COGBLOG

Recently published this new website for Minneapolis, MN criminal defense lawyer Ryan Garry. If you need a defense attorney in Minnesota, look him up.

http://jasonputorti.com/post/595576857/10-things-ceos-need-to-know-about-design

Jason Putorti –lead designer for Mint.com, the first personal finance application I’ve actually been able to maintain an interest in–did this great presentation on “10 Things CEOs need to know about Design”.

Great if you build, design or market web applications.

Love this quote:

“The best marketing tool you can have is a well designed application”

That is the absolute truth. I feel like I need to watch this presentation every monday just to get my mind focused for the week. So good.

View it on slideshare here

Every morning I go out with a run/walk/bike with the dog for an hour. I usually listen to podcasts while I’m out, and this morning I listened to the first couple episodes of a new developer podcast called The Dev Show.

Great content, good mix of web app, open source topics, and just interesting discussion if you are that certain kind of web geek into that sort of thing — like me.

You can follow them on twitter here: http://twitter.com/devshow
And, here’s an iTunes link for The Dev Show.

Here’s my iphone/podcast listening tip (if you can call it that) : Listen to your podcasts at doublespeed. Twice the podcast goodness in half the time! It only takes a minute to get so used to the speed that it sounds normal.

And, here’s tip #2. Don’t do this while listening to a podcast:

I think this news that Google will be soon moving into the lead aggregation business is interesting.

Here’s the official Google AdWords blog post on the subject.

We’ve used a number of lead aggregators — companies that essentially sell quote requests to a pool of potential service providers. BuyerZone, and Resource Nation are two examples. These companies typically derive much of their traffic and leads from natural and sponsored search.

Often, the math works in their favor, allowing them to out-compete individual service providers in sponsored search. For example:

Say the Service Provider has a CPA (cost-per-acquisition) target of $75 for their search leads. That’s a level where they know they will be profitable. If their site converts 5% of search traffic to a lead overall, they could pay ~ $3.75/click in sponsored search.

The Aggregator however will take the leads they generate and re-sell them to anywhere between 3-7 individual Service Providers for typically $15 to $35. If they can sell these leads to six providers at $30ea, they’ll be able out-bid those same providers.

6 x $30 = $180 revenue/lead
assume 100% gross revenue return target, and 5% conversion rate

The aggregator can spend $4.50/click, while expecting to earn $9/click. To the Service Provider they are still getting leads significantly below their $75 target.

The Aggregators also often out-convert Service Providers because they have such a clear and simple goal and benefit proposition — complete this form and you’ll get six quotes from qualified providers.

You can see the impact conversion rates (and closing rates) have on the economics of this situation. It may be in your best interests as a service provider to pay a little more for that exclusive lead, knowing that you’ll close a larger portion of them.

Now, it looks like Google is going to get into the lead gen process themselves–which has the potential to totally disrupt the existing market, with the greatest potential losers being the Lead Aggregators.

Should be interesting to watch.

What does it say about Yahoo!’s sponsored search system that they could not make a profit from the 10MM visits/month that GeoCities sites were receiving before they pulled the plug last week?

I was reading this post yesterday, and it made me want to estimate how much the GeoCities sites were really costing Yahoo.

I tried to make some order-of-magnitude estimates of how much the hosting of these domains was costing Yahoo. Was it really a cash drain?

Hosting:
7.5 million hosted sites.
5 Megabytes of data/site (this is probably way high)

That’s 37.5 TeraBytes of data to store.
Using the highest tier Amazon S3 pricing (we know it would be cheaper than this) of $0.15/Gigabyte, that’s $5,625 in storage/month.

Bandwidth:
10 MM Visits/month.
Assume an average of 3.5 pages/visit (probably high).
Assume 100k transferred/page (also probably high).

That’s 3,500GB transferred/month.

Again using the highest S3 data transfer price of $0.17/GB, we’re looking at $595/month.

Add the per/request fees of $0.012/1000 requests. We’ll assume there were 15 objects/page, 35 million page views, that’s another $6,300 in request fees.

So, looking at storage and bandwith costs of serving the GeoCities requests we’re talking about somewhere on the order of $12,520/month. That doesn’t seem like a lot of money just to keep the geocities pages alive. To cover those costs you’d need to generate just 3.6 cents out of every 1,000 pageviews! It seems like some contextual links could have covered that?

I’m making a lot of assumptions, and to be conservative I’ve tried to estimate on the high side of things. They’ll also need to maintain some of their own infrastructure, or outsource the actual serving of the sites–but I’d think they probably have that down to a science. Yahoo would also likely need at least some staff to manage and support the service, and some staff to plan and manage marketing campaigns to your GeoCities audience. These salaries would far outweigh actual hosting costs—but still, seems like they could have made it work.

Ways they could have made money from that traffic:

1. Cross Sell other Yahoo! properties from the GeoCities pages. Use a small top-of page banner of some kind.
2. Serve their own PPC contextual ads on the Geocities pages
3. Remarket Yahoo’s hosting services to the Geocities site owners (they made a small effort in this regard at the end, but you could continue to market to your 7.5 million site owners month after month.
5. Add AdSense to the GeoCities sites — Heh, heh, just kidding but it would work

So, what do you think? What am I missing?

In the end they probably just decided the revenue upside was just not worth the effort. But it makes me wonder what other Yahoo! properties are in exactly the same situation.

