Articles

Piracy is funny until it happens to you

You know, look. I used to think web piracy was a joke and supported The Pirate Bay and agreed with Cory Doctorow. I would look at an album that I’ve purchased on Vinyl and then purchased again on iTunes but had reached my sharing limit because I have it on my work and several home computers and wouldn’t think twice about finding a pirated copy of it online to copy over to my netbook for a trip. I know it’s illegal but I didn’t care because it was far removed from me, I never saw the effects of this kind of activity first hand. But those days are in the past.

Loyal readers might recall that Morgen and I just published a free ebook. Actually my publishing company used lulu.com to publish the free ebook, but you get the idea. (It’s available as a free download from this link but in case you want another opinion before downloading it for free here’s a review of it. That I wrote.) This free ebook has been available for a few days and we’ve been basking in the glory of post-self publishing bliss enjoying reading and rereading the sevens of positive posts to twitter about the book. The review itself even received positive reviews from the critics.

This was all well and good until I saw this:

pir

Can you fucking believe that? I never thought this could happen to me, but there you go.

Look, I mean, I guess I should be flattered that someone thought so much of my free ebook to pass it on to their friends, but I’m not some running some charity organization over here. Do you know how much I make off it when someone emails my free ebook to someone else? NOT A GOD DAMN CENT that’s how much. Sorry for that out burst but do you know how much it costs me to live what with rent and food and a pregnant wife? Well let me tell you it’s a lot more than nothing that’s for sure. Do you see the problem here?

And poor Morgen, that guy barely understands how email works in the first place to trying to explain to him how he’s getting 50% of nothing since some dick thought it would be a barrel of laughs to email our free ebook to everyone in his address book is no party.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that my eyes have been opened to a whole other side of this argument and some things I’ve said in the past might have worked against me. But I’m trying to correct that now, and I’d like to ask that please, if you’d like to read a copy of ‘Hi Hollywood’ you just do the stand up thing and download it for free yourself rather than sneaking around and stabbing me in the back.

Thanks.

Going down in flames, or being OK with endings

This is a concept I’ve wanted to write for a while now, but have kept putting off and forgetting about. I was reminded of it the other day while having lunch next to a table with two girls talking about their recent breakups. Yes I was eavesdropping. Heavily.

One girl had obviously just gotten divorced and was telling her friend about some resulting confusion, and her friend had also just broken up with a long term boyfriend and was in the same kind of situation. Their conundrum was that in every relationship they’d been in, one party had done something wrong, enough to kill the relationship and cause those involved to never want to see each other again. Painful, but fairly straight forward. However in both of these girls recent relationships nothing had caused a major fracture. Rather, they had just grown slowly apart and both had realized it and decided, like rational adults, that rather than stay together in a relationship neither one of them was happy with that they should end it, and give each other the opportunity to be happy elsewhere.

The resulting confusion was they didn’t know how to treat the other person when they ran into them in the future. Painful break up exes were easy, they’d mutually snub each other and go about their business but given that they had no lingering hard feelings for these recent exes, and likewise the exes didn’t hold any ill will towards them, what the hell were they supposed to do? But this isn’t only a relationship conundrum, and I know plenty of people (myself included) who have the same kind of questions and confusion come up in regards to business in one way or another. I think at it’s core, the bits and pieces of whatever the previous situation were don’t really matter anymore, it’s all about being OK with something coming to an end.

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Crash Space, an LA hackerspace

I’ve been talking about setting up an LA hackerspace for years. Literally, after spending time at metalab in Vienna, C-Base in Berlin, C4 in Köln I returned to the US all excited about the idea. I talked with a lot of people and e-mails were exchanged, but not much else actually happened. Since then I’ve hung out at NYC Resistor in NYC, HacDC in DC and Noisebridge in SF and I’ve decided that in order for this to actually happen in LA I just need to start making it happen, so that’s what I’m doing. And I figured that in order to breathe life into this it needed a real name, so I’m calling it. Introducing Crash Space.

