For over five years, I covered the classified advertising business for AIMGroup.com. I was the beat reporter for real estate and automotive, and I chronicled hundreds of companies – from startups such as Zillow and HotPads – to established classified pure plays including Realtor.com, AutoTrader.com and Cars.com.
We covered social media extensively, but the main story was how newspapers had let these online competitors, not the least of which was Craigslist, decimate their classified advertising business, (hence leading to the dire straights print papers are in today) and what they could do to recover.
An often told if somewhat apocryphal story is how the Boston Globe once had the opportunity to buy recruiting powerhouse Monster.com but declined, saying in essence “hey, we’re the big bad Boston Globe, we don’t need that little pitzkele site.”
If watching the classified advertising shake down is of interest, I recommend you visit AIMGroup.com. In the meantime, I present you here with links to some of my more evergreen blog posts for the site over the last couple of years.
There are a lot of links, so I’ll publish these in two posts – here’s part one.
Thanks for permission to post these from my erstwhile editor Jim Townsend and publisher Peter Zollman.
If the NYTimes dropped print and distribution and gave all its subscribers e-Readers, it would actually save money!
Short attention span theater: new data – 10 percent of viewers leave an online video within 10 seconds.
85% of Gen Y-ers participate in social networking. Do you?
“Digital immigrants” vs. “digital natives” - with Facebook, you’ll never have to “get back in touch” again.
Google to newspapers: “grow up” (it’s not that hard to block Google indexing).
Profile of 2 Israeli startups shaking up writing and news: Iamnews and WeBook.
10 tips on how to make hyperlocal work.
If you want to trash your ex online, do it in Texas, not Colorado.
Teens don’t tweet. How come? Here’s what a teenage analyst has to say.
Consumers will pay 62% of what they pay for a print newspaper to access online news sites.
Why international users are draining Facebook’s coffers.
Creepy hookups – Google Maps and Craigslist personal mashup.
Social networks trump email for content sharing.
It’s not the newspapers, it’s their owners for print’s problems.
The first all-tweet newspaper – social media vanity press? Meanwhile, blog-to-print newspaper fails.
More next week…
Tagged as:
Advertising,
Monetization,
Newspapers,
Social Media
I want to let you in on one of my biggest – and most cost-saving – secrets. Did you notice the new logo I posted awhile back on this site – the colorful “Blum Interactive Media” with the interacting squares? Now take a look at the new logo I have on my personal blog – “This Normal Life.”
How much do you think I paid to have each of these logos designed? A reasonably priced graphic designer here in the Jerusalem area told me that to create a logo, I needed to conduct a full branding endeavor that would run a minimum of $700. From what I’ve seen, that’s actually pretty cheap in the world of corporate creative.
But I didn’t pay $700. Not even half of that. I paid only $30. How did I do it? I went to a website called NamePros. The site is mainly about buying and selling domain names, but there is a section in the bottom of third of the page called “Design Contests.”
Visually, the site is nothing to write home about – it’s essentially just a big bulletin board where you start a new topic and then people post their responses. But don’t let the simplicity fool you – this is a powerful tool.
Here’s how it works: you start a new “contest” by writing a description of what you’re looking for, including any specifics, such as dimensions, colors or concept. You indicate a price and a time frame – contests can run no longer than 10 days. Most are priced between $25-$50.
Designers then starting posting their ideas to the board. Now this is what’s key about NamePros: the logos are displayed for everyone to see – you and all future and current design competitors. The artists expect your feedback and then come back and post revised versions.
At the end of ten days, you could have dozens of different designs and their iterations. Some are amateurish, to be sure, but many are truly top quality. Posting on NamePros represents a radically different experience from other freelance design sites such as eLance where you have to pick a designer first before you see what they’ll come up with.
The one rule you have to follow: at the end of the contest, you must pick a winner and pay them, even if you haven’t received a design you really love. If you don’t ante up, you get banned from the site. But at $30, think of it as a couple of falafel rather than a major investment.
Where are the designers from? All around the world. I’ve had submissions from Malaysia to Maryland. My latest winner lives in Greece; before that, Pakistan.
Tip of the hat: I would never have known about NamePros if it were not for my friend and social media colleague Akiva Fuld. Thanks Akiva for saving me hundreds of dollars!
Tagged as:
Advertising,
Design,
Saving Money
The courts have ruled that the service is legal, but it still leaves a muddled taste in my mouth. I’m talking about Free.co.il, a popular Israeli auction site that works more like the Lotto than eBay.
You can’t help but be drawn in by Free.co.il’s home page which promises a Sony Playstation for NIS 99 ($26), a MacBook Air for NIS 299 ($79), and even a brand new Mazda 3 for a steal at only NIS 899 ($237). Who wouldn’t want to play with deals like these?
At first, it would be hard to distinguish Free.co.il from a traditional eBay-style auction site: you place your bids on items for sale and the highest bidder within the auction’s time frame wins. Unlike eBay, though, you have to pay for your bids. The cost of each bid varies; for the MacBook, it’s NIS 20 (about $5). It’s higher for bigger ticket items.
