Broken and Non-Functional Technology: AdBrite (part one)

Hey There, Rizzn-ites.

Broken technology, non-functional technology, things that don't work as advertised: these are the things that are the bane of my existence the last couple of days. As such, my life has been in catch-up mode, so I don't actually have a lot of time to write this article, so I'll make it a series where I talk about the different services that have completely disappointed me lately. I know I'll be talking about AdBrite today, tomorrow TalkShoe (that one is a doozy, let me tell ya!). I'll be talking about Veveo, AdSense, GrandCentral, and a couple others here in the coming days.

AdBrite (www.adbrite.com)
I recently told GoogleAds to go kick some rocks, and as you may have noticed in your browsing of the website, I've been auditioning new monetization for the blog. I've been fairly pleased with project-wonderful, and I'll be posting a better review of them later, but AdBrite has been a huge disappointment.

In terms of customisation and the types of items you can monetize, its easy to be dazzled by the dollar signs going in. Unfortunately, the ROI on your content is only marginally better than AdSense, and the advertising is several orders of ten more intrusive, doing the pop-over thing, interstitial advertising, as well as traditional text and banner advertisement.

My disappointment started with the fact that it took about four days for the ads to start running. Their pattern matching and keyword matching, once it began, was quite sub-par, in all aspects, and as such, the targeting of the ads was abysmal.

The delivery of the interstitial ads seemed completely arbitrary, even though it was set to display only after three pageviews.

As for the banner/text ads, when they finally did start showing up, as I said, keyword matching was far off the mark, and the banner ads were the variety you find on the trailer park MySpace that start screaming at you how you've won a free iPhone already!

After running for a week and a half, and after recording just over 10,000 pageviews (my guess is that it didn't start recording pageviews until some where in the middle of my run), only four clicks, and $1.35 in revenue.

The icing on the cake was that their inVideo product was completely non-functional. There is a catch in their code - it generates a JavaScript to display, but blogger (and many other popular places to display videos) doesn't allow JavaScript. After some digging, there were several ways to alter the code to make it work in Blogger or other places, but all they did was cause a flash gimmick to pop up saying there was an error in the file (you know, you probably saw it yesterday). About one in 20 loads, the video would play, but then there would be no ads displaying.

Repeated messages to AdBrite support have yet to have yielded any results.

The biggest disappointment was that inVideo really seemed like the lowest barrier to entry in terms of monetizing online video, and I would have loved to use it for my own applications, and reccomend it to clients and readers. Until improvement at AdBrite has been made on several fronts, I don't believe that can honestly be done.

As a result, all AdBrite code has been pulled from the site. Sorry about all the annoying ads interrupting your surfing experience. They're gone now!

Tomorrow, we'll hear about TalkShoe, their most recent rollout of new features, and the rolling schedule of outages they've experienced since yesterday afternoon following the rollout. If you're up for some good belly-laughs, you'll want to be here for that one.

/rizzn

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A Great Day, A Great Week.

I've been quite a busy little beaver here for the last few days. Lots of interesting projects are starting to stack up, and a lot of the hard work that Art and I have been putting into the podcast is starting to come to fruition in a big big way. This post is going to ramble, I'll warn you, but it's all interesting stuff, so stick around for it.

For a couple of weeks, Art and I have been amazed at the jump in traffic we've recieved, with each episode getting around 400-700 visits, with some episodes in the multiples of thousands. It seems that this traffic has not gone un-noticed by many. Yesterday, I just found out that we've made it to the number three slot on most downloaded podcasts over at TalkShoe.com. Don't believe me? Listen to this episode of TalkShoe Hosts Sharing Strategies, TalkShoe CEO Dave Nelson's weekly podcast. For the top 25, fast forward to about 6:23.. for our listing, go to about 8:00.

What are the podcasts surrounding us in the Top 5? Well, if you want to hear it from the horse's mouth, check out the above listed podcast, but I'll ennumerate them for you here for you lazy folks:

1. Lost Community podcast
2. gspn.tv community podcast
3. RizWords
4. Mac Tips Daily
5. Keith and The Girl

So, aside from the bragging, what else is new?