I picked the name Crash Space for a few reasons. Film fans will know there is a great movie about LA called Crash. Also, anyone who tries anything new expects to crash countless times before being successful in their attempts. Computer people are all too familiar with crashes. Sometimes I hope some of us will be so engrossed with what we are working on it will be too late to go home so we’ll just crash there. I wanted those feelings to be strong here, we expect things not to work and to break and to go wrong, hopefully a lot, and every once and a while something really cool will come from all the tinkering. I’m calling it a space because that is as open ended as it gets – anything can happen in a space.

If you’d like to help out, get involved, contribute resources of any kind please join the mailing list.

I also have some early notes about what I want this place to encompass on my wiki, and before too long I will be moving things over to a proper domain – crashspace.org

More soon. I promise. Stay tuned.

Blog Advertising is Broken

Anyone in the ad-supported-blog business knows sales and revenues are on a downward spiral. Some people would argue this is a sign that advertising isn’t a viable business, but I think it’s not so much a problem with what is being sold, rather how it’s being sold. What was once a largely creative realm has been boiled down to a simple numbers game, one that everyone playing loses.

Lets start with a little history: It wasn’t too long ago that blogs were completely free of advertising and blogging was seen as nothing but a hobby. As the medium developed, blogs grew in popularity. Some incredibly talented people found blogs to be the perfect outlet for their creativity, and many tried and true writers began to embrace the freedom of self publishing. Readers began taking note as well and started turning to blogs because of their unfiltered voice and transparent biases. The more popular some blogs got, the more they cost to keep online. Sooner or later people started putting ads on their sites to help with those costs. As more blogs began to implement advertising there were cries that this would ruin blogging (a claim that might end up true though not in the way the protesters had predicted).

Over time acceptance grew to the point that not only do many off-the-shelf and hosted blogging platforms include built in advertising options, but there are also legions, well, at least a few “professional bloggers” who make a living from the ads on their own sites. Additionally there are many companies (like my own) that are supported almost entirely by revenue from ads on blogs.

Today, a publisher generally has three main options to sell ad space on their site:

  1. Direct Sales: This would be when a site has an on staff sales team whose job it is to sell ads on that site alone. This option generally produces the most income from ads (more ads sold, at a higher average price, with 100% of the price going to the site) but it also has the largest overhead – at the very least the salary of that sales team but often rent on an office too. This is the best option, though the cost of barrier to entry puts it out of reach for most publishers.
  2. Ad Networks: This is the option employed by the majority of blogs to sell the majority of their ads. Kind of outsourced direct sales. The way this works is one company represents a collection of sites and sells ads across all of them. The ad network becomes something of a representative by acting as a go between for the sites and the advertisers, and takes a commission for this work – generally 30-40%. Again, the bulk of ads on blogs right now are likely sold through ad networks.
  3. Remnant Ads: While the previous two options are ‘active’ in that a living person is specifically selling those ad spaces, this is a ‘passive’ option in that unsold ad space is being filled at the last second from a pool of ads waiting for just such an opportunity. Remnant ads are often sold by ad networks as well, but I differentiate them because the spaces aren’t being sold so much as filled when there is no better option, and the prices are usually rock bottom, sold for pennies on the dollar. An advertiser might get an ad space that normally sells for $10 CPM for under $1 via the remnant route. Think of this as the bargain bin at a department store – sure there are deals, but generally it’s just one step above giving away things no one wants.

While some ad networks ask for exclusivity, it’s not in any publishers interest to agree to this and most likely a site will use some combination of all three options.

Online ads are nothing new and a good deal of content has been ad supported since before the first bubble. Originally web ads were sold largely in the same fashion as print ads, and websites were just considered digital magazines. Between 1998 and 2001 I worked for playboy.com. I remember one of the ad guys telling me that advertisers didn’t understand the internet and the more he told them the more confused they got. Traffic and hits and clicks meant nothing to most people at that point and he had to explain what he was selling in the context of the print ads they were already familiar with. Though print ads weren’t completely straight forward either because “circulation” is kind of a made up figure as well. In the magazine world there is an assumption that one single printed issue will be seen by several people. This means actual readership is some number x the copies printed – that “some number” depended on a whole host of other factors (largely what was on the cover). He said most of the advertisers still didn’t understand but bought the ads anyway because they wanted to reach people reading Playboy no mater what form it was taking.

