Google and eBay – grow a spine Google

According to the BBC at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6755789.stm
eBay’s annual advertising budget on Google is $25m which, quite honestly, is a drop in the ocean to Google. It may be the biggest but it’s still not significant in the grand scheme of things.

eBay would easily lose more than $25m in annual sales if it pulled Google advertising (otherwise it wouldn’t be spending the $25m).

Google checkout will never make it as long as Google keeps backing down like this.

What’s with all the lol cats?

Maybe I just don’t get it.

thebestof.co.uk – Alexa rank too high?

I was looking through the top UK sites as ranked by Alexa to see if I was missing out on anything good and stumbled upon thebestof.co.uk which I hadn’t come across before. After a few minutes browsing the site I came to the conclusion that it was a pretty appalling site and that the Alexa stats must be wrong.

On closer inspection from here
http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=thebestof.co.uk
You can see that currently 34 percent of visits are to the sub-site oldadmin.thebestof.co.uk and 5 percent visit forums.thebestof.co.uk.

Since only the site owners and local area sub site owners can access oldadmin.thebestof.co.uk and since most of these owners will also look at their content to see if it uploaded OK it seems that almost all visitors to thebestof.co.uk are simply the site editors themselves. Also the forums get 5% of visitors but are virtually empty – 5% of the UK’s 68th most popular site should be a pretty busy forum.

According to thefranchisemagazine.net at http://www.thefranchisemagazine.net/franchise/Thebestofcouk/It-Really-is-Phenomenal/599 they charge between £9,999 and £24,999 per local sub site – that’s a lot of money for a web site that only you visit.

Fools and their money…

FeedYes dropped – thanks for the spam!

I was using FeedYes for converting a sites updates content into an RSS feed however they’ve started spamming my readers big time by injecting fake spam posts.

In fact they were sending more spam messages to my feed that there were legitimate messages, I wont be using them again and strongly recommend against anyone else using them either.

Can you live on your website’s ad revenue?

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking, based on a website I have that ranks on Alexa around the 40,000 mark – yes I know that Alexa is not the most reliable benchmark but in the absence of anything better it will have to do for now.

Total revenue per month comes in at around one fifth of the “average” IT salary I currently earn in my full time job. So to replace my full time income with website income it would need to get 5 times more visitors.

There are many other factors at play including where the extra visitors come from – would the be the same type as the existing visitors and click ads at the same rate?, could I optimise my ads to give a better return?, could Adsense penalise my site in the future and cause the revenue to drop? etc.

For the purpose of this post I’m assuming the simplest scenario – all things being equal etc.

I don’t know how 5 times the visitors would alter my Alexa ranking but at a wild guess I’d expect it to boost my Alexa rank to around the 20k mark. That being the case I come to the (very basic) conclusion that only around 20,000 websites in the world could generate enough revenue from ads to pay a single full time wage in a country like the UK. Of course that’s based on my salary – many people live OK on much less.

Now if I lived in a cheaper country like India / China …

Please do not donate

I’ve been having a quick look into all the PayPerPost stuff where bloggers prostitute themselves to make a bit of extra cash and I keep finding blogs that get a handful of visitors a week yet want $30 per post!

Worse than that is how many of them have a PayPal “donate” button, do they really expect any donations?  – very sad.

Pay Per Post

I don’t agree with pay per post – not that anyone would pay me to post anyway however I was having a look around the site (as you do) and saw that they charge $5 per post “opportunity”.

I thought everything was free with Web 2.0 and ad supported?, how long before someone creates a free version of payperpost.com?

Adsense Smart Pricing – how do they know my clicks don’t convert

I suspect the majority of sites using adsense ads have a degree of adsense, the question is – how do Google know if my visitors who click convert to purchasers?. I’m not aware of any tracking all the way from click to final sale or no sale.

Google must be making assumptions based on content, so wikipedia (IF it advertised) would probably be hit really hard due to the diversity of content.

Member only forums – how to shoot yourself in the foot

The problem with member only forums is that Google and other search engines can’t index all your information. As a result, hardly anyone ever finds them.

Alexa Rank

I was searching for info on Alexa rank and many of the results coming back were for methods on boosting your Alexa rank – why would anyone ever want to do that?, it doesn’t give you any more benefits – maybe a small amount of bragging rights down the pub.