The Lack of Intention Economy

“Since the clicks will likely look legitimate, it comes down to intent – did the user click the ad just to click it, or did they have a genuine interest in the advertisement? It’s not so easy to tell…”

Mark Cuban dissects click fraud. The quote above is from the comments following Mark’s post. Good stuff. Reminds me of an interesting bit about Google’s AdSense program. If what they owe an ad publisher less than $10, Google sits on the money. Since the long tail is shaped like a spatula, there’s potentially millions of not quite $10s sitting safely a Google bank account somewhere.

Same goes for Netflix. More than a certain number of DVD shipments per month, and a customer starts to be a liability. Putting faith in customers to sit on a disc for a week or so at a time and it’s no problem. Subscriptions continue to roll in, independent of discs returned.

What if all the click fraud (robots clicking ads) and all the helping-a-friend clicking went away and conversion dropped below 1/10 of 1%?

Seems ad creators have a vested interest in not exposing click fraud – if only to say their ads are “working”.

Much Love to the St. Anthony Village Muni

After working inside all day (still too much construction noise to move the office outside) I took a the 7-block walk up to the Chipotle in our nearly a year-old Silver Lake Village (spot of the old Apache Plaza mall donchaknow).

In addition to burritos, crack stone creamery, and a handful of other less than compelling storefronts, there’s a St. Anthony Village municipal liquor store. The second in fact. The original is a half dozen block south of us.

I popped in just to check it out their import beer selection – which continually impresses me. Yes, I was impressed. Shelf upon shelf of interesting Belgian and English brews.

Much love to their buyer.

Pondering a Name Change

Hi, my name is Garrick.

It’s a good name. One I’m happy with – now. As a kid, it was a frustrating name. Relatively long, unfamiliar, and without an easy nickname. Though, in the end, those attributes don’t really matter. Persistence does. Continual usage over decades made me more comfortable with my name and by extension, everyone else in the world.

Wait, not everyone else.

For there’s no way more than 30% of Americans have heard of me. Even though, I’m the “garrick” over at Google.

If I changed my name to say, “Mark”. Would more people have heard of me? Well, yes and no. More people are probably comfortable and familiar with “Mark” – and more Marks exist in the world, but they’re all different than me. So, despite more people knowing my name, fewer would actually know me. For all the people the knew me as “Garrick” would be seriously confused. So, by changing my name won’t increase the number of people that know me – but sticking with it will.

Thankfully, in chapter 6 of Freakonomics Steven and Stephen confirm a name is no indication of success, let alone popularity.

Ad-proaching a Singularity

This weekend, stuck in the land of dial-up, I paged through a print motorcycle magazine and compared the articles against the advertisments. All the ads were for gear, motorcycle shops, or vehicles to haul your motorcycles. Essentially, indistinguishable from the articles themselves. You can do the same with any reasonably niche dead tree publication.

The closer a publication moves to the right of the sketch above (going more niche) the more ads = information. The further to the left (going more general) the more ads are a distraction.

You’re already familiar with the Long Tail, so you already know this.

Elsewhere:

“Only 0.04% of those people who got the ads on their screens bothered to click on them. [Luke Mitchell] had expected at least 1% to respond.” -Catherine Holahan, BusinessWeek

“[Facebook is] advancing narcissism — which isn’t really making advertising any better — people will enhance their profiles to get better treatment from advertisers.” – Ester Dyson

“Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information.” – Dave Winer

What’s the Opposite of an Edge Case?

Stowe Boyd and Eric Rice have been taking about the problems of 37Signal’s Basecamp.

I find Stowe’s the most interesting (verses Eric’s ‘nobody uses it anymore’). Stowe says Basecamp is great for small businesses, but it breaks down when small businesses collaborate – there’s no out-of-the-box way to connect accounts on a per-project basis.

“if I am working with four companies who each have a Basecamp instance, I wind up with four account/login/password combinations, and worst of all, no unified dashboard view to consolidate all my Basecamp information” – Stowe Boyd

Thankfully Jason Fried replied and talked about the value of different customers.

“Most people are not like you…. most people don’t have the problems that techies do”

As a quick aside, I think Fried misses the point of the problem by classifying it as “single sign-on” (a “techie” term if there ever was one).

Here’s the question. Do you build and revise a product for:

  1. Most people that use a product just a little bit.
  2. Few people completely immersed in the world you’ve built for them.

I opt for #2, they’re the passionate ones.

In the end, Fried’s right – Basecamp’s API is open and we can rebuild it to the way we work.

Videos Tab in TiVo Desktop – Video Blogs Now Playing – Nearly.

There’s an Easter Egg in the version 1.9.3 of the TiVo Desktop software for Mac. Flipping the right switch in the Preference Pane’s preference shows a new ‘Videos’ tab.

Restarting the server and scrolling to the bottom of ‘Now Playing’ shows my MacBook.

I’m very pleased they put my videos in ‘Now Playing’ (even at the bottom), rather than buried within the clumsily labeled ‘Music, Photos, Products, & More’ where they put the rest of my stuff. I’m glad we’re that much closer to the TiVo future I mentioned a while back.

On the downside, the TiVo still only understands MPEG-2 files. Not very popular round the videoblog-o-sphere. So, there’s a conversion step needed (Tivoizer to the rescue). Bah.

Though baby steps are baby steps.

If It Weren’t For The Customers

“I believe media companies are afraid of interacting with their audiences, because they (mistakenly) believe that their audiences are made up of people just like them — resentful, mean spirited, backbiting, hostile egomaniacs with inferiority complexes who, if given the opportunity, will spout their opinions without regard or respect for anyone but themselves.” – Terry Heaton

I’m continually surprised when I encounter the Us-v-Them attitude Terry describes. I spent so much of my day building partnerships with clients, customers, and collaborations that I forget it’s still out there.