This is an important bit – people bought the ads on the website for the same reason they bought the ads in the magazine, they wanted to reach people who were fans of that specific brand.

Since then we have gotten a lot smarter about web traffic. Hits are now ignored and impressions, page views and uniques are looked at more closely. Many sites not only charge for how many times an ad is seen, but how many times its clicked or even how long it’s visible on a screen. We pat ourselves on the back saying this is better, and in some ways it is, but just because you have new information at your disposal doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing to consider. New doesn’t always mean better. Focusing on traffic alone actually causes problems as it directs the attention of the sales teams towards generic numbers and away from the power of the individual brand. Remember, the main reason people were buying ads on playboy.com was not because of how many people where reading the site, but because of who those people were.

It’s common sense that showing your ad to 5 of the right people is more valuable than showing it to 100 of the wrong people. Old school advertising people knew this and that’s how they sold ads. Getting your ad in front of a specific audience was what was important, how many issues of that magazine were printed was just icing on the cake. The web used to be the same, you wanted your ad to be associated with a specific site because of who else was reading that site, how much traffic it got was just bonus info.

I have first hand experience with this from the buyer side of things as well. When doing marketing for bands while working at various record labels throughout the 90’s, we knew which magazines the kids we were trying to reach read and bought ads in those. We rarely asked how many issues were printed – that info didn’t matter. We knew that some of the most popular magazines had limited and exclusive print runs ensuring that only the coolest of the cool even knew the magazine existed. The audience was the important thing to us and we spent a lot of money on ads with that focus.

Getting back on topic, and present day. To people selling the bulk of advertising on blogs, who is reading isn’t very important – it’s all about how many. Sure the occasional demographic info is tossed around but really the headcount is what matters. And from their standpoint this makes sense. If you want to sell ads on a site it takes a lot less time to spit out traffic numbers then it does demographic info. Rattling off a few figures is easier than explaining the content of the site, what has been said about it, the passion of the writers or the dedication of the readers. And if the numbers alone for one site aren’t big enough, combining tens or hundreds of other sites multiplies those numbers into serious wow-land. 10 million eyeballs is better than 25K, right?

Wrong.

Not when you consider the earlier logic about right and wrong people.

Or if you consider that higher numbers doesn’t always mean more readers.

The problem here is cyclical and self encouraging, driven by short term goals. Reps are ignoring brands/content and selling ads based on numbers alone, which leads advertisers to think that numbers are the only important thing, which encourages publishers to ignore everything except their traffic in hopes of selling more ads. High page views does not equate to good content, useful design, or a quality site – don’t believe me? Look at MySpace. Gimmicks like breaking an article or photo gallery up into 10 pages multiplies traffic but doesn’t make the content any better. Multipage logins filled with ads increase numbers but not the quality of the site. Putting more ad units on a page increases the impression count but does anyone really believe those ads are being looked at? Focusing on numbers alone doesn’t offer a very good ROI, which leads to disappointed advertisers which leads to slashed prices from the reps in hopes of cheering up the advertisers. But they continue selling the same ad spots based on the same numbers so the returns continue to disappoint and prices continue to drop.

The industry has a short memory and this mindset quickly becomes universal – if advertisers are buying ads for 5 campaigns based on traffic alone, when they get to the 6th they aren’t asking about who reads the site, all they know to care about are numbers. The sales people have trained the buyers to focus on one single issue, so much so that they don’t even know there are others to consider.