Well, two new interesting opportunities have arisen, and my (invaluable) podcast experience is coming to bear on them. First one is 5Tribe, the organisation I have been working with over the years, off and on. Their primary function is to help newspaper organisations remain profitable in today's continually flagging old media networks. They mostly do this through improving the site's visibility and upgrading of the online classifieds section. Most newspaper sites today don't even have online classifieds, and in terms of this, they are missing out on a large revenue stream, as newspapers are uniquely positioned to capitalize on their still valuable names and audience as well as the public's willingness to give them money to put bits of text on their site, despite there are hundreds of places to do this on the web for next to nothing.

5Tribe has been expressing a willingness to move into the world of podcasting for quite a while now, but recently have expressed an urgency to move into this market quicker than they anticipated. We're connecting up next week to learn the nature of how they want to get into this world, but with their wide reach in the old media market, any moves they make have the potential to truly reverberate around teh whole new media universe.

In other new projects, Steve over at N-Ventive introduced me to a fellow by the name of Paul Darby, and as a result of conversations I've had with the man this week, we could be putting on what may amount to the largest online live video broadcast to ever hit the net. The fellow runs one of the largest affiliate marketing groups out there on the net, and had the inclination to create a marketing-centric video content network. The best records I've been able to find out on the net tell me that the largest live video broadcast was attended by about 19,000 viewers. Conservative estimates of what he's expecting to show up to the broadcast are at least half of that.

Over the next few days, I'll be doing more news releases on this and hopefully getting more information out there to the big name bloggers that this is something that's going to happen and make a big splash.

I'm looking at my watch right now and it's coming up on 8:00 PM... and I need to be heading home (even though there's lots more I wanna tell you about it). Before I go, I've got to share something with you that was sent to me this afternoon. I sent out a mass email to my contact list with the most recent pictures of Jacob Li that I posted here to the site. One of the guys who got this sent this back to me:

This is such strange timing, Mark. I just had a young man come to me and ask if he could date my daughter. The message here was, we are getting serious and it might turn into something like an engagement at some point. He's a good kid, as is she and of course I said yes. I then set down and open your email and see you as a young Father with a new wife and little baby. To you I'm just an old man, but to me I feel like my daughter was just a baby like yours a few months ago. Time moves on quicker with each passing month. The good news is that things usually get better long term, even with the ups and downs along the way. Enjoy this time of your life.

Enjoy your family right were they are today. It will be but a memory before you can blink.

Very poignant words. With that, I'm headed home for the weekend.

/rizzn

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Has Blogging Reached It's Peak?

There's a lot of things I could talk about today. It's definitely been a hellish week for the ol' Mr. Rizzn here. A lot of my stress has been brought on by this guy, but I've gotten my nerdy revenge, with my smooth SEO skills. Doing a Google Search for who is now, I suppose, a declared nemesis of mine, will yield my account of his atrocious behavior at Rank 5. Go me!

It's not been all bad. I'm also at Rank 6 for this Google Search, which is a good thing (I was, but now I'm at 11 and 12).

At any rate, I picked up this story today from ValleyWag for today's RizWords. It all refers back to the State of the Blogosphere release by Technorati recently that noted the end or at least stall of the growth of the blogosphere. There's been a lot of talk as to why this has happened, but no real concrete theories that set well with me and go towards really hitting towards the heart of the issue.

As you real Rizzn-ites know, it's darn hard to create a viable business model that supports the participants in any Indy-Journalism venture. I've attempted to create several such ventures here .. the most recent of course being the Oblong Box network, ModernOpinion and PoddedMeat. Other similar ventures in the past were things like BlipMedia and even my own blog, Rizzn.com, what you are reading right now.

I've never really publicly discussed why these ventures have failed, but I'll bet the intelligent reader can guess: Money.

It comes down to money, and the inability to properly monetize the production process of producing quality online content. Let's go down my list of ventures, and explore the sticking points.

