Web Publishing

I find it interesting that a company which profits from legal system exploitation (at the cost of thousands of small-time webmasters) would send unsolicited commercial e-mail spam.

I never opted in to any Getty Images e-mail list. I do not know where they got my address. That does not even matter because the email alone broke several CAN-SPAM requirements listed by the FTC, such as “commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender’s valid physical postal address.”

For proof, here is the full e-mail below. Getty Images should be careful next time as well as fire whoever was responsible for a) assembling their email list and b) ensuring CAN-SPAM compliance.

Wipe the drool from your mouth. Now you can license even
rights-managed quality images for a flat rate of $49 each*.

All contents © 2007 Getty Images, Inc. All rights reserved.

I am considering taking my name off of Web Publishing Blog and opening it up to other writers. If you are interested, and qualified, drop me an email. I am open to a wide variety of possibilities including co-ownership. Owning your own internet business is a must.

Do we need a Techcrunch for the part of the internet that doesn’t live off venture capital?

One of the most important lessons I have learned from web publishing and development is that testing & optimization is absolutely critical. Often a few minor adjustments done in 30 minutes can bring in more revenue than months of work. Its even better when those adjustments are done on the fly, leaving you time to do thing machines can not.

Last month one of my readers contacted me about a new service he co-founded, Pubmatic.com. This service allows publishers to auto-optimize their ad inventory on the fly. Unlike Right Media’s RMX Direct, the built in support for Adsense & Yahoo should be a big benefit self-employed content publishers.

Pubmatic currently supports Adsense, Valueclick, BlueLithium, and YPN. Expanding supported ad networks is a top priority, and many more are expected. Text ad color schemes are auto-optimized. Planned additions to later versions include ad size optimization, page position, and number of ad units per page.

One of the case studies Pubmatic lists is Sportsvite.com, which saw its revenue jump 90% during Pubmatic’s alpha testing period. While other publishers may not see such dramatic successes, double digit revenue gains are considered normal.

If that didn’t impress you, then at least check out their desktop widget for Adsense, YPN, Valueclick, and Komli stats, Pubmatic account not required.

If you do want to test out Pubmatic, they are now in open beta, timed just for TechCrunch40.

What is one simple thing that can slice away half of your revenue? If you are not measuring it, you may blame revenue and loss gains on randomness, or mistakenly assign it to something else.

That thing that matters oh so much is server speed.

Real numbers: One of my websites coverts at around 4-5.7%. However, an extra 10 seconds of loading time can slice that number down below 3%. When things get really bad, that number can slide down to 1%.

Whether you have an e-commerce site, or a content site, this will impact you. Friendster’s decline is largely attributed to growth problems destroying their performance. Without a prompt fix many members migrated to Myspace, and the rest is history.

If you are investing a lot of time into an advertising campaign you need to monitor page load times throughout the day. If you have a content site, make sure off-server advertisements aren’t breaking your site’s load times. If you insist on overloading your pages with images & rich media then you better be prepared to pay to ensure speed. Visitors just won’t wait around short of catching the latest nudie shots of their favorite celebrity.

Off topic, note for regular readers. I was an idiot and accidentally made a post based on a 7 year old story (argh!), which I deleted as soon as a reader pointed it out. However, I am planning a big post about parking domain names verse developing them later, possibly for late next week.

The New York Times reports today:

“Business 2.0, a monthly magazine about the new economy, will be shut down rather than sold, its owners at Time Inc. have decided. The publication, which has been suffering from a decline in advertising revenue, will cease publication after its October issue, which will have a cover article on where to invest in a real estate downturn.”

Too bad, although we knew this was coming. Some of the staff will be moved over to Fortune magazine, and presumably so will existing subscribers.

A recent report indicates that online gaming beats social networking and video sharing for internet users over 18. This year 34% reported playing online games weekly, 29% watching videos, and only 19% participating in social networking sites. Gaming saw the largest yearly growth — from 19% in 2006 to 34% this year.

