Londonist: Could This Be The Most Alarmist Standard Headline Ever?

Nice shot. Definitely could have done with some fleeing - had a hole in my shoe yesterday and got home with some very soggy feet indeed. Did win a pub quiz though so it wasn't all bad!

Meeting my hero

There's very few times that you get to kneel down next to your hero. I got the chance today. And got a great book too!
Well worth a quick walk!

Really clever advert

Actually it might not be the cleverest advert in the world, but I do think it is quite cunning.


No idea who the company is nor what they do. To be honest, I don't really care that much as their product isn't something I'm able to buy. Good to know what they're doing though!

Found through Big Secret Pizza Party

A World Without Advertising

I was talking with someone today, talking about ad blockers. These are programs that block the advertising that appears on pages.

The argument was that ads annoy users, therefore they will block them. I was coming back with my usual point about the fact that people are willing to block adverts using free ad blockers. However, they are very unwilling to pay a regular price for blocking the adverts.

Walmo was also talking about how people understand how adverts fit into areas where they feel they are getting content for free, but that they don't expect to get advertising in 'their' space such as Myspace or facebook.

Thought I'd do the maths behind it, to see how much advertising pays for each user.

If we assume that there are three tiers of sites: Quality (e.g. Guardian \ Economist \ Hemscott etc), Entertainment (Sun \ Handbag \ BoingBoing) and Social (Google \ Facebook \ Yahoo! Mail).

We'd be willing to pay more for the quality sites because we feel they're giving us something of value. I think people would be unwilling to pay for things like Google or Facebook because they're seen as piggybacking on other people's content. If they had no choice at all, they definitely would as they're all pretty much a necessity for using the internet in the way we currently do.

If we assume that Quality sites are able (at the moment) to acheive a yield of around £8 per thousand pages - that's 0.8p for every page you view. If you compare this to a newspaper, with around 100 stories on average, that's 80p so quite valid in terms of pricing.

We'd expect entertainment sites to be cheaper. Let's say a yield of around £4 per thousand pages - that's 0.4p for every page. You'd expect an entertainment paper to be shorter than a newspaper, so that's the equivalent of around 20p for a paper.

Social sites fill our sights with adverts. I'd guess the ad yield for these sites (apart from Google) to be around £0.75 per thousand pages - if they're lucky!

Looking at Comscore, the average user sees around 3,500 pages a month. Assuming you look at 65% social, 25% entertainment and 10% quality pages.

This works out to a nice and round £8 a month additional money to pay for the content people look at. The problem is that this then needs to be distributed fairly and equitably between the sites. People need security to know that evil criminals aren't stealing their accounts. Any business doing this sort of deal would open themselves to all sorts of complications. They'd probably charge an additional 25%, taking the charge to a nice round £10.

Now I don't think that's a huge sum to ask people to pay for - if advertising is such a problem ask people if they're willing to pay £10 a month to not see it. If they are then maybe you've got a business idea.

I think sites would be much more interested in solutions that would stop them having to bow to the pressures they get from people like me. Unfortunately it would also involve me losing my job. I wouldn't like that!!

Ultimately as an industry we need to ensure that we don't annoy enough people to the point that £10 a month seems worth paying to get rid of our 'works of art'. I think we should be able to cope.

PS In comparison, the IAB estimate current online ad expenditure to be in the region of £2billion. This, when divided by current internet users of 31 million, gives £64 a year and therefore £5.37. This is slightly different. However, the IAB use PwC to guess their numbers, so I'm going to trust mine because I've put more rigour in than just employing some bean counters to ring round a couple of big media owners and ask them how much they made this year.


(Picture mercilessly stolen from trangress)

Bye Bye Blair

One of the (few) advantages of working in Victoria is that it's relatively close to Westminster. That's why there's never much tube traffic on a Monday as the civil servants take advantage of flexi-time...

Therefore, when I read the itinerary of Blair's final day, I realised it was more than possible to wander up to Downing Street to see the final moments in person. A short walk and I was outside the center of power.

There was a definite mood that this was an 'event'. Ugly protesters tried to disturb the solemnity of the occasion. They were by no means only protesting the war, there was a wide range of causes displaying their badly made placards. Strangely enough, people still seem to blame Blair personally for the war in Iraq. Do they really think he could have stopped the war?

The event, for the general public, was made much more difficult by the police. They pushed everyone a LONG way back from the gates of Downing Street, under the pretext that they had to swing the gates back. They pushed us back about fifteen meters from the entrance of Downing St, which was much further than made sense from the opening.

It's a shame that security considerations now mean that such distance must be kept from 'important' people. Hopefully at some point we will try and have a little trust that the public won't try and kill famous people too often!

