Lingolook

More on the Net Neutrality debate.

Keep your eye on this.

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I had no idea this was on the cards.

Just as I started to believe in the power of the many, it looks like some of the few have very different plans for the future of the Internet.

Spread the word.

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My last post spoke about not going back.

I wrote it very late at night (for me anyway) and it was a groggy description of where my world was heading.

Two days and as many nights have passed and if anything the weight of change described in that post is even heavier today. An old saying goes: When the student is ready, the teacher will come. I like to think of it as the moment your mind is open, clarity comes.

I am beginning to see the power of long tail communities.

I’m not speaking of empty forums set up to discuss the pro’s and con’s of a single idea but communities where the collective knowledge, emotions and feelings of millions of users is shared. In his book “The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand“, Chris Anderson described it as probabilistic statistics - a matter of likelihood rather than certainty - but there is something about using the combined knowledge of an open community as the lowest common denominator in the definition of a particular principle that defies the imagination.

Wikipedia is of course the flag bearer for this medium, but there is an increasing amount of interest in this means. Take Imagine, a site that infuses the mechanism for people to self-organize get togethers such as the one’s introduced by Meetup.com with the passion of idealistic activists around the world.

Imagine’s vision is deceptively simple:

We want to live in a world where all people can live free and dignified lives, where any person who wants to help another can do so, and where no opportunities for action and collaboration are missed or wasted.

The strength of purpose of this kind of initiative is phenominal, with thousands of people worldwide dreaming, planning, doing what they want for their own communities, shifting power from institutions to people at the edges.

Or even the Personal Democracy Forum 2007 coming soon to New York, starring some of the online world’s biggest movers and shakers that aims to address:

• How is voter-generated content changing election campaigns?
• Why should advocacy groups adapt to the connected age?
• What new technology tools and practices are on the horizon?
• How are new technologies democratizing the political process?
• Which political leaders “get it”?

OK, political motivations aside, what do communities like this offer for business and marketers in particular. The possibilities are endless, once the insights and mindsets of your target audience has been fully understood. Once you accept that the many can be smarter than the few (The Wisdom of Crowds), developing a campaign becomes a process of striking the right chord in the right places.

Look at what happened over on Dell’s Ideastorm site, which uses a combination of blog user interaction with a Digg-style voting mechanism to give public weight to the unthinkable.

Going back to Wikipedia, and to one of my projects in particular, what would happen if you focused the probabilistic systems used to build an unstoppable collection of online reference material on a “massive-scale” towards instruction? Could the web be left in charge of its own education? Could its millions of users teach themselves?

Like the guys at TTeach, I believe they could and am working on a means to prove it.

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It’s a fascinating moment for me.

On the one hand I’ve got a great job. Copywriting - and in particular freelance copywriting - has given me both the insight and education that lets me put my thoughts and feelings into words as well as the time, freedom and inclination to explore the outer reaches of web life.

At ‘work’ I have been busy drafting the story behind a few upcoming product launches with various success. I have been studying various ways of approaching the thorny subject of internal communication and recruitment. On top of all this, I have also been looking into creating the master content of a series of web strategies so that the text is both easy to translate and effective across 7 key European markets.

Not a dull moment then.

But just like anyone with time management problems, I have also been distracted by what has in the past been called “blind ambition” but now goes by the name of a “challenge”.

You see ever since I stumbled across the letters, S, E and O, I have been drawn to their power - the fact that words, chosen carefully, could actually change the geography and relevancy of search engine results.

Then there was what you could actually do once you had uncovered this secret. White Hat is my natural colour of choice, of course, but nevertheless these three letters have unquestionably permitted some fortunate few to exploit a system to the detriment of the many.

These letters also have a more sinister side: they alienate you from the “real” world around you. I recently brought to my multi-billion dollar client’s attention that there was precious little activity on their site from any of the search engines. I even went as far as to recommend reformulating their web strategies not only to generate new traffic streams from natural search engine results but also to build enough reputation throughout the entire site to change the formula used by my client when linking to its resellers.

I got a big bunch of nods, a number of smiles and quite a few “wow we had no idea”s but never heard from them again about it. Meanwhile my client continues to pour truckloads of money into individual projects which, because they are disjointed from the overall core principles and are void of any shared values, detract from the performance of the site as a whole.

Ugh!

