28 Dec 2007
Preface: These comments are mine and not those of my employer or anyone else. Ok, maybe they also represent the voices in my head.
Advertising on the Web
There's lots of advertising on the web. The biggest web company in the world (Google, ever heard of them?) generates pretty much all of their revenue from text (and now some image ads) based on the context of your web searches, email, or web page content. Big media sites like ESPN or ABC or NBC generate some revenue and awareness through the old late 90s staple of the banner ad. Blogs, podcasts, and video sites get in on the action with pre/post-roll ads, typical interstitials, and sponsors. Tons and tons of ways for sites to generate some income, but they're all pretty much based on getting a large number of eyeballs.
With the recent growth of blogs, forums, and just the general smaller sites run by individuals rather than corporations, folks have wanted to cash in on some of that free internet money. But banner ads and AdSense cash really don't work too well unless you gets loads of traffic. Now, granted, there's tons of ways to do that (which is why a bunch of the junk that fills up sites like Digg and Reddit these days are obvious linkbait bullshit attempts to generate lots of traffic), but the internet in general--through better algorithms and crowdsourcing and such--has gotten pretty good at weeding those things out. Besides, only a few linkbaiting attempts can work in a given time period, so even this is not a surefire way to get yourself that sack with a dollar sign on it.
Affiliate Marketing: Good
This gave way to a new niche: affiliate marketing. In all honesty, this started a while back with Amazon. And, to this day, Amazon's method isn't really bullshit. Amazon's affiliate system and basically a way for people who review stuff or talk about different things they want to link to those items on Amazon and get a kickback if someone purchases through their link. Everybody wins in this situation; the buyer gets an object they wanted, the site owner gets a few bucks back for setting up Amazon and the buyer, and Amazon gets to sell an object.
Plus Amazon gets some search engine love from having lots of sites link to them.
I've used the Amazon affiliate system when doing my not-very-often-update podcast. I've never made a dime, but that's because I don't do it very often and I'm not exactly linking to highly sought after stuff. But disclosure is important, because it's the lack of disclosure is a big reason that affiliate marketing is currently the <insert your horrific disease here> of the interweb.
Affiliate Marketing: Bad
Somewhere along the way, the affiliate stuff got bastardized. It was, of course, inevitable. We live in a world of pyramid and get rich quick schemes broadcast in half-hour increments on late night TV. But the internet's version is far more nefarious. The BS seemed to start in earnest with BzzAgent, a Boston-based marketing company that paid "agents" to go around talking up products--products that the agency had been paid to promote. There was no disclosure; "Hey, I've never actually tried this product! I'm getting PAID to tell you that I think it's awesome!" Of course, BzzAgent took some heat for their arguably deceptive marketing. It was not intentionally deceptive, but they were implicitly offering people incentives to be deceptive. After some bad press and some backlash, BzzAgent claims to be all about the disclosure.
Affiliate Marketing: Worse
Similarly, a company called PayPerPost sprung up. Here's a group that will pay you to write about a product, service, or other site, right on your own website! You write up a few paragraphs, throw in a few links, and you make some money. The sponsoring company gets some search engine juice and some good word of mouth. PayPerPost gets some money for bringing the two parties together.
Not so different from the Amazon model, right? Sure, except that there was no required disclosure that the post was, basically, just a paid advertisement. Posts from PayPerPost folks weren't required to be tagged as advertising, the way that those fake magazine articles are. The writer never even needed to try or use the product they were writing about. It was obvious to everyone what was going on: blatant link buying in an attempt to game the search engines.
(For a more complete story on PayPerPost, try TechCrunch.)
So what's the difference between this and the Amazon model? The end-user. The buyer. They're getting hosed in that they're just the commodity being traded in the middle. Taking someone to Amazon, where they're then exposed to any number of other reviews for the product in question (which, by the way, is almost always a consumer product that's a tangible good) is incredibly different than linking them to a web hosting company (more on that later) or some other digital good that is not quite as easily identified as something a user does or doesn't want.
Particularly when all of the reviews for said product are paid for, and thus biased, by the aforementioned affiliate system.
