http://www.jkontherun.com/2008/07/giga-omni-media.html

For the last couple of months, I have been spending countless hours looking / waiting for a new TabletPC to come out. With the amount of time I have spent on looking, I probably could have just went and bought top of the line and forgotten all my worries. In the course of looking for one of these computers, I was able to stumble onto this site, jkontherun, and have found it to be great ever since.

I just want to say congratulations to the two of them as they hopefully were able to get something for all the hard work they have put into their blog.

I think this buyout confirms two of the fundamental points which Scribefire is based on, and why I am excited about what I am working on.

1) Niche blogs can be successful.

Blogs which highly target a niche can still be successful even as the Internet becomes more and more commercialized. Federated Media, Glam Media, etc all have found that advertisers want to target to niches and that they haven’t been able to, or that its hard. Most of the companies are targeting the large blogs with the large audiences, but there isn’t a reason why semi-successful or even more niche audiences are just as important to advertisers.

2) Bloggers really just want to blog.

Two snippets from James really struck a chord for me.

What will change is a good thing- both Kevin and I have joined the Giga Omni Media group and will be able to focus all of our time on writing for you here on jkOnTheRun.

Having these resources at our disposal will not only mean your experience on the site will get better but it means that Kevin and I can concentrate solely on creating the content you crave.

The truth of the matter is that when you are running a blog, especially if it becomes a full time job, is that there is so much to have to worry about beyond your actual passion. The idea that, quite frankly, writing content and finding an audience is hard enough without having to find your own advertisers. The un-fun parts of actually making money starts to take a bigger and bigger role.

As advertisers feel more comfortable with the idea of User Generated

So, recently I have been on this Pandora kick. As an internet advertising guy, I find myself always looking at how display ads are shown on pages and wondering their effect.

Here is two screenshots I took of Pandora’s single ad placement on their player.

Some observations:
1) It seems they use the one placement for all their ad sizes, a 300×250, 160×600 and a background. Depending on the refresh, you will only see one ad, the size and type varying.

2) In the cases of the normal display ads, they are completely out of place versus the layout of the page.

3) Despite being completely out of place, with my computer screen size, and firefox at full screen, the ads are smack dab in the middle of the my computer screen.

This leads to some interesting questions,

1) Was this purposely planned? It makes the ads a bit more jarring, but not overly so. This should bring the ads to attention for the user, but not be overly annoying (think the flashing ads you may have seen).

2) What is the performance of these ads? What is the CPM pandora can sell at? On the one hand, these are pretty well placed ads. On the other, we are talking about a music player, which essentially means people are not looking at it all the time. In fact, there are probably epople who leave it ona nd walk away from the desk. There is no requirement for interaction to use which should mean lower performance, possibly even worse than social networks where users are at least interacting with the current page.

Of course, in the end, I may have completely overestimated the thought processes involved in creating these, but whether intentional or not, I would love to know the metrics on an ad unit on Pandora.

So, where have I been and what have I been doing?

It can all be summarized here.

Long story short. I am part of a group which is building a whole new ad network focused completely around the blogger. With today’s private launch, that includes the original ScribeFire tool, which allowed a blogger to post directly from Firefox. This also now includes the new QuickAd ability, which allows simple drag and drop of ads directly onto a site. The most amazing part of it is that you never have to leave firefox to do any of this.

This is just the first in a long line of functionality improvements to both the addon and to the website. We already have improvements in the pipeline.

Expect more to come.

Hi Everyboyd.

I am splitting up my blog.

http://personal.fredlu.com will be … well … the personal blog.

This blog will be more work related. And in that vein, I thought it was high time to put up what I have been working on and I promise I will next week. In mean time, the hint is on my right.

Just downloaded Firefox3 to try it out.

Good news:
Scribefire and FireFTP both still work. I use scribefire more than fireFTP but both as very useful extensions.
Tamper Data also works. Great for debugging.

Bad news:
Firebug doesn’t work. This is a horrendous killer for me. This extension is critical to my job.

In the 10 minutes I have played with it so far, it seems pretty good. I especially love the smaller shortcut bar, means it fits a lot more links than before.

UPDATE: Firebug does work, but it isn’t as good.  It used to output everything that was output to page, but I no longer see it anymore.  I used to be able to see what javascript built what frame etc, but can’t find that anymore.

http://checkoutblog.com/entries/2008/5/29/the_incredible_shrinking_laundry_deterg.aspx

Ever since finding it, I have absolutely loved the Walmart blog, and find how amazing a transformation in how I feel about the company came about because of it.

Prior to the blog, I always thought of Walmart as the big scary store. It is out to pay low and make profits purely based on size. Yet, reading the blog, you can find all the good things they do too (like this particular post about detergent). It is great to see a company use their power (buying power) both for good and evil. The good probably doesn’t come out nearly as often as it should.

For those in the industry, this graph has been making the rounds today.
You can find Pubmatic’s own view of it here:http://www.pubmatic.com/adpriceindex/index.html

Everyone has their opinions of this; some say this is bad sign for Pubmatic, others say its a sign of the economic times.

So what is my opinion? I think the data just isn’t clear enough. You cannot convince me that the cratering of cpms from .38 to .18 in single month is actually a real drop. Do you really think that the large sites with the dedicated work force could not sell half of what they had been able to sell only the previous month? This just says to me there is something wrong with the data. My suspicion would be some new large users who are low performance sites. A single large publisher with low cpms using the system can easily cause this drop without adverse affects on others in the column.

The interesting piece is the 1.29 number. How is this coming about? Why is it so much higher than large sites? I don’t buy the idea that its because advertisers are buying niche. Quite frankly, 1) advertisers are still quite weary of small sites and more importantly 2) there is just not the capability for an advertiser to target niche sites they are looking for.

So, before people read into this graph too much. Remember, while 3,000 seems like a large number, it is a tiny fraction of the internet. To make anything other than broad judgments on this data is overreacting.