions are jumping up and down about how disgraceful the pay is given they are putting of approx. 1800 people.

Here’s the thing. It’s beyond bloody remarkable that the manufacturing was still done in Australia in the first place.

If anything, the board of the company should be praised for keeping the local jobs going for so long when nearly all of their competition shut up shop and moved their plants to China years ago.

The economic reality is that the textile manufacturing in Australia is cost-prohibitive compared to China. We can argue whether that’s fair or not, but the reality is that most of the garments we buy now share one thing in common: they’ll have Made in China stamped on the tag, because it’s multiple times cheaper to make them there instead of here.

If anything, it could be argued that the company was acting irresponsibly in not taking the business off shore years ago.

I feel badly for anyone who has lost their job, but this tall poppy lynching is a crock, and it does nothing to save jobs.

God help us if this is going to be the carry-on when every big company puts of staff in the coming year as Australia finally falls into a recession. I suppose on the bright side, the Australian media will have something to easily write about, given any serious reporting is quickly becoming untenable as they shed staff as well.

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Inquisitr February 2009: and still the ad market bleeds

admin —  March 2, 2009 — 7 Comments

Pageviews: 2,315,920 (new monthly record)

Traffic profile: largest post at 15.2% of views (and a bloody lot of comments).

Finances: the ad market is still bleeding.

Our overall monthly return was down 2.1% from January despite a 27% jump in traffic. By my calculations, we are off 23% on what we should have achieved in February based on January’s return.

Our profit is up somewhat this month due to putting off one writer. The profit though is up less than the cost of that writer. The weakening AUD helps a little bit as well (all my calculations above are in USD) as the net return has a slightly higher end result due to currency conversion, although all our costs are in USD, so this only works in our favor with profit.

Going forward we’ve done everything we can to run a lean ship. Our cost base is down, and despite being down a writer the traffic went up. However there are risks ahead. We’ll likely do less traffic this month (we tend to go on two month cycles), and a similar drop in advertising rates will hurt. The only question now is when will the online ad market bottom, and how much further will it fall.

Technorati Rank: 252. It actually went backwards this month by a small amount, although has been all over the place (even 133 briefly for one day, and a high of 305.

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The web in 1996 wasn’t as bad as Slate makes out

admin —  February 26, 2009 — 12 Comments

Farhad Manjoo at Slate has a rather weird post up on the Internet circa 1996. I say weird because he makes conclusions about the internet at that time based on what we expect from the web today, with the following conclusions:

I started thinking about the Web of yesteryear after I got an e-mail from an idly curious Slate colleague: What did people do online back when Slate launched, he wondered? After plunging into the Internet Archive and talking to several people who were watching the Web closely back then, I’ve got an answer: not very much.

and more

We all know that the Internet has changed radically since the ’90s, but there’s something dizzying about going back to look at how people spent their time 13 years ago. Sifting through old Web pages today is a bit like playing video games from the 1970s; the fun is in considering how awesome people thought they were, despite all that was missing.

Notably he also links to archived pages at The Internet Archive, despite the fact modern browsers don’t render them correctly (Yahoo didn’t look like this in Mosaic or Netscape 1), but I digress.

People still refer to the new medium by its full name?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùthe World Wide Web?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùand although you sometimes find interesting stuff here, you’re constantly struck by how little there is to do. You rarely linger on the Web; your computer takes about 30 seconds to load each page, and, hey, you’re paying for the Internet by the hour. Plus, you’re tying up the phone line. Ten minutes after you log in, you shut down your modem. You’ve got other things to do?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùafter all, a new episode of Seinfeld is on.

Now my memory of the time may be dulled by age, but it wasn’t quite like this.

Sure, you paid by the hour, and it was as expensive as hell. I think at first I was paying something like $50/ mth for 6-8 hours,then $5 an hour over that, and I use to get these horrible excess use bills. Yes, it was slow on my 14.4k modem I paid $500 for at Grace Bros (now Myer) in 96. I went back to Uni briefly in 96 as well, so I had free access on campus as well, which helped.

But to suggest that there was nothing to do on the web in 96 is disingenuous.

In fact, with maybe the exception of Wikipedia today, I actually read more widely in 96 than I do today, despite hundreds of millions of extra sites to pick from.

There wasn’t as much, but compared to before it was more than enough.

The marvel of reading a foreign newspaper online like the NY Times might be taken for granted today, but in 96 it was a miracle of the digital age.

The front page of Yahoo acted as a portal to information that went beyond the local library into areas you simply would never have known about or had access to.

Discovery of interesting content was half the fun, even if perhaps it didn’t share the purpose driven goals of today.

Sure, what video there was usually appeared in a very small portion of the screen and took a decent time to play, but there was multimedia.

Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com was founded in 1995. I remember vividly listening in (I believe on broadcast.com, but I could be wrong) to New York Police Scanners and Air traffic control in Houston, Texas. Would that enthrall people today? Probably not, but in 96 this idea you could listen to police attending callouts on the other side of the planet in real time was radical, and simply amazing.

There was plenty of other things to do as well. Manjoo points out that during this time Geocities started to become popular. I don’t recall when I set up my Geocities account, might have been 97, but I set up my first site in 96 on my ISP account, the first branch of a political party in Australia online I might add. In 96 I taught myself the basics of html, used hotdog along the way, and actually created something that others outside my own small world could see.

The Internet at this stage started to change the world as we knew it. It wasn’t boring in any shape or form given the standards of the time. If we were to time travel back: yes, the web may have been boring by todays standards, but students of history know better than to judge history strictly by modern eyes.

In Web 2.0
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Maybe I live in a moral vacuum: defending TechCrunch over the Last.fm/ RIAA post

admin —  February 24, 2009 — 7 Comments

I probably should just duck and hide before writing this.