So BzzAgent and PayPerPost started paying people to write about products and services, without a requirement of disclosure, and in many cases, without actually even trying out the product they were promoting. Sure, they were just trading on their online identity--burn people enough and you're opinions are worthless. That is, of course, unless you can create endless domains and identities. The two companies were rightfully shat upon by the honest folks on the web. Both have started to talk about honest disclosure and transparency in attempt to stay relevant and to ensure their clients don't run away for fear of being painted with the same dishonest brush.
It hasn't worked for PayPerPost, whose business was rightfully crippled by Google when Google basically dropped the rank of any site found to be working with PayPerPost. If PayPerPost's business is as honest as they claim it is, this wouldn't have mattered. The paying companies would still be lining up to get reviews and links. They're not. They wanted search juice. And that's not for sale, well, not through PayPerPost, at least.
Affiliate Marketing: The Drizzling Shits
Which brings me to my biggest pet peeve, and the one that hits closest to home: bullshit web hosting review sites. There's tons of them. They claim to review web hosts. They don't. They rank sites based on who pays them the most money per hosting sign up. It's, quite frankly, a pox on the hosting industry. Each web host offers the affiliate a little more money. In return, the affiliate gives them good links for SEO, some traffic and new sign ups, and a couple of web STDs.
From some of our internal research, somewhere around 20% of all sign ups that come through affiliates are fraudulent. Most of them have a life span significantly shorter than a typical sign up. Many of the sign ups that make it through the front end fraud checks are still BS accounts. They sign up, collect the affiliate fee, and then cancel. With most web hosts, if you did that 10 times a day, you'd make in the neighborhood of $100k a year.
I'm not kidding.
Why is this so bad? Again, it comes down to disclosure. None of these sites reveal they're doing this for pay. Most of them layer some arbitrary, made up review score on top of their listings, depending on which host is paying the most that month. The affiliate doesn't care that it's slimy--they're getting paid. The web host doesn't care that it's slimy--they're getting new "real" hosting accounts. Who cares? The actual honest person who did hit Google or their search engine of choice to look for a web host to open a blog or a place to host their pictures of their grandkids. They find a review site, sign up with the top rated host ("oh my, this host is rated the top on ten different sites!"), and then find out it's a completely crappy host. The poor grandma doesn't realize that ten different review sites were all run by the same person/group/company. She didn't realize that the top host was paying these affiliates so much because their service is so bad they're hemorrhaging customers.
I'll admit, my company pays affiliates. Slimy ones, at that. We're not hemorrhaging customers. We've actually stepped up our game, I think, and have started to deliver a better hosting experience for most of our customers. But growing organically by word of mouth isn't good enough for us, so we put on the full body web condom and deal with the underbelly of the internet.
It's disgusting and immoral and we shouldn't do it. Many of us have made that case. But, unfortunately, the dollars trump us. So we build in workarounds and special rules to pay off certain affiliates to make sure they get the conversions they want so they'll keep sending us traffic. And keep linking to us.
Affiliate marketing isn't inherently bad. But, as with anything, when you mix it with the internet, it ends up being more bad than good. It's the drizzling shits of the internet.
Soon enough, Google will step up and kill this trend. And it'll be a great day when we can focus on stuff that matters and not spend thousands of man-hours building search algorithms to weed out fake sites, building fraud detection to weed out the fake sign ups, and trying to convince ourselves that just because other folks are doing it, we need to do it to keep up.
Yuck.
Save Us Obi-wan
Dear Matt Cutts,
Can Google please fix the fake review sites? It would be awesome.
Thanks.
Your pal,
The Interweb
Affiliate marketing is everywhere now. Google it. You'll find hundreds of blogs devoted to how to get a spammy, content-less site ranked high in the search results, get people to click your links to generate conversions, and how to basically make money being dishonest. Granted, all marketing is somewhat dishonest--promote the good stuff, hide the bad stuff. But when it's a first party doing it, you know to take what they say with a grain of salt (which is why good companies are transparent and talk about their occasional foibles ... it makes the marketing spin look less spinny). When a supposed neutral third party is hiding the fact that they're making money off of their "review," it's not easy to discern that. It's ugly and stupid and dishonest. And it makes people loads of money.