Either SEO (and SEM for that matter) is still in its infancy outside the US or I’m starting to be earn a reputation as a lunatic.

Best thing is to start my own business and boy do I have a few ideas knocking around. Thing is even then when I talk to friends and neighbours about them, even some who have offered to invest, the “big picture”always remains a few feet out of reach, as if what I see happening across the world in blogs, media companies and other online industries is merely a figment of my imagination, or just part of a game I’m playing all by myself.

‘Slow world’ meets the ‘fast world’, as an Italian web specialist once said, is when those living in a world fed by mainstream media have to deal with the lightning fast reactions of those of us who have chosen a more democratic, if slightly more volatile, path online. It’s never a pretty site and we (fasties) always come out worse off.

The question of whether to continue or go back is a rhetorical one. However the answer opens up a whole new debate: Then what?

I have ordered the near future into challenges I have to face:

1. I want and need to master the art of RSS as I believe RSS technology is what’s needed to create the world’s most advanced e-learning platform.
2. I believe that niche communities and experience aggregators are the key to entrepreneurial success in a Web 2.0 world. Jeremy’s “No Money in Web Advertising” articles have been instrumental in this decision.
3. I believe strongly in a healthy relationship between paid content and free services. E-learning, for example, is an ideal platform to experiment with both.

Each of the above is a open project I’d like to see up and running by the end of the year and if there are any talented writers, teachers or programmers reading this, I could probably bring that forward quite some way.

Want to know why I got buzzed today. Because I read this, then watched it here.

Oh and Jeremy, if you’re reading, I’ll be in touch soon - or you will…

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Jeremy Wright’s response to allegations that there’s no money in advertising is seriously worthy of note for anyone planning on setting up an online media company (like me).

If for nothing else, it was a real eye-opener for relative newcomers, again like me, on the mechanisms used to generate income from similar projects.

Remember I’m the creative one. I’ve got the idea in my head and am working on ways to implement it, yet people with hands-on knowledge of revenue streams are way ahead of me in this field.

What was particularly interesting for me was the part where Jeremy wrote:

They (Jeremy Liew’s figures) don’t hold true if:

1. You do more than 25M AdSense impressions per month (you get a better cut, exclusive deals, etc).
2. You work with a boutique ad network (like Federated Media).
3. Are able to get some remnant inventory providers (which can go from 0.50-2$/unit CPM, giving you an RPM of 1-4$ with just 2 units per page).
4. You do any non-performance/metric advertising (like sponsorships).
5. You do text links.
6. You have any internal sales team at all (which’ll sell those 1$ units for 2-5$, giving you an RPM of 4-10$ on even the most generic traffic).

He went even further:

1. For generic traffic, expect a 3-5RPM. To get to 50M$/year in revenue would thus require 800 million pages per month.
2. For demographically specific stuff, expect an RPM of 12-15. You’d need about 300M pages per month.
3. Huge in-demand areas like cars and sports can net you an RPM of 40-50. You’d thus need about 100 million pages per month.

Now that’s not to say these numbers are easy. But a media company that balances the above 3 properly, does sponsorships, syndication deals, content licensing, text links, feed ads, etc could potentially achieve 50M$/year in revenue on about 200 million pages per month.

The mechanisms at work here make fascinating reading. Sponsorships, syndication deals, content licensing, text links and feed ads are all relatively new business areas for me, but seeing as the project I’m toying with would be used extensively by universities and international business groups, it should be one of the first things I look at.

But it isn’t. I’m the creative one, remember? I just put two and two together and came up with over a million subscribers.

Maybe I should just give Jeremy a call…

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I was cruising around MySpace earlier on today and came across a link to a game called LOST.

It’s not the game I like (haven’t played, might not even get round to it), it’s the way it’s being promoted virally.

From the game’s own site:

Welcome to Lost. This game is a student project that aims to show how 7 million people connect and break the record for the most number of players ever.

You can join the game if you find an invitation. An invitation is an internet address that looks like this: www.lost.eu/example - but instead of the word ‘example’ there are some random numbers and letters.

There are invitations everywhere - on the internet and in the real world.

It’ll be interesting to see how fast Lost reaches its own particular Tipping Point.

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Before I do anything today I wanted to share yesterday morning with you.

I normally get into the office at around 8.00, switch on the PC and either go and grab a coffee or sift through my notes getting ready to start the day.

Yesterday was just like any other only something weird happened when I booted up.

