The Google AdSense Blog has a good post on eCPM for those wondering how advertisement is paid. The general thing is that CPM, cost per 1000 impressions of advertisements (cost per mille to be exact), is a very good way to measure the success of a web site. My personal blog is in the 1 digit eCPM via AdSense while the OUBS Blog is in the double digits for example. The thing is though that just because it is a good way to measure like this, doesn’t mean it’s a good way to be paid in that form. But this will develop over the next years and with TV, radio, newspapers, … being digitized it will happen there too. And attached to that are a million of cool opportunities.
Technorati Tags: eCPM, Google AdSense, Ormigo
Monthly Archives: February 2006
Short Intro to eCPM
ZoneTag US Online
Yahoo! has released a new research project called ZoneTag and as always it is US only. I really have to move to the US some time! 
Automatically tagging my shots with my location would be very cool indeed, and the cellID information seems to be purchasable in most if not all countries. So I hope they will come out with a plan for Germany soon. (source)
Technorati Tags: cellID, Location Based Services, UMTS, Yahoo!, ZoneTag
Foneros Frappr Map
Until Plazes FON system comes online, you can all enter yourself on the Foneros Fappr! Map. I am number 5 in Germany.
Technorati Tags: FON, Frappr
Pricing Structures at FON
Martin posted on how FON talks with ISPs and with it revealed some good infos about pricing structures for all those business minded people listening in. At first, ISPs are sceptical…
But when we have our foot in the door and we explain exactly how Fon increases ARPU and reduces churn, ISPs do a 180 on us. The key here is our rules. First on prices. Fon will charge aliens (paying customers who pay because they have not donated wifi) $2 in the States and 2 euros in Europe. This rate is a bargain for 24 hours. With this rate we become the “easy jet” of wifi. But interestingly this rate is not low enough to get a neighbor to want to connect through another neighbor. In France for example you get good monthly broadband connections for 22 euros per month. So at 2 euros per day it just does not pay to be an alien.
So in the end it’s about taking all your stakeholders into account in your pricing strategy. FON could go lower than 2 EURs, and that might be one of their week points. Other providers of WiFi access points might be able to go lower, but FON has a hard time doing it, because that’s one of the good sale points with ISP because of the point made by Martin above. If they would go lower than it would make sense for me to sit together with my neighbors and let them all use my box via the standard FON way (with just giving them access of course being illegal in any case).
One thing I do not fully understand from his post, which will probably become clearer once I have my box, which should be in the next few days is how much they can pay when. If I am a Linus, so offering my box free to other Linuses, then the ISP will obviously not get money for Linuses accessing my box, or do they? If I connect as a Linus to a Bill box, I need to pay $2. If a Bill accesses my box he has to pay $2. Aliens obviously always pay. So the only downside is clearly that a T-Online Linus and a Arcor Linus will be able to share each others bandwidth. But hey, they both do have DSL, so that’s probably ok for the ISP because more people might get DSL if it gives them a roaming account right with it.
If I understand Martin’s post correctly … after reading it one more time, the revenue sharing he is talking about is that if a Bill or Alien connects to my box the ISP gets 50% and FON 50%, so I get nothing, but I do get the roaming. A Bill would get 50%, with ISP and FON each getting 25%. So in this case, there is a virtual cost connected with being a Linus, and I would have to see how many people connect to my box and choose to be a Bill or Linus accordingly. If I get a lot of connections, charging money will be worth more than the few roaming days. My first idea, in that revenue always goes to the box owner first, if it is generated via his box, actually sounds more logical. Then Linuses are just an additional community above the Fonero community. We will see soon enough.
Technorati Tags: FON, nocat, Pricing Structure, WiFi
It’s a particle … It’s a wave … It’s …
Having studied physics once, I am still amazed at stuff like this. Check out the following video on Google. A real must see: Quantum Physics Double Slit Experiment – What The Bleep Movie – Google Video.
I think scientists should do more things like this to make sure they get their funding. After you have seen the video, ask yourself if you want us to know more about this and whether something good will come out of it or if you think it is a waste of money.
And here is the newest feature of Google video. You can now put this directly on your site.
