With the announcement of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 coming out within the next month, do you think you’ll be upgrading?
After getting a taste of the new Photoshop CS3 interface…I don’t see how I couldn’t. It’s just too nice.
As of now I’m planning on upgrading to CS3 Design Premium. You? Your thoughts?
So yesterday I got a jury summons in the mail. I’ve never been summoned before, so I don’t really know what it’s like to go possibly serve on jury. I will say that I have no desire to go sit in a court room for even one 8 hour day to listen to a bunch of lame cases and I certainly have no desire to get stuck having to go for like a week…that just isn’t something I need right in the middle of a super busy time with client work.
So, last night I was chatting with some folks trying to figure out clever ways to get out jury duty. I have absolutely know idea if any of these will work, but I’m dang well willing to try them.
(Note: I claim no legal responsibility for your butt if get thrown in prison if somehow one of these is illegal.)
Now, the obvious answer to this is to simply show up and do your civic duty and serve. Doing so guarantees that you pretty much won’t ever get summoned again. But where’s the fun in that?
Is it just me, or does anybody else think that taking an actual bath is just gross? Seriously. Think about it. You’re sitting in a small bucket-like container wallowing in your own filth. Sure it’s diluted…but still. Kinda makes me gag just thinking about it.
Or maybe I’m taking crazy pills here.
So I’ve officially stopped watching LOST tonight. I’m just bored with it. The plot hasn’t progressed a single bit. The promos are just flat out laying about what the shows will be about the next night.
It really is unfortunate. The first two seasons were absolutely fantastic but this third one really has taken a turn for the worst. With so many commercials throughout the show, it almost feels like they’re just milking this as much as they can because they know it won’t be around another season.
Oh well…atleast The Office is still good. 
For those of you looking to get into the ad game, here are some of the top ad networks you can be a part of. Note that these are based off of my personal experience over the years. The amount of traffic your site gets as well as the quality of your content will strongly affect your rates.
Tribal Fusion - My average CPM (cost per thousand impressions) with these guys has always been higher than the other ad networks. I’ve had a few targeted campaigns for my sites, but not enough to be a deciding factor. They have a notoriously clunky interface that’s reported to be getting a face lift in the coming months. Despite the bad UI, the quality of their ads tends to be on the higher end with fewer of the flashing “You’ve just won a DVD player! Now forfeit your soul!” ads. They require a minimum of 2,000 unique visitors per day for most categories, though some more saturated categories can be as high as 10,000-20,000.
ValueClick Media - Formerly known as Fastclick, ValueClick Media has one of the best user interfaces in the business. Extremely easy to use. They accept just about any site with traffic…and I’m not really suggesting that as a good thing. I’d say a solid half of their ad fill is of the “annoying” genre. But despite some of their ads being lower quality, there are still quite a few good ads available and they’re definitely at the top of my list.
BurstMedia - BurstMedia (or rather their interface) has become known as one of the worst ad management interfaces in all the advertising world. It’s just plain spine cringing. They’ve been lowered to one of my bottom tier networks in my line up of ads solely based on how horrid their interface is. If they were at the top of my tier I’d have to spend time in the interface filtering out ads I don’t want…and that would put me in a bad mood. But interface aside, they are one of the few ad networks that can really hook you up with some killer targeted campaigns. I’ve had some campaigns with them with CPM’s in the $20-30 range…so I can’t complain about that. If you can withstand the horrible interface, these guys have some quality ads running.
Casale Media - Casale has only been a major player in the network game for a couple of years now, but they gained quite a bit of popularity at launch because their user interface is so easy to use. It was (and still is) compared a good bit to the network formerly known as Fastclick (now ValueClick Media). Unfortunately their wonderfully easy interface is plagued by low paying, flashy “You’ve just won 97 DVD players!” and a large number risque ads.
And there we have it! I know, I know…”What about AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network?” Well I purposely left them out. I don’t really consider them “ad networks” mainly because the user has much less control over what advertisers end up on their site. It’s more like “Here’s a code snippet to drop in your site, we’ll show you the advertisers that pay us the most money.” I personally prefer to have control over what end up on my site down to the pixel…so I’ll leave the contextual ad networks out of the game for this post.
Another thing you might have noticed is my harping on the user interfaces of each ad network pretty heavily. I didn’t do it only because user interface design happens to be a passion of mine, but more to say that a good user interface can go an extremely long way. Take Casale for instance, their ads are 99% bile, but I still use them because it’s extremely easy to filter out that 99% and use the 1% to put some quality advertisements on my sites. On higher traffic sites, that 1% really can be a signifcant amount.