IAC ranks right behind Yahoo in terms of skill in turning interesting web properties into web graveyards.

Four years ago IAC bought Ask Jeeves for stock worth 1.85 billion (at the time). But, since that IAC stock is now worth about 30% of its value back then that would place the deal’s present value at about 550 million—still way, way too much. Now it seems IAC is ready to put Ask (minus the Jeeves) on the block.

We were Ask Jeeves advertisers once upon a time. Back when they had their own ad management system instead of the horrible outsourced Looksmart clone they implemented in 2006—a decision I’ll never understand.

Back there in late 2005 there did seem to be a glimmer of hope that Ask Jeeves may grow their 3% search share to something bigger. They had a memorable brand with the Jeeves butler. But, IAC showed him the door in a rush to turn them into the next ho-hum online destination.

The butler didn’t fit with their rush to be just like Google. See, they’d upgraded their search technology so you didn’t have to do your searches in the form of a question. But maybe asking a question to the butler was the only fun thing about the site! I mean he was in the Macy’s day parade. Come on!

Interesting Utah factoid, one-time super-star Utah agency DSW created the original Jeeves brand (along with Intel Inside among others). DSW also gave COGBOX one of our very first jobs back in ‘97.

Good luck unloading Ask.com. I can’t imagine who would line up to buy it.
You had potential at one time, and it was squandered.

Here’s more on the topic.

If you watch just one of these videos, watch the one called “big dog”. Amazing!

Fast Company pulled all the videos of their other robots together here.

The company is called Boston Dynamics.

October 27th 1994. 15 years ago today, the first online banner ads were run on HotWired.com.

That first day also marks the zenith of banner ad click through rates. A banner with just two words, “Click Here”, achieved a 78% click-through rate. Each click was followed by the user sighing and saying “oh, it’s just an ad”.

Here’s an interesting account by Frank D’Angelo at AdAge.

In the twelve years since we started COGBOX I’ve never experienced a hard drive crash. So, I was probably due.

Yesterday, while working on a COGBOX.com refresh my up-till-now trusty iMac suddenly froze. And, on restart I saw the dreaded flashing-question-mark-folder screen—not good.

While my iMac is still not back in service, I’m back in action with a combination of my laptop and other office machines.

There are a few choices that have made this hard drive crash much, much less painful than it could have been. I thought I’d post them here to give credit to the products/services that have helped. Maybe my experience will help you.

Hosted Subversion Repositories – Beanstalk
We use Subversion for version control on all our client sites, and we host our Subversion repositories off site with Beanstalk. Beyond all the other many benefits of version control, hosting at beanstalk makes picking up development right where I left off super-fast. Three other development tools we use that are subversion friendly : Versions, BBEdit, and Coda.

Google Apps – Gmail, Calendar and Tasks
About two years ago we moved all our cogbox.com email over to Gmail for Business. It would be impossible to go back. Besides the amazing speed with which I can search through 40,000 messages in my inbox, having our email as a web service means no hiccups in the case of disasters like yesterday’s. Just lately I’ve started using Tasks from in Gmail and really like it, easy fast to-do lists (they look good on the iphone too).

So I’ve got my client’s sites & development projects, my email/calendar and my to-do lists. What about other work files?

Time Machine
Fortunately, Apple came through for me. I’d stopped paying attention to whether my backups were working months ago. But Time Machine was there in the background storing my files every hour.

My only regret is excluding some of my system files and applications from my Time Machine backups to save space. When I do get my iMac back in working order I’ll have to spend some time re-installing a bunch of apps. What I should have done (and will be doing in the future) is let time machine do a whole system backup to a larger network storage device like a Drobo. Then my recovery would be as simple as a hard drive swap and restore from Time Machine.

All-in-all, relatively painless. I’ll update my post as my recovery proceeds.

Update:
I forgot one other app that has made my life much easier with this crash —Yojimbo. It’s another app from the makers of BBEdit that allows me to store (and encrypt) thousands of logins, notes, code snippets and other bits of information, then sync it between multiple machines. With all the mental space I’ve freed up with this app I can now sometimes even remember where I’ve left my keys!

Update 2:
I found the difference between an Apple HD replacement and a local Mac Reseller (MacDocs) HD replacement is about $150 and 1 TeraByte. Apple Store: Replace my 500 GB drive w/another just like it – $350. MacDocs: Replace with 1.5 TeraByte drive $200.

(Normally something as simple as a HD replacement is something I’d do myself, but the Aluminum iMac replacement process involves suction cups and major dis-assembly—well worth avoiding for the $75 mac docs fee.)

Yahoo (I’m sorry, I’ve lost the enthusiasm for the brand required to call them “Yahoo!”) is putting a long neglected sponsored search program to bed for the last time. No, it’s not their PPC program, though that was long neglected, it is their paid inclusion program — Search Submit.

Search Submit allowed you to pay a fee to guarantee inclusion of your pages in the Yahoo Search index. We actually used that service years ago. It was a convenient way to ensure that you had new pages indexed quickly, and that large sites like ecommerce sites were fully indexed.

These days failure to get your site fully indexed has more to do with poor site design than with failure to cough up some extra cash to Yahoo. And, for commerce sites there is always Yahoo Product Submit.

The program will end at the end of this year. Buh bye.