The reps either don’t understand or don’t care about the value of the brands, and thus don’t pass that on to the buyers. This is a huge problem because loyal readers are actually the most valuable thing and the hardest to create. The authors and publishers of blogs work very hard to craft their content to develop a community that is interested in and cares about a particular set of topics. The better blogs can quickly become the premier source of info for many niche topics. This is an invaluable community to reach if you have a business catering to that niche. You might even be willing to pay a premium to reach them because those are the right people, and you know getting your ad in front of them will result in much more business for you then having it in front of any other audience.

This asset is being trivialized by the numbers only approach. You might think there is no way this could really be getting ignored, but it is. I’ll give you a few first hand examples from my own experience selling ads for Metblogs over the years. Keep in mind that with Metblogs we publish local sites, written by people in a city for other people in those cities. It’s local for locals, and if you want to reach people who are obsessed with their cities, Metblogs is a damn good place to find them.

  • When we direct sell ads, we regularly get anywhere from $25-$45 CPMs. This is hard proof that advertisers will pay those rates to reach our audience. The most we’ve ever gotten from an ad rep is $16 CPM, but more often the CPMs range between $6-$10.
  • We’ve had advertisers tell us they approached our reps with a budget and expressed interest in some of our specific local markets, but the reps told them their money would be better spent on a package of sites covering a wider range. They later found that under 20% of the ads they bought ended up on sites with a targeted local audience. This didn’t make those advertisers demand better targeted ads, it showed them poor returns on the investment in blog ads and they cut their budget for the next round.
  • We’ve had ad reps tell us they have advertisers who want to reach blog readers in Nashville, TN but until we get over a million uniques on our Nashville blog in a month they can’t sell the space. There are only half a million people who live in Nashville. Nashville is only one example, this exact thing has happened in many cities – reps requesting traffic numbers greater than the entire population of a specific city.

These aren’t isolated instances, and in talking to other blog publishers, local and otherwise, I hear similar stories again and again. What this tells me is the reps either don’t understand the assets they are selling, don’t believe in the value of the assets they are selling, or don’t care to learn about those assets. None of those options paint a good picture, and it’s easy to see how over a long enough time line prices will continue to drop as the sites are devalued over and over again.

Going back to the beginning, the reason I say that direct sales are the best option is because publishers can explain exactly who their audience is and why someone should advertise with their brand. Unfortunately that is very time & labor intensive making it impossible to do that and run their sites, which is why I say it requires a dedicated sales staff. But that isn’t the magic end all solution to make this all better. A dedicated sales staff is trying to sell ads to the same people as the ad reps, and if the ad reps – industry wide – are preaching the numbers only gospel to advertisers, then not only do the staff sales teams have the job of selling ads on their own sites, but now they also have to either try to reeducate the advertisers or just pay by the same rules as the ad reps. Again, neither of these options are ideal in anyway.

I don’t want to sound like I’m blaming the ad reps for this, even though that is kind of what I’m doing. What I’m attacking is more the model and approach. Reps are in the business of selling ads, but the problem is the tools they have, especially the CPM concept itself, focuses on selling ads right now now without consideration of how that will effect selling ads next year. They are also in the business of selling a whole lot of ads, so its much more efficient to do package deals and boil many individual sites into one traffic pot. This is great for selling one batch of ads right now, unfortunately it’s the worst thing you can do to promote long term value and growth.

This decline will continue until everyone goes out of business unless something changes. Something needs to change, and honestly there are too many smart people involved in this business to just let it die without trying something different. Funny enough, as I was finishing this article TechCrunch published a piece by Shelby Bonnie called ‘Lets Kill The CPM’ which I think comes to the same conclusion I have though via a slightly different route, and ends with the same call to action. Something has to change. I’ve been talking about this problem with people for a while now and standing around on the street corner complaining hasn’t worked out so well for us so we’re going to take the steps and try to provide a solution. Or at least an alternative option, that we believe will be better. We’re still finalizing some of the organizational structure but I hope to have an announcement about that soon. I’m excited to see Shelby talking about this, and hope this leads to more announcements by more people in the very near future.