Again, it's why affiliate marketing is the drizzling shits.
Examples
Just in case you're wondering, here's what a bullshit review site looks like. I shouldn't claim this to be authoritative. I don't know with 100% certainty that these are fake review sites. But they fit the mold. They cloak their affiliate links, bring you over to the web host with an affiliate cookie, and have surprisingly similar reviews. I won't link to them, but you can paste them into your address bar.
http://www.best-webhosting2007.com/
http://www.web-hosting-review.toptenreviews.com/
http://www.web-hosting-reviews.org/
http://www.web-hosting-top.com/
http://www.webhostingtoplist.com/
http://www.webhostingfever.com/
http://www.websitehostingreviews.com/
http://www.100best-free-web-space.com/
26 Dec 2007
I've been super lazy about posting, mostly because I've been ridonkulously busy with work and the holidays and all that fun stuff.
But, I try to update my Twitter (if you care). And I'm going to try to post a bit over the next few days of my vaca (top music of '07! the drizzling shits that is affiliate marketing! something else!). In the meantime, hope your holidays rocked as much as mine did and the jolly fat man (or whatever the representative of your holiday might be) brought you Jelly Bellys.
I should spend sometime update my del.icio.us links too. Merry Festivus.
07 Dec 2007
I'm waiting to get on a red eye back to NY (and then on home to Boston). When checking in, I saw a boat load of teens heading off to go somewhere.
I hoped to hell they weren't going to be on my flight, since I'm hoping to sleep.
I'm not going to sleep. Fun.
On the bright side, I'm at least watching some TV I missed this week thanks to fox.com.
29 Nov 2007
Vacation means I do stuff.
Like changing the theme on my blog (thanks http://www.blogohblog.com/).
Updating plugins.
Writing.
Other stuff.
So, if anything is broken, let me know.
29 Nov 2007
The company I work for has been growing. Rapidly. Our business model (as I think I've mentioned before) is that we acquire other hosting companies and merge their customers into our pretty scalable, manageable platform. It's generally a ton of work, replete with headaches, stress, and lots of long hours.
But, at the end of the process, we've got a bigger company, more customers, new tools and applications for our entire base, and a few months to stabilize and work on new projects. It's a hard cycle, but one that works well, and one that has worked exceedingly well because we've kept our team small and focused. Pretty much everyone knows what's going on, is clued in on the ins-and-outs of the platform and any new changes, and understand the implication of every decision. It was an ideal situation. When you had to cut features to hit a deadline, drop support for something because the work expended dwarfed the number of customers who used it, or changed the way something worked--everyone was on board. When work ramped up, people who hadn't previously been involved could pitch in and help out without making this later (i.e. defeating that rule established in The Mythical Man Month). A small team, busting ass, getting really hard tasks done just under the wire.
Our new acquisition makes our company significantly larger. The process of moving customers is also significantly larger. We've added a ton of staff across the entire organization to theoretically help make things work better/more smoothly/with ice cream and puppy dogs.
It just doesn't work that way. You lose the closeness of the team. The ability to communicate quickly and have everyone on the the same page. You add more people who need to be trained on the existing platform before they can even start working on new stuff.
Sadly, you add people who just don't really care at all about pitching in.
With a small team, people can't really hide. If you're not pulling your weight, it's obvious, and your peers kinda take care of it. As you grow, people figure out how to duck out, stay invisible, do the bare minimum to get by without being noticed.
This is going to sound conceited, condescending, and douchebaggish, but I think the folks who get in the way as you grow generally fall into four categories.
- New people who are just too new to help out
Obviously, you can't blame these folks. They're coming to help out, but they just need to get up the learning curve before they can be counted on to be effective without being a drain on the team (i.e. the Fred Brooks' rule that adding people to a late project just makes it later). If you're lucky and you hire well, these guys will come through the first month or so of their employment sucking up as much info as they can, ready to help out within 4-6 weeks. But, with most new hires, it's a bit steeper curve, and you've got some folks who are anxious to pitch in that you need to keep diverted on other stuff.