Anyway, the police stopped me from having a good view. But I managed to be among the few people cheering and applauding Blair as he finished his ten years in office. He gave a little wave from his car. I can imagine that he's got the BEST feeling in the entire world this morning. Nothing at all to worry about for a couple of days.

Well done Tony Blair. He will be missed (at least by me)

Small bars, many people

Went to Lab bar again last night. Seem to have been going there more often recently, I think more people have discovered it, though it's been there for a couple of years.

I don't know if it's me getting older but it seemed overly crowded last night. If you're going to have a very trendy bar that becomes popular, I think you should look at restricting the number of people going in to it!
Unfortunately this results in places like Mahikis and Pangea which then become magnets for socialite types who want to show everyone how 'important' they are.

Personally, I believe in hunting down new and funky places - this helps to keep things simple. It also avoids too much crowding.
I suspect I'm going to experience more bar crowding when I start working in Soho, but hopefully it'll also give me the chance to find the new trendy bars before they get too busy.
Also, I'll be quite close to the Sanderson which doesn't seem to get too crowded (the wince-inducing prices scare most people away!!)

Google Moves a Step Closer to World Domination

Sometimes Google comes up with something extremely surprising. In fact this does seem to happen more often than with almost any other company in the entire world.

This week's surprise is Google Gears. It sounds pretty innocuous - it will allow web apps to work when you're offline. The first app is very exciting, it lets people use Google Reader when they're offline. I think this is fantastic and will make my next couple of train trips far more interesting as I can read my feeds rather than the newspaper.

However, the important development is that we will be able to use Google Docs offline (I assume). We will be able to use Google Writer instead of Word, Google Spreadsheets instead of Excel and the forthcoming Google Presentations instead of Powerpoint.
At the moment, Google's offerings are not as good as Microsoft's, but they're free while Microsoft's cost a large amount of money.

We'll see if this does make a huge difference to people's usage of Google services, but I can see it being beneficial. The only problem is that Google will now become a software supplier. I think there'll be a couple of people using this Google Gears product to hack into people's computers at some point - it does seem to give people rather a large amount of access to their computers.

It does look like it will be possible to accomplish almost everything on a computer without leaving Google's own sites. Probably not a good thing!!

Let's hope Ask's information revolution actually happens.

Rise of Facebook

I've been to a couple of different parties in the past few weeks where everyone is talking about Facebook. It's quite interesting seeing its evolution from an equivalent of FriendsReunited to a genuinely useful tool that people are using to organise their lives.
I was planning to meet up with someone this weekend and was sent a Facebook event rather than an email or a phone call to sort out the details. Allen and Overy recently suffered an internal revolt when their IT department decided to block the Facebook's website. There was a swift backpedal and the lawyers are back to manically facebooking each other.
The thing that confuses me is why this didn't happen with Myspace or Bebo. They both emerged (in the UK) around a year to a year and a half ago. They swiftly took over many people's lives and had them organising their lives around the websites. However, these sites didn't win over my social circle so I always felt a little left out.
Whole books have been written on network effects and how things like social networks can evolve. I can't be bothered to think about why they succeeded. Instead I'll draw a couple of pretty graphs.
This one shows the growth of Facebook against those of its competitors.

As you can seem Facebook is doing a good job of catching up, but it's still a huge distance behind Myspace and Bebo. It'll take them a good six - nine months of current growth. Worrying for Piczo is the fact that they've actually lost audience in the last month. Things are not going to go well for them if they can't fix that soon.
A quick look at the younger people shows Piczo in even more trouble:

Facebook has already overtaken Piczo and is halfway towards catching Myspace and Bebo.

A good thing to notice on this graph is that Bebo and Myspace are neck and neck for the umber one social networking spot. This should be noticed by all the brands competing with each other to see who can spend the most on Myspace - there's a couple of different places to spend that money...

The 'hidden' rise of Bebo and Piczo shows the importance of having good measuring tools in the internet - you can't see what other people are doing online. A website is usually less exciting than the last episode of 24 and so gets talked about less. The current measurement systems still leave large amounts to be desired.

We'll see what Google or Tacoda will offer us when they get round to sharing the piles of data they are sitting on - I suspect there'll be some interesting nuggets within them.

What I do for a living

It's always uncomfortable when someone tries to boil down effectively what you do. I was at a house party the other day and everyone seemed to be telling me that their job was very important and involved 'strategy' and other managerial sounding words.
I could go for the generic explanation of what I do. It would involve words like 'strategy', 'clients', 'direction' and many other buzz words. I could probably put the '2.0' suffix onto any of them to make myself sound even more grand.
Explaining my job to people who don't work in the industry is always difficult because it hasn't existed for a very long time and the definitions of what we do haven't really filtered down to most other people. Most people probably don't really care about what it is that I do.
They might notice the adverts on their screens while they're surfing the internet, but they probably don't appreciate the time and effort put into making them move their mouse to hit the 'close' button.
My favourite explanations are below:

"I make the Internet free"

Obviously this isn't entirely true, but it does have more than a couple of grains of truth. Adverts from my company appear in front of almost every person who goes online in the UK. I don't think many of those people paid the sites which provided the free content they were looking at.
There's a huge number of online services beyond news which are funded by the advertising we place - social networking, webmail, RSS readers, search engines...
Without the ads we place most people wouldn't be able to find a single useful things on the web. We'd be stuck with the BBC's website and whatever people are willing to write and pay to host.
We're capitalism's friendly face and probably the people who've allowed some of the most life changing technology into your world.