(For more history on advertising as a medium I highly recommend this wikipedia article or the AMC series Mad Men.)

Taking responsibility for your own interpretations

My last post about Facebook ruining relationships (or not) got linked to about a million times but didn’t generate that much discussion. My guess is I was so long winded people either never finished it or were just too exhausted by the time did to add anything to it. That’s fine, and I’ll try and be more concise in the future. Maybe. One comment that did come in struck a chord with me and rather than follow up there I thought it deserved it’s own post. Commenter Robert K got me thinking when he said:

I once misheard a lyric by the group Stereolab. What I thought I heard was “Responsible for what I say, responsible for what I heard”, which I found incredibly illuminating. Wow. I am responsible for what I hear. Ironically, I heard the lyric wrong. The last word in the lyric is actually “hush”, not “heard”. In this case, I’m proud to take responsibility for that interpretation. But to your point, so often I forget that I am responsible for feeling annoyed with what others say or write, and it’s up to me to control my behavior, not theirs.

I’m so relieved to see someone else say this because it’s honestly something I think all the time. I often find myself in situations where people misinterpret something I’ve said and I have a negative reaction to it. I have to find a way to delicately explain that I meant something else entirely, something which probably wouldn’t elicit such a reaction. Sometimes this is because I just do a bad job explaining what I’m trying to say and sometimes it’s because people have a preconceived notion of my standpoint before I’ve said anything. It happens with business associates, friends and family. In any case it’s annoying and frustrating. How do you tell someone nicely “you are upset about something you made up in your own head” or worst “don’t get all excited just yet, you misunderstood what I was saying.”

It’s not that easy, trust me.

But this goes both ways- I learned a long time ago that interpretation was a powerful tool. Both in how others interpret you, and how you interpret others. It’s hard to control how others interpret you (hence the previous paragraph) but realizing you are in control of your own interpretations can make a huge difference in your life. This is all about trying to decode intent, but in the same way beauty is in the eye of the beholder, intent can and is often decided by the recipient. While it’s true that if you hurt someones feelings, even if you weren’t intending to, their feelings are still hurt. It’s also true that when someone is trying to hurt your feelings, simply readjusting their intent (in your own head) can soften the blow considerably. If someone tells you that “you suck” that could mean they have taken a careful look at you and found you to be sub par, and this might hurt your feelings. Or it could mean that this person just has incredibly low self esteem and the only way they can feel better about themselves is to try and push someone else down, this might make you snicker at how much they themselves suck. Not what they intended, but arguably a better interpretation, from your standpoint at least.

I think a lot of this boils down to, as Robert put it, control our own behavior. As as society we reinforce the idea that there is always someone else to blame when someone does something wrong. I don’t like to give anyone else that much power over me. If someone else upsets me, it’s because I let them upset me. If I upset someone, it’s because they are letting me do it. This is passive for most people, but when you realize it and learn that it can be an active choice then more often then not when faced with “do I want to let this person or situation upset me” the answer ends up being “no.”

Facebook doesn’t ruin friendships, being a self important asshole does

I’ve had this WSJ article by Elizabeth Bernstein called ‘How Facebook Ruins Friendships‘ open in a tab in my browser for over a week now because I’ve felt I needed to say something about it. Unfortunately due to the fact that I’ve been in the middle of traveling around the world and that the article is so massively flawed I haven’t been able to decide where to begin. I just reread it and realized what is stumping me.

I want to write something lengthy about how it’s the old problem of misunderstanding the technology and one group of people asserting that another group of people should use something as flexible as Facebook in only one way, and assuming anyone using it another way is wrong. The reason sites like Facebook and Twitter are so popular is that at facevalue they are simple, but their simplicity allows people to use them in ways that work best for them, which is rarely the same way someone else uses them. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature and something we’ll be seeing much more of in the future. Some people can’t grasp that concept and insist on thinking there is only one way to interact with them. In real life we don’t only interact with people in one way, we have a million different choices depending on the person and the situation and Facebook and Twitter are some of the first major steps towards having those kinds of relationships online as well. As a society, we never think that the person who stood in line next to us at the coffee shop, our cousin who we haven’t seen in months, a co-worker from 3 jobs ago and our neighbor are all jerks because they don’t talk to us the exact same way our closest circle of friends does, so why do we expect that kind of uniformity online?