Gaming, as a whole, is hot. MTV recently announced they were investing half a billion dollars in gaming. The unpredicted global success of the World of Warcraft MMORPG raking in $1 billion in revenue have certainly helped grease the flow of revenue to online gaming (that was in 2006.)

So how can an independent online entrepreneur take advantage of this information? (Those of you who voted “no” to owning your own business in our latest poll, take note.)

First, its what isn’t being done that matters. Is this story just about gaming being big? What I see is that adults need more social networking sites to call home. Myspace’s audience either appears to be young & wild while Facebook remains home to the young & educated.

Second, advertisers need performance from gaming advertising (and video, as well.) Considering the religious zeal mega corporations poured millions in to promoting themselves on the tiny niche virtual world of Second Life, this is easy money. Game developers + public relations machine = a money printing press. Give the brand advertisers real engagement, not a sideshow a few academics and jounalists visit.

There is a lot of money to be made. Lots of competition is not a bad thing. Simply work your business around and with the competition rather against it — thats the way to go.

Need more ideas?

YPN made quite a few layout web site publishers criminal amounts of money last year. Massive amounts of traffic combined with $1+ clicks adds up very rapidly. Following a crackdown by Yahoo, quite a few were scrambling to unload their inventories on Sitepoint & Digitalpoint’s marketplace.

One teen girl is in it for the layout market long term. Ashley Qualls has turned down a $1.5 million buy out offer and is growing strong. She’s made those quick to cash out look very foolish.

“Whateverlife attracts more than 7 million individuals and 60 million page views a month. That’s a larger audience than the circulations of Seventeen, Teen Vogue, and CosmoGirl! magazines combined.”

This story is great evidence that you don’t have to be a programming wizard to make very good money on the web. I recommend you check out the full article in Fast Company magazine, read it for yourself here.

I am interested in how many readers own their own business. More specifically, is the business your primary source of income?

Computer repairmen,

(click here for part 2, it gets better)

Car mechanics,

Home Depot salesmen,

Mercedes dealers,

Anything technical or mechanical that you don’t understand — you are probably getting ripped off.

During my flight to Affiliate Summit East in Miami last month I read the latest issue of Harvard Business Review. The July-August issue was titled “Going the Distance” and it focused on long term success management.

The article that stuck with me the most was “The 4 Principles of Enduring Success.” A group from Innsbruck University School of Management studied European companies who have outperformed their competitors (more details here.) The results appeared to be based on current stock prices (which in itself is questionable,) however the points are valid if not containing a bit of common sense.

First, “exploit before you explore.” Great companies use their existing assets before moving on to greener pastures. If you are a one man band with attention deficit disorder, your in trouble. Web publishers: squeeze as much profit as you can out of your existing web properties. Marketers: saturate the heck out of what works.

Second, “diversify your business portfolio.” Can you exploit what you are good at and diversify at the same time? These sound contradictory; the author notes diversification in suppliers and customers. Web publishers: If 95% of your traffic comes from Google and 95% of your revenue from Google Adsense, watch out! Marketers: just the same as publishers, make sure all you income and leads are not coming from a single source.

Third, “remember your mistakes.” This may be common since, but in a corporate environment it takes effort to communicate failures that may have occurred even 5 years ago. Publishers & Marketers: Record your major changes in a journal, noting what works and what doesn’t. When dealing with future projects you can look back and identify success trends (I am doing this already with great results.)

Finally, “be conservative about change.” When 3 year old companies get eaten up for billion-dollar price tags and search engine algorithms send small businesses into bankruptcy taking things slowly seems insane. Perhaps a better take on the word conservative is testing things before going all in. That means understanding what you are getting yourself into rather than just trying to follow everyone else. Web publishers: Build sites up slowly, rather than working 3 months solid and rolling the dice on a launch. Marketers: gather market intelligence and run lengthy testing before dropping millions, or thousands, on a new product.

Harvard Business Review often has insightful articles. Unlike typical news magazines covering stories of the latest trends and events, HBR’s articles read like detailed case studies. Unfortunately retrospective views often lead to cherry picking facts, so it is fair to view the conclusions with some skepticism.