So, let’s say you bid 20 times to win that MacBook. You’ll pay NIS 20 x 20 or NIS 400 ($105). Then you pay the price of the unit, plus shipping of NIS 75 ($20) – written in tiny letters on a separate page you have to click to see. Your total cost: NIS 774 ($206). That’s still way less than the retail price of NIS 8,899 ($2,400) at Apple’s Tel Aviv outlet, but it’s not the NIS 299 that was initially advertised.
And what if you don’t win? Then you lose the NIS 400 entirely. That’s how Free.co.il can offer such low prices.
Still, if you place your bids right (and there is a whole section on “bidding strategies” on the site), and you’re willing to stick with it and spend hours aggressively placing last minute bets, you will win eventually (hopefully for an item you actually want). So, even if you wind up spending NIS 2,000 bidding on several items before winning one that’s valued at NIS 10,000, you’re still getting the product at an 80% discount.
There’s one other trick Free.co.il has up its digital sleeve. If two people bid the same amount, both bids are canceled. That means that the highest “unique” bid wins. You can see who’s placing what bids, their initials and even where they live, but not the amount they’re spending. So you never really know if your bid is being burned or not.
Free.co.il is entirely in Hebrew, but there’s a thriving market of overseas competitors. Is this a good business? Investors seem to think so. One of Free.co.il’s rivals, Swoopo, has raised an astonishing $14 million. Another – BigDeal – has a $4 million war chest and some Silicon Valley luminaries at the helm.
It’s certainly compelling – who wouldn’t want an iPhone at a tenth of the retail price – though I don’t think I’d have the stomach for it (I usually chicken out and click the “Buy it Now” button on eBay). And it peeves me that Free.co.il buries those hefty shipping fees in hard-to-find small print – it makes me wonder what else are they hiding.
But if you’re willing to play by the rules, and you enjoy the thrill of the game, Free.co.il could be the 21st century version of “The Price is Right.” All we need now is our own Israeli version of Bob Barker.
This article originally appeared on the Israelity blog.
Tagged as:
Advertising,
Entrepreneurs,
Israel,
Products
Outbrain is a company I like a lot. It has a seemingly simple product that provides some very useful functionality: content rating and recommendations for blogs.
Follow the easy installation instructions and Outbrain will allow your readers to give your latest post a 1-5 score. Then, based on Outbrain’s massive database of reader tastes and web content, the Outbrain widget that displays on your blog will point visitors to related articles that Outbrain has determined they might find interesting.
Yes, it directs visitors away from your blog, but it also has the potential to turn your site a mini-destination site. (You can see Outbrain at work on this blog – scroll to the end of any post.)
When the company raised a sizable second round of financing earlier this year, a lot of brows were furrowed: $12 million for a blog plug-in? Investors must have had a sneak preview of the company’s latest feature, launched earlier this month: an enhancement that allows publishers to pay for premium placement of their content.
The new goodie is called OutLoud and it costs $10 per URL. Featured content appears at the top of the Outbrain recommendations list and is clearly labeled. Without OutLoud, Outbrain uses its own algorithms to suggest content.
OutLoud can be used in two ways. A publisher can let Outbrain control which sponsored recommendations appear; Outbrain will then split revenue with the blog publisher.
Alternatively, a publisher can set up the OutLoud service to work as an internal referral engine: only URLs from the publisher will appear. This can be used to generate more traffic within a single property or on a network of sites owned by the same publisher.
At first glance, $10 might seem like a no brainer for a small to medium sized online publisher, but it quickly adds up. And the $10 fee per URL is only for a month. You have to pay up if you want the sponsored link to keep going.
Outbrain says that the service is aimed at a number of target clients:
- Marketers who want to drive word-of-mouth by amplifying positive reviews about their company.
- Individual bloggers who want to promote their most brilliant posts.
- Public relations professionals looking for new ways to distribute releases
- Social media gurus who can push out articles from a corporate blog to drive traffic.
With such a cool product, I wondered what product management is like at Outbrain. Amit Elisha, who directs the process, says that the days of long and involved specs with accompanying Photoshop images are long gone. “We were work on a very fast 3-4 week release cycle,” Elisha said. “We prefer UI (user interface) mock ups over technical documentation, which we keep very brief.”
Elisha’s tool of choice is Balsamiq Mockups which makes it incredibly easy to create a wireframe. I tried it out and it lives up to the hype with a truly drag and drop interface. Thanks Amit for the tip!
Elisha has been with the company since August of last year and moved from Israel, where Outbrain started, to New York for the job. I asked him my favorite question about what parts of product management could be outsourced. None, he said. Outsourced people don’t have the same stake in the company. “We hire people with a certain DNA,” he added.
For publishers looking to generate additional revenue, OutLoud certainly looks promising, although it will take some time before the service has the critical mass to add up to more than just some extra change. On the other hand, it’s free to install and Outbrain doesn’t add its own branding or links back to the Outbrain site.