While the PC was going through the usual start up procedure, I noticed a little pop up message that I have seen on three occasions beforehand. On each one of those I had no choice but to reinstall Windows which wouldn’t be so bad if I could have reinstalled a series of other programs I had bought online (thanks Virtual Thesaurus).

Took about two days to get me back up and running.

Now I rack up a lot of computer hours but that doesn’t make me an IT pro, so when the window with the words

“svchost.exe — application error the instruction at “0×745f2780″ reference memory at “0×00000000″. the memory could not be ‘read’”

popped up, I don’t know where to turn, particularly as the computer becomes unusable (no new executables would start).

As re-installing Windows is almost as traumatic as moving home or getting a divorce, I tried to think of what it was I had done to provoke this but the only thing I could remember was that Windows had run one of its scheduled automatic updates. Bingo. Windows had fried the PC!

Like most freelancers/consultants my PC is my lifeline. Without it I’m in apnoea.

This time I was determined not to lose everything so I googled the error message and found this which led me to a Microsoft patch that fixed the problem

Here’s the link: Download updates for Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Error and I thoroughly recommend you bookmark it for the day I hope never arrives for you.

More than thanking Scott Swigart and Chris Koester, who elicited comments like “You are a GOD!!!” I would like to ask Microsoft to investigate why this happens and STOP PUTTING MY BUSINESS AT RISK!

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The thing about Internet Marketing, and by that I mean businesses set up to take advantage of the Internet’s vast, cash-spending audience is that the only ones that actually seem to make any serious money out of it are the ones selling the dream to others.

Like a 21^st Century Ponzi scheme on a mass scale, Internet Marketing fuels the promise of easy money by creating 2^nd and even 3^rd tier affiliate programs, each getting a “cut” out of the diminishing sales that pass their way.

The problem is that if you work at it (and leave your morals at home) you can actually make affiliate marketing turn a handsome profit. Want to know why those “free” pornography picture sites pop up whenever your 9-year old daughter uses Google for her geography project? Affiliate marketing.

It might not be ethical, but I know a man who knows a man that spends all day putting TGP codes into his various sites, generating an effortless $10,000 a month for himself in the process. No brainer that one.

Apart from subscriptions (we’ll get to that) there are times when I can’t help thinking that info products are the only thing outside the adult industry that actually “work”.

Take this article from the New York Times. It’s a fascinating piece about the earnings potential of Adsense sites that really puts things into perspective.

The article asks the question:

Let’s say you wanted to build an advertising-supported online media business that took in $50 million a year in revenue. How many users would you have to attract to get there?

OK $50 million a year sounds like an awful lot of cash, but only if you’re alone. If you’re a serious business, that’s probably where you’d aim.

So anyway, the results. According to the author of the report, Jeremy Liew, a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners, the numbers are like a cold shower.

To make $50 million with a big staff-produced content-rich guitar site, sponsored by, say, Fender and Gibson, a site would have to generate more than 200 million page views a month, Mr. Liew estimated.

A site aimed at a specific demographic, like teenagers or Asian-Americans, would need to generate 800 million page views a month, by Mr. Liew’s reckoning.

And for a general-interest site, the ad rates go even lower, so traffic would need to be much higher to generate $50 million — about four billion page views a month, which would put it in the top 10 of all the sites on the Web.

I just had a quick look at B5Media’s (falling) Alexa ratings. Remember this is a project based on advertising revenue with, according to its home page: more than 170 blogs, 14 vertical channels and 2.5 million unique visitors a month.

UPDATE: Jeremy Wright from B5Media correctly pointed out that this graph only describes the visitors to theB5Media homepage and doesn’t reflect page views across all their blogs which are of course hosted on separate domains. Mea culpa.

Even with 2.5 million unique visitors per month, how the hell is B5Media making any money? Even if these “unique” visitors subscribe to more than one of B5Media’s blogs, we’re still a long way off that 200 million per month target. I must be missing something somewhere…

So where does that put me and my opinion? Nowhere new really. I have always been a little suspect of single income channels for online businesses as the numbers just don’t add up. But Jeremy Liew’s results certainly illustrate the daunting battle to remain financially viable faced by content-dependent Long Tail businesses.