"I make rich men richer"

I think anyone who isn't a doctor or self-employed does this for a living. In my case, I work for a company which is owned by a group of people who I see on occasion. They are all men and I have seen figures which show exactly how much richer I've made them.
Even civil servants help by making the whole system work and therefore maintaining the framework which allows these rich people to get richer. I don't mind because one day I hope to join their number. However, there's a huge number of people who also have a similar plan...

"I get poor people to buy things they don't need with money they don't have"

Unfortunately one of the problems with advertising is that the most susceptible people to it are the poor. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, people who were rich make themselves poor by buying all the things advertising tells them to. Secondly, poor people are easier to sell hope to. Give them a loan and they'll find many things to spend it on.
As many a social worker will tell you, it isn't usually spent on things they actually need. More often than non it'll be things that the telly told them they wanted.
Luckily, most poor people haven't invested in getting themselves the internet so most of the things we sell are for slightly more upmarket consumers.

Ultimately, I really enjoy my job and I think one of the things that would make a job less interesting is being able to explain it. I think the thing I can take away is that every now and then I get to do something new. Something no-one else has done before and something other people will copy at some point relatively soon.

Topical!!

Topical!!
Originally uploaded by mild_swearwords.

Went to Legoland yesterday.

Among the many worldwide scenes that they have recreated in Lego, this picture of Downing Street seems to have been updated by someone sneaky!

Mourning

Extremely bad news today with one of my favourite people in the entire world deciding to resign.

Just turned on newsnight and seen an interesting debate with two utterly defeated people discussing his 'legacy'. Charles Kennedy and Michael Howard attempting to criticise what Blair achieved in office.

Maybe he did bad things but I have extreme doubts that any of the opposition leaders would have had the ability to do things better or even particularly differently.

Seriously - can anyone honestly imagine Michael Howard or Charles Kennedy actually sitting in Downing Street?

Someone's Opinion on my Industry

(image from digitalgrace)

Amused by one of the comments towards the end of this gentle moan at advertising:

Dylanwolf

May 7, 2007 10:31 AM

"I'm with Salfordian on this one.

In our society advertising and marketing is the "elephant in the room" that no-one speaks ill of. This monster rapaciously soaks up enormous piles of money, resources and skills in order to fart out a thirty-second add showing yet another shiny silver car morphing up an empty, snaky mountain road. Who cares - brand image is an entirely specious fabrication.

Let's gather up our own flaming brands and storm the citadels of the advertising agencies. We should take no more.

These self-aggrandising leeches of society award themselves preposterous wages, stinking bonuses and regularly preen themselves in champagne award ceremonies. Smear them in the products they push and stick them on a pyre, I say.

Roy, when are we as a society going to properly remunerate social workers, carers (you know the list!) etc with wages commensurate with the value of their work?"

It seems strange the amount of invective generated by putting adverts in front of people. Especially when they're probably exactly the same people who would kick up a fuss if the media they consumed suddenly cost money...
I think the media needs to be a little more honest with their consumers. I did like a service that the Guardian offered a while ago - you paid money and the site came with no adverts at all. This scheme had to be dropped because less than 50 people took it up (the Guardian was then being read by over 9 million people).
People like moaning more than paying.

The Gillette Fusion War on Terror

Beautiful skit by Stephen Colbert. Love the idea of sponsoring the War on Terror.

Hospitality

Hospitality
Originally uploaded by mild_swearwords.

Went to Hospitality at Herbal last night - fantastic atmosphere and music.

Cyantific played a great cheese fest.

Blu Marten then destroyed the place with some fantastic music that navigated the border between music and noise in just the way I like. I was happy!

Rejected Petition

Hi,

I'm sorry to inform you that your petition has been rejected.

Your petition was classed as being in the following categories:

* Party political material

* Intended to be humorous, or has no point about government
policy

If you wish to edit and resubmit your petition, please follow
the following link:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/SirWillFerrell/AJuACRBGTFh2AjfiIhA6Le3

You have four weeks in which to do this, after which your
petition will appear in the list of rejected petitions.

Your petition reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to: 'Give Will
Ferrell an honourary Knighthood, and make the viewing of
Anchorman compulsory for all schoolchildren.'