- "That's not my job"
As you grow, you tend to hire people into specialized roles. When you're small, everyone's a generalist. Everyone can do everything, and will pitch in wherever they can. Eventually, you cross the threshold and start to hire people who are specialists and have no desire (or ability) to generalize. So when you need to spread the load for a big project (or lots of little projects) across your newly enlarged workforce, you all of a sudden encounter a new set of responses:
"That's not really what I do."
"I'm not really interested in working on that."
"I'll try, but I don't think I really understand what you mean."
"That's not my job."
Obviously, that sucks. It's crunch time, you're reaching out to people, and they can't get over their job title enough to pitch in. You just have to hope you're smart enough not to hire many people like this. There's a slight alternative to this person ....
- I don't have enough work to do so I make up my own
"What?" you say, "How could someone not have enough work to do?" Well, sometimes people are specialized. People who've been hired and pigeonholed because they're really not that good at their job, or because they're a pain in the ass to work with, or <insert your reason here>. Often, these people will (rightfully, and properly) want to do something. The problem is they'll go hunting creating a problem so they can make up their own solution. They'll start to churn up trouble ("I don't really like the way this works. I think it should do this.") or start working on changes to things.Normally, this isn't too bad. New ideas are generally welcome. In fact, a new perspective will almost always bring with it some nice nugget that allows you to make your stuff better.
The problem is that it happens in the middle of crunch time when your focus needs to be on the project at hand. It's further complicated because the people who start looking for problems in need of solutions, often try to solve problems that they don't quite understand. They may not have been involved in the initial project(s) and thus don't get that the problem they're "fixing" is unfixable for technology, platform, manageability, or any number of reasons.
You end up with people who are further isolated thinking their ideas aren't valued and your focus is diverted from the necessary work.
- It's Miller Time!
When you get bigger, people lose the mentality of sticking around and pitching in until the work is done. Granted, everyone needs to get out of the office. And there's nothing wrong with working a 9 to 5. But on big projects, particularly ones that affects tens or hundreds of thousands of customers, sometimes you need to stick it out.There are those folks who look at the fact that there are people leaving, so even though there's some project work left, they duck out. Or they say "hey, there's a few people left, they can handle it."
The result is a bunch of people who are pissed because they're staying and doing the lion's share of the work, and another chunk of people who are alienated because they don't think people should expect them to have to stay and work late.
In all of these cases, it's pretty easy to see both perspectives. And my intention isn't to be an ass and call out the people in these groups. It's simply a set of observations from a project manager/pseudo-engineer who's been working at a company that's grown from 40 employees in one office, to 100 or so spread across the country.
So, it all leads back to the question at hand:
Would you rather be overworked or homicidal?
Would you rather work at a small company, busting your ass, feeling stressed and overworked, but knowing everyone is putting in 100%? Or would you rather work at a larger company, with a ton of people to do the work, but ready to throttle those folks who aren't pulling their weight?
I'm in the former camp. It could be an age or life station thing (though, it doesn't look like it, in my limited experience), but I'd rather just be working somewhere I can bust ass and know that everyone else is too. Small teams or small companies or startups.
I think that my company will figure out how to make it work. It's just going to be an adjustment. There's going to be some growing pains (there already have been, as we've lost a couple of good people). As long as we don't lose any more good people, we should come out of this and understand (hopefully) that our current strategy doesn't work.
We've been a textbook case of forgetting the rules of The Mythical Man Month. Maybe that'd be a good gift for some folks in our company.
29 Oct 2007
I'm Twittering Game 4. At least a little bit.
29 Oct 2007
Note: I'm writing this while watching Game 4 of the World Series. The Sox have already gone up 1-0 in the 1st. If this entry ends up poorly written, full of nonsense, grammatical errors, and insanity, it's because I'm distracted by the possible 2nd World Series title in 4 years. I also have ridiculously bad hiccups.
