I got this ad in my RSS feed for Gizmodo.  It shows an ad from Pheebo (not sure who they are), but it links to if not a scam, a pyramid scheme.

You can go directly to the landing page here:

http://www.nickgetsgreen.com/3/index.html?t202id=414965&t202kw=Pheedo.com+-+Business+Feeds

My absolute favorite part is the huge disclaimer at the bottom.  Here is a fun snippet.

Subscriber must clearly write the authorization number on the outside of the package and return the CD to the address given by the customer care department within thirty days from the date of enrollment or does not promptly return the disc with authorization number according to the terms above, Subscriber agrees to pay a one time fee of $99.00, which will be billed on Day thirty one from the date of enrollment. Once the free trial shipping and handling fee has been paid and once Subscriber does not cancel within the thirty day Trial period, the one time fee will be NON REFUNDABLE. In addition, the subscriber will be provided access to an online Resource Center which will bill at $47.50 on the fifteenth Day from the date of enrollment and we will re-bill every thirty one days at $47.50 per month until cancelled by calling 1-866-995-9812.

It also mentions an alternate eBay Money Resource Center.  I am pretty sure neither Ebay nor Google have either of these sort of deals.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/03/license-to-stall.html

And, while its beside the point, I have held firm to this belief. Someone…at some point, will figure out a good monetization of blogs. My guess is we will have some big name advertiser give it a chance, throw some money sponsoring the whole small blogs, and then we will have a flood of copy cats.

The trick is to standardize placements (half way there with IAB sizes). Standardize site takeovers (similar to the gawker sponsorships). Then having a sales team which can go out and sell the inventory.

Some hurdles would be fraud (and boy is it a big hurdle), getting non-personal blogs (though personal blogs may be interesting to some), and figuring out how to convince an advertiser to give it a try.

I just wish it’d happen sooner than later.

I am in the industry, and I can’t help but agree with the idea that display ads are largely ignored.  After all, I see the ads, and I ignore them too.

That being said, I firmly believe there is still a place for it.  Just look at some of the campaigns which have worked well so far.

We have the Orbitz mini game ads, which some people specifically played.

We have the neat combo Apple ads that were found among may places including nytimes.com

We have the site takeovers on sites like Gizmodo.

We have the site takeovers by video games on sites like 1up.com.  These are even done using standard ad sizes.

Woot.com has great ads from dealnews.com.  Dealnews is showing ads of actual products that are on sale.  As a deals site, they are advertising their value add!

The point is, just like in any other advertising form, the goal of the marketing isn’t to distract, it should be to entertain.  Instead of trying to force attention onto the user (I’m looking at you interstitial, and pop ups), we should be looking to make the users look toward the ad spots.

So.  What are some examples that could work?

I would love to see Ebay ads show ads which have the items I actually am bidding on (and possibly am losing).

I would love to see Nike show ads of my custom designed shoe with the buy button right there.

I would love to see anyone run ads in succession similar to the highway road signs (I call it a temporal roadblock).

I have plenty of ideas.  Right now, the biggest problem is that the agencies who create ads don’t know all the tools they have at their disposal, while the current ad network system does not have the expertise to help them.  All this will change as more dollars come into the system and as people innovate more in this space.

Giant ad agency GroupM — it counts companies Nike, Unilever and Sony as clients — says it will only do business with Web publishers if they agree to wait as long as 180 days to receive payment for serving GroupM ads. The industry norm is payment within 60 days.

It looks like another group has now decided to pay out in 180 days (following Federated Media’s 180 days). Is this becoming the norm? Is this even acceptable? If networks start to be paid on the 180 day scale, then they will have no choice but to pay publishers at 180 days (or more).

At what length before a publisher will just say, fuck it, I’m just going to run adsense?

Long payment terms are just business as usual with ad networks – it often takes our partner Federated Media six months or more to get us payment for ads served on TechCrunch.

I had thought I had been part of internet advertising and gained some experience, but this little tidbit from a TechCrunch article really shocked me.nbsp; TechCrunch seems to be okay with waiting 6 months for payment, and more importantly, considers it business as usual.

Scribefire paid out within 7 days of a month closing.nbsp; While at RightMedia, the books were closed well before then as well.nbsp; Quite frankly, it is shocking that any business would be okay with someone else holding their money for 6 months (think of the interest payments).

Anyone else hear this before?nbsp; Any networks out there able to pull off 6 month payment terms?

The answer is, it depends.  You can’t compare a CPM campaign to a CPC campaign until you make it an apples to apples comparison.

eCPM – equivalent CPM, estimated CPM, or whatever you want to call it.

It is the term that is used to figure out how valuable your inventory is.

For a CPM campaign, it is very simple to figure out what your eCPM is.  They are the same.  If you are paying $10 cpms, then your eCPM is $10.  You are paying $10 for 1000 impressions, or 1 cent per impression.

For a CPC campaign, the equation is :

Where CPC is the cost per click, CTR is your click through rate.