Many people in the UK have recognised a need for young people
to have a role model.

We, the undersigned, believe Will Ferrell to represent all that
is good about life in general. His attitude to life and acting
exemplify productivity, hard work and people skills.

Anchorman has gained international recognition for portraying
equal opportunities in the workplace. We believe that if more
people in Britain used the values and attitudes Ferrell
displayed in his role as Ron Burgandy, the UK would be a better
place.

Although he has not yet loaned the labour party any cash, we
are sure some of his earnings from 'Blades of Glory' could be
diverted to a suitable account.

-- the ePetitions team

Flying

Sometimes it's possible to get very bored of queues. Airports seem very happy with the idea of making people wait. There's loads me people just standing around patiently waiting. Workers stand around patiently not doing anything. I'm not patient so I fidget. This makes me look unusual so I get searched. Fun.

The 'Information Revolution'

I was on the tube this morning and I noticed an ad for the 'information revolution'. Wasn't entirely sure what it was, nor who it was for.

This intrigued me, so I remembered the URL on the advert and had a look at the site when I got home. It annoyed me as I don't like letting those creative types know how successful they were at their cunning cross media approach. In my opinion, I'm only interested in it because I'm a geek.

The site purports to be telling people about the dangers of relying on only one information source. It features interviews with 'real people' and some unsourced facts about the peril we are exposing ourselves to.

Although they don't explicitly say it, they are arguing that you shouldn't just use Google to do your searches - you should diversify.

I strongly suspect that this site is a cunning attempt by Yahoo! or Ask to subvert people into changing their searching habits. The site doesn't have any adservers tracking activities on the site, and there is nothing overtly associated with any brand.

The only clue that something is weird is the search box in the bottom right of the site.Seems unusual to put them in alphabetical order...

I ran a WHOIS on the URL (a technique for finding who owns the website) and found it registered to a little company called Profero. One of my best friends, Lydia, works there and therefore I know that it's a digital advertising agency.

A quick look at their client list shows that they have both Yahoo! and Ask. I'm not sure this is the kind of thing that Yahoo would be willing to sign off - they're a bit overly corporate and this seems quite brave. Therefore I think it's Ask Jeeves looking to change people's behaviour.

It is a good site, but I think it falls just short of where it needs to be. There's no controversy, there needs to be more emphasis on the bad things that could happen if we all used Google.

Getting in trouble with the legal department is difficult, but it does need to make some statements that show it's some kind of movement rather than a corporate site. Maybe make up a term about 'information pollution' or some catchy name for a homogenous infrastructure.

Might keep an eye on it to see what happens!

I wandered lonely as a bus

I had the unfortunate luck to fall asleep on the way home tonight. It reminded me me how far away some parts me London are. I went through places like Wood Field, palmer's green and other bits of Enfield... It was a worrying reminder that Enfield is a good half hour drive away from real civilisation. Sleep at your peril!

PS3 takes on Second Life

Fantastic move by Sony \ Playstation.

I love the idea of having a 'virtual space' for PS3 users. Hope it will result in some funky new things, both for players and for evil corporate people like me.


I can imagine this morphing into some kind of virtual ad space. I think the key will be to resist being overtly commercial. We had a presentation from Bebo the other day who said it was important to be seen 'as part of the community'.

Personally I think the important thing is to show members that the advertising is giving something to them.

Advertising is expected on a free platform - the majority of people understand that someone has to pay for the service. The key is to get the balance between awareness and annoyance. Ads need to be positive, and be a reward for getting the consumer to do something.

I love the idea on this service that certain things will be unlockable. obviously the initial rush will be to extract money (kids are willing to pay for mobile backgrounds, why not virtual T-Shirts?). However, I think the best thing will come from earned rewards. What if people who have completed a certain game then get some kind of obvious identifier?


World of Warcraft shows the lengths some people are willing to go to show off their 'prowess' at playing games. The home space for the PS3 users could easily morph into that. Competitions could be run, with the winner getting a large statue in one of the communal areas (sponsored?).

If Sony can recruit a good team capable of running this area effectively, it could easily become a very strong community. It could even end up representing something very valuable for Sony?

Spotplex - Next Big Thing?

Really interesting site I just found out about from the regularly excellent Data Mining blog.

This site has the potential to give us some numbers on the 'blogosphere.'
At the moment, the only effective measurement on blogs is through Technorati and Nielsen's Buzzmetrics. Spotplex is offering the ability to measure actual readers (or at least page impressions).

It'll be interesting to see how well this service does. It has the potential to compete with both digg and google analytics. While it is doing this, it will enable us good ol' advertisers to work out how many people are reading these blog things, and give us some fantastic graphs to show what people are actually looking at.

Can't wait till this gets integrated with Swivel!