I personally think that Adsense only works if combined with other sources of income, for example combining advertisements and affiliate programs within a paid subscription product. Sounds far fetched and you’d have to tone it down to avoid being slapped constantly by Google, but there are plenty of successful marketers doing this already. That way there is subscription revenue from one product and advertising and affiliate revenue from another that is seamlessly integrated into the first. What’s more, as the reader base actually wants to be there, integrating the two might also increase advertising CTR.

Just a thought, or at least it was as it’s the model I am developing for Web-Teach, but I’ll write more on this as I go along.

UPDATE 2: Jeremy also mentions that B5Media is planning to abandon Adsense as it isn’t a business model and I can’t say I blame them. Even with an average RPM like theirs you’re always going to need to be stretching it a bit too far to make any sense (sic) out of Adsense.

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I am going to be absorbed by two things this week:

The first is something I caught off of Jack Humphrey’s fabulous Friday Traffic Report blog.

Called social power linking, in essence the theory is that Search Engines do not have the monopoly on surfers. By that I mean that surfers don’t start at a SE, visit a site, go back to the SE, visit the next site and so on. Once they’re surfing, they’re probably bouncing from one site straight to the next. I know that’s true for me - I use a non-personalized Google page as my homepage (to get off it ASAP), and only ever go back there as a starting point when my personal search conversation changes.

In between, I’m clicking around a lot, using one site’s links to head off to another, that I probably wouldn’t have found in in SE’s.

Here’s where the “social” aspect comes in and it’s particularly important in blogs, after all we bloggers will link to anyone!

Just like in SEO, Social Power Linking gets you in the way of passing traffic but not just SE traffic generated by a few, carefully guarded keywords. It’s about giving and getting. Being part of communities, throwing up and promoting your feeds within them and getting much more efficient and effective in what Jack describes as “marking your turf”.

There’s quite a lot to pick up on here so I’m going to spread it out over the week ahead and share a little of the experience online every day.

The other thing I’m involved in this week is getting my Web-Teach project into first gear. This is one of those ideas I’ve had in the back of my mind for longer than my pride will allow me to admit, and the reason it’s surfaced now is thanks in no small part to a recommendation by Shel Israel when replying to Tom Shelley of the Economist.

The idea of paying bloggers part of the Adsense (or similar) revenue  from their particular page is as simple (and obvious) as it is pure genius and exactly what my Web-Teach project is looking for.

Web-Teach (not its final name BTW) is essentially an adaptive online language teaching project, designed to offer language students access to relevant content (personalized fields of interest) that is also didactically in line with their linguistic needs. A way of giving what they want AND what they need. A kind of B5Media for language-learners if you will.

Trouble is, this idea is so far down the Long Tail it’s mind-bogglingly complex to undertake alone and that’s where Shel’s revenue-sharing idea steps in (if you’re reading this Shel, thanks for that).

So Web-Teach is now almost viable.  It’ll have an unglamorous launch but maybe, thanks to the power of social media, a bright future.

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I read an interesting article over on Shel Israel’s blog about how Tom Shelley of the Economist had started mailing him asking for ideas on the direction the Economist should take while developing its own blog.

The post immediately after was one from Shel asking the public how his new book was shaping up.

This product/public interaction got me thinking about how one could or should adopt social media to create and market a new product and whether the need to satisfy public demand stifles brand identity by outsourcing it to the world at large.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m already a self-declared fan of Dell’s IdeaStorm and firmly believe that direct public interaction in shaping a company’s products and strategies is a fascinating development of this new medium.

But at the same time, I can’t help thinking this strategy risks pandering to a fickle public hunger for mediocrity and not necessarily what a product, brand or company stands for.

If blogs are the doyen of long tail social dialogue, then why is it their creators feel they need to satisfy short-tail philosophies to make sure they are accepted?

I think there is a danger of getting wires crossed here.

Physical products (and real-world businesses for that matter) live in a short-tail world and need all the help they can if they are to exceed their pre-set Key Performance Indicators. That’s why Shel’s call for public approval, and indeed Dell’s attempt to engender public input are such great ideas. 

Blogs, however, live in an entirely different medium. Sure, Technorati has its own Top 10, but this is principally about frequency, not authority. So asking the public how a blog should be isn’t so much helping a blog’s rankings as an attempt to make it an instant, popular hit rather than building it and shaping its inherent values over time.

I think companies should do everything in their power to ensure that their soul is the driving force behind projects as niche-rich as blogs, and champion this above anything else from the outset, no matter what happens.

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