I want to write yet another piece about how the problem lies more in how we classify “friends” online, and how early attempts at this have made the road harder, but Facebook and Twitter are more educated steps in the right direction. Before the internet we had endless ways to classify people we knew – Friends, relatives, neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances, boss, ex roommate, penpal, etc etc etc. Each one of those meant something very different and we all knew it. When we moved online we were forced to decide if someone was a friend or not, with no other options. That both bumped some people into categories it shouldn’t have as well as watering down the term “friend” itself. The popularity contest encouraged by almost everyone of having more friends on a site then someone else only ads more to this. Is someone you’ve never met and never talked to a friend simply because you both have stated that some other person is your friend, or because you live in the same city? Likely not. While both Facebook and Twitter allow you to limit and adjust the kinds of info you get, and send, to different kinds of people, most folks just accept all and broadcast all which clutters their stream and makes them say things like “Why is your life so frickin’ important and entertaining that we need to know?” as someone quoted in Ms. Bernstein’s article states.

Which brings me to the crux of this – Ms. Bernstein starts her piece by saying “Notice to my friends: I love you all dearly. But I don’t give a hoot that you are “having a busy Monday,”” Guess what, if you don’t care if someone is having a busy Monday chances are you don’t love them, and shouldn’t be considering them your friends. And I’m not saying that in a bad way, I’m noting user error here. Clearly Ms. Bernstein has made the mistake of classifying acquaintance as a friend and now she’s annoyed because she’s given them too much access. There is nothing wrong with not caring about the intricate details of every single person’s life. There is something wrong with saying every single person is your friend and then complaining that your friends are telling you things you don’t care about.

There are people I know, perhaps because I worked with them years ago, that I’m connected to on Facebook. I would not consider these people friends, we never hang out and I haven’t talked to them in ages, but I wouldn’t deny that we know each other and if I saw them in person I’d stop to say hi and catch up. I don’t care if these people are having a busy Monday and that is why I have Facebook set to not show me updates from those people. There are other people who I see on a regular basis, will rearrange my schedule to hang out with if I have the chance, and honestly enjoy the company of. These people are my friends and I do care if they are having a busy Monday.

If there was no internet and I saw one of these people in person and they said they were having a busy Monday I’d probably ask why, I might even ask if there was anything I could do to help. Conversely if there was no internet and the person driving next to me rolled down his window to tell me he was having a busy Monday I’d likely roll mine up because I don’t care. But I know someone else out there probably does.

That might sound rude, but it’s because we’re looking at this as a 1 to 1 relationship. The web, and Facebook in particular isn’t 1 to 1, it’s 1 to many. You might not care about something someone is saying, but likely they aren’t saying it to you, and there is someone else out there who does care. You shouldn’t be annoyed they are saying something you don’t care about, you should realize you are doing something wrong and need to adjust you consumption of info to make sure you are only getting info you do care about. The people aren’t assholes for saying something you don’t care about, you are for assuming they are only talking to you.

This works from the other side as well, when I post something online, be it on this blog, on Facebook or on Twitter I don’t assume everyone is going to read it. I don’t even want everyone to read it, but I know that some people are interested and for them it is valuable. Some people however think everything they put online should be read by everyone they know, and that causes problems because it has no basis in reality at all.

My point is that Facebook, or Twitter, or any other piece of software doesn’t ruin relationships. Misunderstanding people ruins relationships. Trying to put everyone you know into one cute little box ruins relationships. Assuming that because you don’t care means no one else does ruins relationships.

Facebook and Twitter and sites like them give you the chance to get closer to people you want to, more efficiently. It’s up to you to decide who that includes.