What works for me won’t necessarily work for you. These types of ads are generally impression-based and are rarely content targeted. Think of these types of ads as being more like the billboards you see driving down the highway. They’re much less targetted but ultimately reach more people and have the potential make a a large amount of money.
In a future post I’ll cover a much wider spectrum of ad opportunities…especially some that could work better for the average blogger.
If you are not familiar with Alexa, it is a tool that tracks and ranks the traffic levels of websites across the internet. How does Alexa gather this data? They get it from their community of users who have installed their toolbar. This toolbar then tracks all the sites a user visits and this ultimately makes up the data you find on the Alexa site.
Initially, this would seem like a great idea. Users get the added benefit of having sites suggested to tfhem based on their browsing habits and all the web in general is able to see a ranking of all the sites on the internet. It’s a win/win situation, right? Unfortunately…no, it’s not.
There are a few inherent problems with the way Alexa goes about all of this.
“Who cares?”, you might ask. Despite Apple only having a little over 6% of the market share, that’s still literally millions and millions of users browsing habits in a significant demographic that are being ignored.
With the massive surge of Firefox in the browser scene, an even smaller percentage of users are being tracked.
So not only does it require you to be running IE6 or IE7 on a Windows machine, but people have to be convinced that it’s a good idea for them to download some companies software that ultimately hacks in to their browser. In an age where viruses and internet security at are the forefront of everyone’s mind, the Alexa toolbar has got to be a hard sell.
So what is a prime example of Alexa’s flaws at work?
Recently John Chow made a post that mentioned, among other things, his traffic levels for the month of February. He said he had 266k+ pageviews and 127k+ unique visitors.
I’ve been on my anti-Alexa kick for a while and decided to run a quick comparison on Alexa to see what Alexa had to say about John Chow’s site versus a site of mine, The Apple Blog.
The Apple Blog gets over 500k pageviews and 250k visitors per month with our traffic being on a steady incline since we launched over 2 years ago.
With that info on the plate, check out Alexa’s comparison of my site and John’s site.
That’s very interesting to say the least. Not only does it show John’s site as having massively higher amounts of traffic, but it shows The Apple Blog as declining in traffic. Both of which are simply not true.
See, the problem in this situation is that a very large majority readers of The Apple Blog (well over 60%) are Mac users. On top of that, the non-Mac users are mostly using Firefox. And then, on top of that, the low percentage of users that are browsing the site with Internet Explorer are most likely to not want to bloat of their browser with another toolbar like Alexa.
All of these factors combined mean that The Apple Blog ends up with hardly anyone browsing with the Alexa toolbar which, in turn, gives the impression that The Apple Blog has relatively low amounts of traffic.
If you’ve read long this far you’re probably wondering why this is even a problem. “It’s just one of many tools for measuring traffic.” Sure, you could say that. And in many cases it really is a non-issue. The problem arises when companies start basing decisions around the stats.
Businesses like Text Link Ads and ReviewMe place a very large amount of weight on Alexa rankings. Obviously they need some way to rank sites, but the problem here is that the tool they are using is largely skewed towards Windows IE users when not every category of site has that demographic as the large majority. This way of doing business is hurting both the end user and the businesses themselves.
So after all of this ranting it’d be fairly lame of me to not offer up a solution.
The problem with gather web stats over something like television viewership, is simply the massive size of the internet. There are just too many websites floating around for people to be polled about similar to the way Nielsen does television.
So how is this problem solved?
I believe there are a number of solutions. Fortunately, these solutions actually already exist…it’s just a matter of getting people to realize how awful and inaccurate Alexa stats are, and to move towards an alternative.
Some existing alternatives:
Compete.com - Compete.com is sort of the ultimate alternative here. They have the largest source of a ‘clickstream data,’ which basically means they sample the widest range of users. It’s a healthy alternative to Alexa in every way.
comScore - comScore is second in line in terms of accuracy. They use more than one source for clickstream data and also separate US and international traffic. The problem with comScore is its low sample group (only a little above 100,000) and it’s not easily accessible or free.
Hitwise - Hitwise is generally considered to be one of the top methods for businesses to gain traffic comparison data on competitors. Unfortunately it’s very costly and really just isn’t worth it for the average Joe.
The ultimate problem here with Alexa is that their sample group is extremely biased due to technology issues that Alexa have blatantly chosen not to fix. Compete.com really should be the new standard for traffic comparison. They’re very aware of Alexa’s problems providing accurate data and are actively moving towards a better alternative.
I hope (and challenge) all of the companies that are using Alexa data as a major business axis, to rethink their decisions and move toward something that’s more accurate and ultimately more beneficial to the end user. It’s simply foolish to continue making business moves around an obviously faulty tool.
Adobe CS3 will be shipping announced March 23…so they announced that they’ll be announcing. Awesome. Or not.