Note 2: I also realize that I put punctuation outside of my quotes. I mostly do it when I'm quoting song titles, since I think it's lame to make it looks like the punctuation is part of the song title. I also make up words. Wanna fight about it?
On Tuesday, I made my first ever trip to the Roxy in Boston to see The New Pornographers live. TNP are one of my very favorite bands (#2 on my last.fm profile) and I'd never had the opportunity to see them play live. I wasn't expecting to be completely amazed, because I know they often tour without Dan Bejar and Neko Case, who've got their own bands to tour with. But, lo! there they all were on stage in front of me. The band played a bunch of stuff off of Challengers, the latest album, which I'd previously been underwhelmed by. But seeing the songs live added some new element to them that I hadn't noticed before. Going back and giving the album a more critical listen has definitely caused me to have a new appreciation for the album. It's not Twin Cinema, but it's really good -- and some of the quieter songs (and the Dan Bejar led "Myriad Harbour") are the best on the album and just required me to look past my hopes of a super indie pop album to just a great all around pop album.
The band mixed in songs from all 4 albums, and played every song I really wanted to hear. I was really, desperately hoping to hear "My Slow Descent Into Alcoholism" off of Mass Romantic and as we headed into what was surely the last song, I had come to the realization that I wouldn't get it. And then they busted it out and the mostly knowledgeable crowd bounced a bit and enjoyed the pure pop goodness. Highlights were easily the always phenomenal "The Bleeding Heart Show", the aforementioned "Alcoholism", the crowd faves of "Sing Me Spanish Techno" and "The Laws Have Changed", and then the most surprising of all "Adventures in Solitude" -- a song that I didn't love on the album but have gained a whole new appreciation for after hearing it live.
As usual, there was some less than goodness: the 6'4" guy with the giant block head who pushed his way in front of us so that we could see stuff only over his shoulders; the sound mix was mediocre at best, approaching atrocious; the layout of the Roxy not being nearly as good as the Paradise or TTs for a show.
Normally, that'd be the highlight of the week. But then on Friday, I got to see my favorite band Dear Leader play (#1 on my last.fm profile) play at the Paradise. This came only mere hours after Dear Leader lead singer Aaron Perrino friended me on Facebook (thanks! you rock!). So I was pretty pumped. We got there in time to catch the end of Boone and the entire set by The Russians. The Russians were pretty great, with a pretty strong Beatles vibe. And not in an annoying pretentious way, but in a good way.
But, of course, it was all about Dear Leader. And they didn't disappoint. Playing with probably the most energy I've seen them play with in a long time. They blew through just a great opening of "Nightmare Alleys" and "My Life as a Wrestler", immediately getting the crowd into the show. Making it better, for the most part, this was a Dear Leader-knowledgeable crowd. So when the band busted out "Rivarly", which I haven't heard live in a very long time, the crowd new it was special and reacted accordingly. Everyone was into it straight on through to "Raging Red" (featuring a nice Hall & Oates interlude) and "Labor On" with the crowd on backing vocals. The band came out for a first encore, then a second, which was started off with an aborted, joking attempt at "Give a Little Bit" and the now customary rocking version of "Born to Run".
Other than the group of underage hoochies (scientific term) who proceeded to grind on each other in front of us (and gave new meaning to the DL song "Everyone Looks Better in the Dark"), it was pretty much a flawless show.
Topping it all off, during the show, Aaron Perrino dropped the news that his original band, The Sheila Divine, is reuniting again on December 28th. And I've already bought myself some tickets.
So, it was pretty much a great week (aside from work, which was less great). Two great concerts, the Sox winning the first 3 games of the World Series (and currently leading Game 4 1-0).
12 Oct 2007
We had a database issue the other day. We were losing records in our DNS database. It turned out the table was corrupt and inserts were failing.
We used MySQL's REPLACE INTO to update the table. So, in essence, this is what was happening:
try to insert domain
oh, I can't insert? that means it's already there
delete the existing record
try to insert again
On a happy table, that works just fine. The INSERT fails initially because the table is corrupt, but REPLACE INTO thinks it is because the record exists. So it DELETEs it. Then it tries to futilely INSERT the replacement record, which obviously fails.