When I started BlipMedia, arguably one of my most successful projects, I was just in the right place at the right time with a good idea. It was a free podcast hosting company, with the added benefit of having instant updates available to the content producers - they didn't need to be in their studio to create podcasts... they could simply call in from anywhere they could find a telephone. This was a novel idea at the time, and that feature combined with there being free unlimited hosting made for an explosive growth on the site.

Unfortunately, then, as now, there was a real problem finding advertisers willing to speculate with their dollars on monetizing such a bleeding edge media. This fact, combined with a devestating hurricane that destroyed our office in Florida, meant we could no longer keep the service alive. If not for that, we might still be around today, and we might be breaking even - as of current, there isn't that many people willing to venture out in the podcasting market to advertise, although this is quickly changing now, thanks to the efforts of companies like TalkShoe, PodTrac, and Blubrry.

After that, I started Oblong Box - and this was the offer I put out to a bevy of writers: Have a free domain name, free hosting, and free design. All you must do is post to the blog. I had worked out a series of monetization deals with companies like Blogitive and PayPerPost that should have subsidized all my expenses, and put us way out on top. Unfortunately, as in the Blip days, Blogitive and PayPerPost were very slow to sign up new advertisers, additionally they created very complex and restrictive posting policies that more or less strangled our financial growth.

As a result, I was unable to pass the cash down to the writers quickly enough to keep them around, and one by one, they ended up dropping off the network, and consequently, we only have a fraction of the writers on the network who still write - those that write simply for writing's sake.

ModernOpinion was based upon the same principals, but with an optimized website and domain status in an aim to get around the restrictive policies that PayPerPost and Blogitive had instituted. Unfortunately, it was not enough, and despite investing hundreds in promotion and advertising on the site, the money was not enough to pay the writers, and much like OblongBox, they lost interest, and stopped writing.

PoddedMeat is a similar story, although technically the company is not dead, simply on hiatus. We tried another bleeding edge technology - video podcasting, right at the start of the video podcast craze that iTunes was attempting (and continues to) fuel.

Again, though, we could not find advertisers that would keep pace with production costs. Simply put, there are no ad agencies out there that can get enough money to subsidize these types of ventures. At it's peak, PoddedMeat's two shows were recieving in excess of 60,000 views/downloads a week. Unfortunately, this was not enough to entice advertisers into making the leap to the new medium.

There are simply not enough ways for the average blogger and podcaster out there to make enough money to justify their habit. As I have seen, only those with a true passion for writing, podcasting, or video podcasting will continue, regardless of what it pays. And, it would appear, there are only around 15 million of these people in the world.

15 million is a large number, though, isn't it? That's still a lot of people, and with that number, someone should be making money.

That's an excellent point, and several people are making money off this. Just not the people who are doing the bulk of the work (i.e. the content producers).

Digg, Google, PayPerPost, Blogitive - these are the people who make a lot of money off these bloggers. However, when it comes time to reward them, they are handed a pittance. As I've said on the show many times, my blog has been here for around 10 years. I've been monetizing it for about half that time, primarily with AdSense, although I've used PayPerPost, Blogitive, BlogAds, and other smaller services ad various points.

AdSense, on my best month, produced around $24.00, shortly after I broke the Christopher Walken story and posted the pictures I took of Suge Knight being hauled off to the hospital after he was shot in the leg. In total, I've recieved about $200 over three years from AdSense.

Blogitive produced me about $600 over five months.

PayPerPost produced me about $200 over two months.

BlogAds produced me about $24 over one year.

I produce consistent quality content and have a significant audience that reads my words, and many of my ventures have grown to the point where actual percentage points of the internet have been exposed to me (at least that's what Alexa says). I have my own wikipedia page, for cryin' out loud!

Despite this, the blogosphere continues to punish me monetarily. I'm stubborn enough to keep coming back.

If you're looking for your reason why the blogosphere is slow to grow, though, that's it.

/rizzn