Archive - May, 2006
Even More Clever MySpace Advertising
I like sifting through the bulletins on MySpace. Not because I want to keep Tom from shutting down MySpace by forwarding along chain letters, and not because I want to spread the word about how Rupert Murdoch is going to physically come to your house and strangle pet goldfish unless you repost this, but because I like to see how scripts and scams are working the community to make some cash.
There are plenty of simple ways to drive traffic to money making sites from MySpace, and most are nothing too fancy. This one, again, not overly fancy, but I am willing to bet that it works pretty damn well. As most of these do, they start with a photo of pretty girl, and end with a few bucks. Damn, marketing is simple ain’t it?
Step 1 – Requisite pretty girl profile. In this case, it’s Amanda (aka “Hot Abercrombie Chick”).
Step 2 – Bleeding heart bulletin, Amanda uses the old standby “Help me keep my site online!”. The help she is looking for comes in the form of good hearted and horny young men, who pop over to Amanda’s blog and click the ads. As she forthrightly states, your clicks help her out.
This helps me pay for web hosting – all you have to do is click. I really appreciate your help; without it I couldn’t pay the web hosting bill and my site would go down. If you’d like, you can do this every day – it really does help.
Step 3 – Now we are on Amanda’s site. We read about how she needs the help from the ad clicking to pay for hosting. But wait…her blog is on blogger. Hosting is free? What gives Amanda??!! Are you trying to yank my chain here? Oh wait…
I’m in the process of moving my blog over to professional hosting on Yahoo. Though it’s possible to run a blog on completely free services, doing it this way is messy and makes everything slow to load.
Right, blogger, run by Google…very slow…and messy. Fucking Google and their crappy load times and bad scalability. But she IS moving to Yahoo hosting, and she is real cute…so I should help. For sure. Let me click on one of the contextual “student loan consolidation ads”. Wait a second…shouldn’t these ads be about Abercrombie, or hotness, or hosting? I guess Google sucks at load times AND contextual advertising. Man…it’s a wonder these guys even make money. Good thing I didn’t pick up that stock at $100/share.
Just because we care about Google, and we want to let them know that their load time stinks and they can’t seem to contextually match ads properly, let’s look at the source code on poor Amanda’s site. See if we can’t help a hot chick in need and a big company with broken systems.
OH SHIT! Amanda! You have forsaken me! And you have forsaken me in the form of cleverly hidden text regarding student loans that fooled Google into serving high paying CPC ads on your site. You have used JavaScript to hide text and game Google! You have used your virtual hotness to trick me!
Damn you Amanda…I thought we had something.
Postage Paid Greeting Card Envelopes
Idea du jour. Greeting card envelopes with pre-paid postage.
I need to buy a Mother’s Day card today, and it will be a pain in the ass. The card buying itself is not the issue, nor is the concept of Mother’s Day or the greeting card industry to blame for my displeasure, but it is the stamp situation that pains me.
I don’t buy stamps. I don’t buy stamps, mainly because I never mail things. I pay my bills on-line, I don’t write letters, I don’t enter the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes…I really only mail greeting cards, at best 5 or so times per year. But for each of those 5 or so times per year when I DO mail things, tracking down a stamp is a pain in the balls. I need to borrow one from someone (which I just hate doing), buy a whole book of stamps (which I never end up using, and then when rates change, I need to buy the 2 cent stamps…which only compounds the issue), or I need to go to the post office to mail a single greeting card (when there is a mailbox 2 feet from my office).
So Hallmark, American Greetings, whoever…listen up. If you provide two choices for greeting card envelopes when customers purchase Mother’s Day, birthday, Father’s Day cards, etc at CVS, one normal postage-free envelope, and one postage-paid envelope, I am willing to bet that a good portion of the general public would pick up the latter. In fact, personally, I would pay a premium for convenience of postage-paid envelopes. I am guessing that someone like Hallmark could negotiate a pretty sweet bulk deal with the USPS, where they only pay 70% or so of the actual postage rate, and then charge me a 20% premium OVER the standard postage rate on these envelopes, and make a nice cut off of this system.
Just a thought. For now, I will be heading to the post office later. In the rain. With my single greeting card.
MySpace Instant Messenger, A First Look.
Ok, since fellow “FIMer” Kareem Mayan posted this information over on his site, I am going to let this loose as well.
I showed this to Pete today and he was like a pit bull on a leash. He wanted to break this story on his site and I was teasing him by showing him the app and not allowing him to blog it. I felt the same way, but since I had an obligation to not to over-expose this during the beta, I had to restrain. So did Pete. So go visit his site and read some of his stuff…he deserves some extra visitors for being a good guy and keeping it quiet when I asked.
So anyways, it’s here. MySpace has dropped it’s official instant messenger program, and so far so good. Nothing overly crazy, and no painfully obvious omissions to the interface or functionality that I can see so far. The client is clean and simple, intuitive (no re-inventing the wheel here), and is basically what I would expect it to be, with some extras tossed in such as MySpace message notification and some quick links to my page and the pages of friends. My pal Eric pointed out that it would be neat to be able to instant message blog posting or comment entries, and I would have to assume that such functionality is not too far off, or at the very least, has been considered.
It sure will be interesting to see how this plays out. It seems that AOL has it’s sights set on MySpace, and is working on what might be the only legitimate threat mounted to the mammoth social networking site yet, in AIM Pages. It is no co-incidence that MySpace is dropping this app now, to try and curtail any initial bleeding that may come from the AIM Pages launch.
In a later part of my conversation with Eric, we discussed who would win in this battle between AOL and MySpace. The best analogy I was able to come up with as to why MySpace will win out initially was this. Moving your social networking page is like moving your house. It is your identity and your life…your on-line life anyways…and packing it up and taking it all to a new address is hard. Starting over in a new town is hard. You need to decorate, you need to make friends, you need to familiarize yourself with new surroundings…and that can be a real pain in the ass. People are too damn invested in MySpace and are not likely to simply uproot and move to a new on-line town simply because they use AIM for an instant messenger client.
Moving IM clients on the other hand, is like switching phone companies. Granted, it is like switching phone companies where you can only talk to people that have also switched to the same phone company, but the point is…that it is far less of an on-line lifestyle change. Hell, you can even keep using AIM and use MySpace IM along side it, as I suspect many a teen will do. Hopefully Trillian will build some interoperability in and make running both clients a snap…but until then, I think I would ease up on the “MySpace Killer” tag that seems to be attached to every story about AIM Pages. Let’s not get crazy here.