Outbrain was founded by Yaron Galai and Ori Lahav. The 25-person company has headquarters in New York with R&D in Israel. The latest round was led by Carmel Ventures with previous investors Gemini, Lightspeed and GlenRock Israel filling out the round. Total raised to date: just over $18 million.
Tagged as:
Advertising,
Blog,
Israel,
Monetization,
Newspapers,
Publishers
by Brian Blum on October 14, 2009
in Writing
I’ve always felt that I’ve been an under-performer when it comes to updating my blog. Unlike some of my more prolific colleagues, I’m in general a once a week poster, both on this blog and my personal site. I like to take my time, collate references, and create a thoughtful 800-word essay. I suppose it comes from being a professional writer (you can see my portfolio here).
Now it turns out, I’m not such a bad boy after all. I recently stumbled across this article on Leo Babauta’s Write to Done blog. A guest writer (with the improbable name Bamboo Forest) suggests that it’s not posting frequency but the quality of the content that’s key. “People don’t line up to subscribe to a blog (just) because it’s spitting out three posts a day,” Forest says.
Here are 7 reasons why less frequent posting is not only OK, but may be better for your blog’s traffic. These are important lessons for publishers and media companies that maintain a blog but don’t have the staff (or available hours) to keep up a daily routine.
1. More posts mean you can’t weed out the duds.
When you’re rapidly posting several times a day, not all your posts are going to be top notch. Some will be mediocre at best. And that not-so-stellar article is going to be at the top of your blog, at least for a while.
2. Your blog is judged by the front page.
If you post too often, it won’t be long before some of your posts drop off the front page of your blog, relegated to the “previous posts” button or even into the monthly archive. Not a lot of people go trawling through back articles. So you want your best posts to be at the top, to give your readers an incentive to keep coming back.
3. Posts improve with time.
Whenever I write – whether it’s for this blog or a document for a client – I never submit it the moment I’m done. I’ll put it in the digital drawer for several hours, maybe even wait until the morning to finish it. I’ll always find something to change or add to make the piece that much more compelling. Don’t your readers deserve the same attention to detail?
4. People read many blogs.
The people who follow your blog are also perusing many others. If they use an RSS reader, it’s even worse. If you post too frequently, your busy readers may miss some of your posts – perhaps even your best ones. Give your fans the time to consume all of your great writing.
5. Less frequency generates more comments.
The longer a post stays on your front page, the more comments it can collect. A post without comments can be damning – it says to readers that no one is really visiting, so why should I?
6. Open up your blog to guest posts.
Guest posts on your blog let you fill in gaps when you get too busy (hopefully with paying clients) to blog that day or week, and the cross-linking is a great way to build traffic. If you’re doing all of the posting yourself, several times a day, there’s not much room for the out of towners.
7. Readers do not unsubscribe from too few posts.
Your followers won’t unsubscribe if you only post once a week. But if you publish uninspiring content, you’ll drive away readers you could have otherwise retained.
If you’re maintaining a blog, check out the Write to Done blog. Bamboo Forest blogs at Pun Intended.
Tagged as:
Advertising,
Audience,
Monetization
We all feel like we’re addicted to email sometimes. Now along comes someone to tell us why.
New York Times reporter Matt Richtel, interviewed on the NPR program On The Media, explained that in psychological terms, there is something called “intermittent reinforcement” – “that’s this idea that if you put a rat in a device where a food pellet only comes out of a hole periodically, the rat’s going to be checking that hold all the time because it never knows when that food is available.”
The same thing happens with email, Richtel said. “Most of the stuff we get is plainly unimportant. But occasionally, something really important comes along. So what does that do? It randomly reinforces us to be checking all the time.”
In other words, we are not that much more evolved than the common rodent…at least when it comes to checking our iPhones ten times an hour. And it’s not just email – Facebook status updates, SMS, chats – they’re all part of an addiction that, apparently, gets physical as well.
Richtel again: “when you check your device, you basically get the equivalent of a dopamine squirt. Well, if you get that little candy when you check your email and you check your phone, in its absence you start to feel bored.”
And when you feel bored, you want a new squirt. So what do you do? You send out a text or an email or a Tweet, or you initiate a Facebook chat, all in the hope that you’ll get a response. It becomes an endless loop.
What does all this mean for Internet advertisers and publishers? Perhaps this: If you want to get your message out, steer clear of banner ads and choose more interruptive media. Build up your social media fans and followers. And keep them guessing as to when the next big announcement will arrive in their inboxes.
————
The interview, by the way, was part of a larger discussion on “distracted driving” amid new laws forbidding texting while behind the wheel – see Matt’s articles here. The implications for advertisers when it comes to potentially fatal social media behavior are far more ominous.
Tagged as:
Advertising,
Monetization,
Social Media
Interactive video has been one of my passions since I worked as a “multimedia producer” in the early 1990s creating CD-ROM titles in edutainment and healthcare. In 1994, I led a team that produced “How Multimedia Computers Work,” an immersive interactive environment that plunged viewers into a virtual 3D computer. We followed that up with “How Your Body Works.” Both were co-published in a book-CD package by Ziff-Davis Press.