Clickthrough rate is just the number of clicks you get per impression which means our equation now looks like:

If you have a CPC of $1 per click, and a .1% click through rate (1 click per 1000 impressions), it means you are making $1 eCPM (for every thousand impressions, you average one click and so make $1).

Notice that the value of the inventory isn’t solely based on CPC.  There are two factors, CPC and CTR.  There is two ways to make the inventory more valuable to such a campaign, you can either raise the CPC or raise the CTR.  This is already understood inherently.

CPC is negotiated during the sales process and so is not that interesting.  Advertisers and publishers essentially determine what a click is worth to the advertiser.  From here on out, the Advertiser has now said that each click, and subsequent eyeballs to the landing page are worth the CPC.

The clickthrough rate piece now becomes interesting.  If you can raise the CTR, then you have increased the value of your inventory and made more money without making your advertiser pay more (as the advertiser is thinking in cost per click).  If you can increase the clickthrough rate of your ads from 1% of users to 2% of users, you have effectively doubled the amount the advertiser is paying you while keeping your advertiser happy.  This can simply be done by moving where you locate your ads.  If it is above the fold of the page, it will have a higher clickthrough rate than if it is at the very bottom of your web page.

This argument also can be made to the advertiser.  If the ad is more interesting, then, there will be a higher clickthrough rate on it, which is more valuable to the publisher (and will subsequently get you more inventory).  This actually explains the prevalence of distracting ads (all that flashing does produce higher CTR at the expense of looking nice on the page.)

So back to the original question.

If your $0.50 CPC campaign is able to get a .1% click through rate, then it is worth $.50 eCPM.  Compared to the $1 CPM campaign, you are better off running the $1 CPM campaign.

If your $0.50 CPC campaign gets a .3% clickthrough rate, then it is now worth $1.50 eCPM.  Compared to the $1 CPM campaign, you are now better off running the CPC campaign.

Up next, more elaboration on this idea, and even more fun with the CPA campaigns.

In addition, such a move–which was once opposed by some Yahoo execs–would now be seen as injecting energy in the company.

I make no notion of hiding my love of many people who are at Yahoo, I have made many friends there both from Right Media and even Yahoo proper (though many have left Yahoo already).  Still, it has to be disconcerting and worrisome to anyone involved to be reading something like this.  When you are going to be getting energy from the slow lumbering beast that is AOL, you know you are in some fundamental trouble.

My suggestion? 
1) Choose some people and give them control.  There are still plenty of people at Yahoo who want to turn things around.  Or believe, given the lee way, they could help change things for the better. 

2) Let them run amok.  Clear all hurdles in the way.  The goal here is to give them enough rope to hang themselves and make sure at the end of it, no one can say “i couldn’t do it because x,y,z was in the way.”  Some of the initiatives will fail, but the responsibilities and ownership is what is the most lacking now.

3) Hold them responsible.  Once all the hurdles are cleared, then the person should be held responsible for their product.  Maybe the initiative failed, maybe it was due to market forces, so be it, but with the power you have given them, they need to also be held responsible for what occurs.

Essentially, there seems to be too much “this is getting in my way, that group isn’t cooperating.”  Have each group pitch their vision, choose one, and let them have the perogative to get it done.  Tech getting in the way of Product getting in the way of Business will mean nothing gets done…which coincidentally seems to be the current world.

All of this would not be helped in the least by AOL coming into play.  More territorial fisticuffs will just delay anything actually getting worked on and done.  For same reason, a Microsoft buy wouldn’t have helped, AOL doesn’t help.

I have absolutely no doubt that Yahoo can rebound.  You can’t walk 10 ft without bumping into some really smart hardworking people.  But without some strong characters to point in a single direction, nothing is getting done.

End of Rant.

Here is the most recent piece of it.

I just read this: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2008/09/22/quote_du_jour_2_1.html

And it got me to wondering.

If they can only provide 15-20% returns.  But are leveraged at 30x debt to equity.  Doesn’t that mean they were only making about .5% for each factor of equity?

That seems to be FAR lower than what the bank would pay me for keeping my money in their savings bank account…

In other words, it would seem, if I could get 30x out of my equity, i could make 15-20% returns on my money just by putting it into fdic banks?

Granted, this is an apples to orange comparison as GS is a lot bigger than the small man such as I, but the point remains.

So, what is it that I am missing from this thought process?  Please, all you financial peeps shed some light?

I can’t go an hour without it crashing.

Wow, its been a long time since something I read hit me as hard as this.

I think this gets to the very crux of the problem. We are talking about kids here. If you build an interest in science now, you will get them interested for the rest of their life. Instead though, we interest our kids with Barbies and American Idol. Is it of little wonder that Reality shows now are more popular than say Jeapardy?

These little things are exactly what gets ingrained into a culture. It is exactly how cultures are built. We can’t see it as well as we exist in the gradually changing culture, but it is there none-the-less.