But lets be clear on the why: it
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Moving away from heavy metal for the time being, after our discussions on ad revenue I wanted to do some more research. I wondered, when you go to a blog that has high yield (by CPM) ads, what does it cost the aggregate publishers to have you visit? Or, from the other way, what does the publisher make from your visit?
Firstly, we are going to be working with data from Federate Media, as they represent some of the biggest names on the internet. Lets take an average of a $20 CPM rate. This might be a little off, but sites seem to range from $7 to $36 dollars per thousand impressions across the site, so $20 sounds like a fair average. [also, ads have different rates based on size and placement, so this average is not perfect]. Now, once again we need to get an average number of ads per site, and by visiting a few, I would say the average number is around 4. Once again, this is a quick and dirty estimate. Not all sites, especially the smaller sites, have sold all their ads. But four seems to be about right.
So we have an average CPM rate of $20 and an average of 4 ads. That means that the site is getting a combined CPM rate of around $80/thousand impressions. That is an amazing number. Anyway, lets do some more math.
As a single person, you are 1/000 of that rate. As in, you count as one impression. So we need to divide that $80 into 1000 pieces. 80/1000 = $0.08, or eight cents. That means, that every time you hit the front page of an average provider gets 8 cents.
Let's see what I am making on this blog. [Admittedly, this blog is not for profit]. I get 50 cents per thousand impressions, which could be worse. That means that I am getting 1/160th of what they are. Is my content really so much worse? I hope not, but it does show you the power of having an audience of more than, say, 100,000 pageviews per month.
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Turns out Arrington is about as popular as I had thought: extremely popular. But unlike any other celebrity, he does not have tens of millions of dollars and several bodyguards. People apparently have been physically harassing him, alongside what I am sure is a deluge of constant online attacks.
That was me, I am partly to blame.
If you dig through this blogs archives you will note a large number of derogatory comments against Arrington and TechCrunch. I want to apologize for a number of them. While I am still not a huge TechCrunch fan, I recant any personal remarks made against any TechCrunch writer.
Arrington has decided to take a month off and figure out where life is headed. Good for him, if he decides to come back I will gladly read his work again. You can read Michaels post
here.
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As promised to everyone on Twitter, and my non-tech cohorts, here are some images and notes from last nights Metallica concert in Chicago. (Allstate Arena, January 26, 2009).
A few people showed up, this is a shot from about 20 minutes from before Metallica came on:
The opening light show was amazing. They shot smoke into the air and then had a wild laser show for the first two songs:
James milking the crowd before playing "Creeping Death:"
The light boxes were all shaped like coffins in honor of the Death Magnetic cd cover:
These next two are a few samples of the pyrotechnics that were used. The first image (sorry, iPhone quality) is one of the 30 foot fireballs they were shooting into the air. The second is of the synchronized (and color changing!) jets of flame from "One:"
A good shot of the band playing with green lights turned on. It was hard to get images, the lights would change so fast that some shots are blurred to oblivion:
The coffins in motion again, they were moving about throughout the show:
The lasers are back!
And finally, during the second encore (Seek and Destroy) several dozen large Metallica-logo emblazoned beach balls fell from the sky. They mostly ended up on stage where the member of Metallica would throw them at other band members to force them into making mistakes. After the show was actually over (post encores) James and Rob played a strange form of head-only volleyball with one. Lars commented that "next they're going to juggle for you Chicago!"
All in all, the most amazing and best night of my life. I have over 200 pictures from the show, so if you desire a few more, I can do that.
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I have ads on this blog, they make no money, but for some reason I had to add them in. I wandered over to my ad provider, Adify via Typepad, and took a look at my click through rate. Shockingly Predictably enough, it was horrible.
Either you all are far to smart to click on ads (a good reason), or the ads are poorly targeted (not helping at all). Whatever the reason, I have a CTR of 0.1%. Take that ad platform. Pay me for those impressions, I am taking my 50 cent CPM to the bank.
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Sometimes when you read the news in the morning you hack up all over the floor. I did today when I read that shite service extraordinare ChaCha is raising a 30 million dollar series C round of funding. Apparently flushing their money down the first two times was not enough for these investors. This will bring the total amount of fail-cash to an amazing 46 million.
Sure, there is a global recession. Sure there is a huge credit crises. But in silicon valley everything is possible, ChaCha just proved this.
Someone send in the fail boat.
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Moving off topic here everyone, heads up.
Given that last year was an election year, I have been thinking quite a bit about health care and the like. My sister is a doctor, so I am keyed in somewhat. This involves a good friend of mine, and some frostbite. Needless to say, not the happiest story, but interesting.
So my friend was out all night a little bit ago. This is Chicago. It was cold and snowy. His socks got wet and he froze for a long time. Not the worst thing, living in Chicago means being cold. But something wasn't right. His toes were completely iced, and he had limited sensation. Being like me, he shrugged it off until the next day.
It started getting worse, his toes started to blister and turn purple. He called my sister for advice. She told him to get it looked at. We put it off for another day. Today it was far to bad to ignore. We went to the hospital.
Nice place, really, got a little lost, but found the ER. Once we found the right person we were with a nurse in minutes. Then one doctor. Then another. Then a resident. It was a never ending stream of people looking ag my friends feet.
All in all, we felt a little bit like rockstars. Everyone wanted to talk to us and just chat it up. Weird.
All of the them were extremely happy, nice, and professional. Busy, sure, but they actually cared. My friend is still there, hes going to need to stay off his feet for a while, but the level of service was amazing. For whatever it is worth, our system does get some things right.
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