Now we're down one record. Oops.
Thankfully, it was easy for us to fix the table and replay the changes and get everything back to normal. Yay. Filing this one away in my brain in case I run into it again.
12 Oct 2007
Hey, I made a small revision to my Greasemonkey script that makes it smarter about handling time (particularly AM/PM).
It's updated here and updated on Userscripts, where I'm up to like 566 installs! I'm a hit! Or something. And I'm like the 4th link in Google if you search for "google calendar evite!"
If you've got Greasemonkey, install your Evite to Google Calendar script right from here.
16 Sep 2007
Through the wonder of the internets, I was able to check out a few of the new fall TV shows via my TiVo. Yay! New TV!
So, then I actually watched them. And new TV didn't seem so new anymore.
Let's start with the worst. "Journeyman" stars the dude from "Rome". Not the really cool dude, but the other one. The less cool one. He plays a journalist (ha, "journ"alist ... "journ"eyman ... ha) in San Francisco who has a British accent that just sort of peeks out every now and then. It's only mildly annoying. It's slightly more annoying when he randomly starts going back in time. It becomes apparent, fairly quickly, that the show will be about him adjusting to the new time he's in and then setting some prior wrong right.
Yep, exactly like "Quantum Leap." Except not nearly as good. The one good bit was that they resolved the marital strife his time traveling caused right off the bat. But, otherwise, this looks like a show that'll make it through half the season before they have to rewrite it and have it take a massive twist because it's just boring.
"Bionic Woman" reminded me a lot of another show. What was the name of it? Oh yeah ... "The Bionic Woman." Except this one tried to be all futuristic and clever. It had one decent fight scene with the villian (Starbuck from "Battlestar Galactica", which is an infinitely better show, as far as I can tell), but like everything else in this show, it was rushed and pretty much pure exposition. You'd think a dorky sci-fi action show would be right up my alley, but I fell asleep twice trying to get through this. The best part is how the main character flips out after becoming bionic, hates everyone involved, but within 10 minutes is fully using her new powers and fighting the bad guys. I guess they wanted to get right into the bionic powers rather than dealing with the potentially interesting story of her struggling to deal with her new powers.
Whatever. I probably won't watch this. It looks like it'll be a worse version of the new Terminator show. Which I haven't seen yet.
Finally, there were two kinda good shows.
"Life" is not about Eddie Murphy being in jail. No, this version is about a cop who was wrongfully accused of a murder and spends 12 years in jail before being freed. Part of his settlement for wrongful imprisonment (besides a bunch of money) is to be put back on the force as a detective. It all stems from him living his zen-like existence and wanting to make a difference ... or is it. Muhahahaha.
Actually, the zen aspect of the main character, and how it affects his perspective and approach to police work is kind of fun and reminds me a good bit of "Raines," a show from last season that I like a lot (about a detective who talks to ghosts in his head). So even if the show didn't have a secondary element, it'd still be worth watching. But there's a nice reveal at the end of the pilot that puts a slightly new spin on the main character (is he as zen-like as he seems) and adds a hopefully nice serialized story to the proceedings. I'll be watching.
Finally, there's "Chuck." Or, as it's also known, "Jake 3.0." It's about a guy who works for the Geek Squad at Best Buy ... umm, I mean the Nerd Herd at Buy More. He's a dork, he's droll, he's Seth Cohen. Hey, wouldn't you know, this the new show by the guy who invented Seth Cohen. Surprise! Chuck gets an email from an old associate and BAM, he knows a bunch of spy stuff he shouldn't. The NSA and CIA send operatives to capture or kill him. They all work together to save stuff.
Ok, so it's a bit derivative of the previously mentioned Jake 2.0 crossed with The O.C. And, given the subject material and the plot, it's a bit lacking in the energy department. That being said, it was really fun. It's obvious that this could be a good, even great show, once it finds its footing a bit. They had to cover a lot of ground in the opening episode, so it's not too surprising that it was a bit uneven. It looks like it'll be worth watching for the first season and a half before it turns crappy like The O.C.