There’s a storm in the blogosphere over a post Erick Schonfield made on TechCrunch last week alleging that Last.fm gave user data to the RIAA.

Erick isn’t exactly on my Christmas card list, and I’d be the last person to naturally want to defend either Erick, or TechCrunch, but I’m going to.

I’ve read and re-read the post, and I don’t see that it’s quite as bad as people make out.

Yes, the data was incorrect, untrue, a lie…what ever you want to call it. But that’s the nature of tips: some work out to be true, some don’t. Some are great scoops, some ride the fail train.

The question then becomes: which ones do you publish, and how do you publish them.

If you read the post carefully, Erick clearly points out that this is a rumor, and actually publishes the tip clearly marked as such.

He then goes into padding out mode (the mode you go into when you don’t have a lot to write about) where he talks about the broader privacy implications if the rumor is true.

Not once in the post did he say categorically that it was true.

He also made attempts to contact both the RIAA and Last.fm. Last.fm gave a one line response that clearly didn’t rule out the proposition “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA.” That’s not a categorically no we didn’t type response. That’s a response that says to me that it might have happened, but the person writing that line isn’t aware of it (hedging bets).

There are of course broader implications of printing such rumors in terms of the effect it can have on a company at the receiving end. That’s a debate left to others, but I’d note that if no lead, tip or leak was ever published, the role of the media (including blogging) as a accountability watchdog would cease to be.

I ask myself what I would have done if I had received the same tip, and although I might have worded the post a little differently, the difference would be small. I would have run that post if I was still at TechCrunch. I might not run it today because I don’t have a highly paid team of lawyers backing me up, but I would consider it.

Love them or hate them, TechCrunch got to where it is today off the back of exclusives and being first. Sometimes they get it wrong, but so to does just about everyone at some stage.

I’m not suggesting that TechCrunch shouldn’t be criticized ever, and that much of the debate around this topic shouldn’t be taking place as much of it is healthy in terms of looking at the broader ethics and placement of blogs, but in part “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.”

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Shame Darwin Shame

admin —  February 20, 2009 — 4 Comments

I’m sympathetic to old diggers still holding a grudge against the Japanese given the historical context, but in 2009 there’s no place for this, particularly when a lot of the message is coming from people born well and truly after WW2 who simply don’t have an excuse to hold a grudge.

Age: Japanese ship unsettles Darwin

TERRITORIANS paused to remember the 1942 bombing of Darwin yesterday, but for some the commemorations were marred by a Japanese vessel docked in the harbour…..

Controversy rose over the presence of the Tokyo University ship Umitaka Maru, docked at Stokes Hill Wharf only metres from the ceremony. “A lot of people are very upset about it being there,” said Andrew Burford from the Maritime Union.

Mr Burford said he had been inundated with calls from people, outraged that the vessel, in Darwin to pick up supplies, could be berthed so close to the ceremony.

Japan is Australia’s No 1 export market, we’ve been at peace with Japan since 45, and trading with them since the mid 50s. It reeks of unfounded Xenophobia.

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Sure sign of a bad economy

admin —  February 17, 2009 — 3 Comments

Always a sure sign of a bad economy: cheaper cuts of meat, and booming chicken sales

SMH:

THE bleak economic climate is forcing shoppers at Coles to trade down from T-bones to sausages, in an attempt to cut their shopping bills.

In the latest sign of the drift to thrift, consumers are also swapping expensive cuts of meat for chicken and eggs, and branded products for generic and private label goods.

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Google News censoring pics?

admin —  February 16, 2009 — 3 Comments

We ran a story earlier today on the name and public details of the alleged Churchill fire arsonist. We didn’t run his picture due to the gag order in place on his picture and address in Victoria (the gag order was lifted on his name), despite The Inquisitr being hosted in the US. No idea whether we were free to do so given where the site is hosted (I’ve heard arguments on both sides), but I didn’t think it was worth getting into a possible legal argument over. On the shot of his MySpace page we took, we purposely blanked out his image.

So this is seriously WTF. We’re in Google News as being based in Victoria, so maybe Google put in place something to be on the safe side? I just don’t know.

site:inquisitr.com - Google News

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Some Australian PR Reps don’t get blogs

admin —  February 16, 2009 — 8 Comments

To start on a positive note, I’ve had a uptick lately of Australian PR pitches. Some are half reasonable, although like all the stuff that comes in, we can’t run it all, even if we wanted to. The Inquisitr doesn’t do a huge amount of Australian related content, although as our Australian traffic increases it does get a little tempting to do more Australian posts…within moderation of the broader mix.

But I digress. Got pitched last month to promote a new Australian banking product. They wanted to give me a $10 account in return for a post.

Now besides the paid for post argument which can be left for another day, apparently $10 in the eyes of that PR firm at least is fair game for a blog with 1.5-2.5 million page views a month.

It’s hard to compare one site to another, but I know from some of the media I’ve received previously that WAToday, the Fairfax WA portal did 341,000 uniques in July 2008 (I don’t have later figures). No idea what their page view figure is, but today we’re in a similar range on Alexa at least (not the best source I know) to what that site is doing, and we have more uniques.

Question is: would the same PR agency offer $10 for a post/ article on a Fairfax property?

Obviously the answer is no, and one would presume that they’d be buying display advertising for the product instead of trying to buy a post….well, you’d hope so.

So why treat all blogs and bloggers as if they were backyard operations with small traffic?

Besides, according to News.com.au, I personally account for 5-6% of all online contracting for the entire country 😉

American PR reps are a lot smarter these days, although I do remember the time years ago when they weren’t. Not all the Australian PR industry is clueless, but I get this feeling that some have only just woken up to blogs as an outlet for news, and are treating bloggers as a cheap way to get exposure without showing the least bit of respect.

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