Technorati Tags: Electron, Light, Particles, Physics, Quantum physics, Waves
Moving to Performance Marketing
There’s a good article on Topix.net’s blog entitled 7 billion, $108 billion. 45 billion, $46 billion.. In it Mike looks at the revenues of Google and Yahoo coming up in his calculation at a CPM for search based advertising of $50 CPM and site wide CPM of $4. His calculation is flawed in some respects as to Yahoo! selling the homepage for a fixed amount of time, or that there are $20 CPM runs and more on Yahoo! probably but they are just not fully sold out at all times and that Yahoo! mail is huge but probably very bad to monetize. Another thing would be that his point about Wall Street valuing the search leader higher, which is untrue. They value the possibly revenue growth higher, and might be wrong there.
But his more interesting points come later.
It is going to take continued developments in both technology and business models to successfully morph the current advertiser experience delivered by the publishing world (access to eyeballs) to that delivered by the search world (access to actual leads). Obviously, performance advertising was a great first step in this direction.
I absolutely agree. Having built a big performance marketing network, I know this to be the future in many respects. The problem is factoring in branding into the equation. I starting an idea of a quasi Tobin’s q attached to performance marketing, meaning that if performance based your ad would have a value of $3 CPM, you can add a Tobin’s q of 3 for high branding value and pay $9 CPM with an idea that you are getting your bang for the buck. It might even be used to factor in lifetime value.
In any case, the industry is still very open and we are just working on one part of the entire equation here that is driving the lead based model further into the long tail. The long tail is all about aggregating, finding a common ground to work on. It’s similar to how VISA works really, in that you just set the rules and then let people work with it.
Technorati Tags: CPM, Google, Ormigo, Performance Marketing, Topix, Yahoo!
Industry Shots
I just had a great weekend with Thijs and among others we took a photo shoot around a few locations in cologne. Later Thijs gave me a bit of a deeper introduction to the art of editing RAW files with the likes of Adobe Lightroom (currently in Beta). I might have overdone it a little bit but here is a set of shots from some industry structures from the last days, all changed around in Lightroom for giving them just that little bit of kick, or making the speciality of the scenery clearer. Check it out on Flickr.
Tagged
Scot just tagged me so for the sake of the well being of this world I will respond.
Four shows I enjoy:
- The West Wing
- CSI
- This week in tech
- Whatever is on when I need to tune out
(podcast)
Four jobs I’ve held:
- Warehouse Ordering at a Polyprophylen/Polyethylen Laboratory
- Journalist
- Project/Product Manager
- Founder
Four places I’ve lived:
- Hilden, Germany
- Brussels, Belgium
- Aachen, Germany
- Cologne, Germany
Four places I’ve vacationed:
- Dominican Republic
- Dubai
- Turkey
- Tansania
Four cool toys:
- Powerbook
- Canon EOS 350D/Rebel XT
- Nokia N70
- My new FON router
Four Web sites I visit daily:
- Bloglines
- Statcounter
- Company Internal Tools
Four places I’d rather be:
- Home
- US West Coast
- Traveling across Asia
- Traveling across South America
(I am actually very happy here )
Four bloggers I’m tagging:
I HAVE A HOMEPAGE
And yes, I am screaming! Finally I can publish myself in a butt ugly manner on a Google Domain. Check out My Home Page on Google Pages.
Can I tell you something? I expected this to happen. But I expected SOOOOO much more!
Technorati Tags: Google, Google Pages, Home Page
MySpace scares Jeremy
Jeremy wrote a great post entitled MySpace is the New Blogosphere and in summary, MySpace scares him! When fully thinking about it, I can do nothing but agree. The easiest point to understand is this bit:
Let’s be fair. In April, MySpace will become the most trafficked site on the planet. By the end of the year, MySpace will account for roughly 10% of all web traffic and, by the end of 2006 (if growth and acceleration curves maintain), it will account for about 40% (accounting for a plateau, because realistically we can’t have more people on MySpace than are on the entire web).
That should be enough to scary many people out there and his point that it is growing almost three times as fast as the blogosphere and already has one third of the users should scare a few people too. This is already and will be a force to be dealt with. And hey, their “problems” with child molesters and the like… any single country with 30 million people has that problem too. It was to be expected and needs to be dealt with but it is nothing that surprises me the least bit.
Technorati Tags: Jeremy Wright, MySpace, Web Traffic
