knofun

Ok, this is not my site but everyone should go take a look at http://www.worldometers.info/. It has realtime numbers on all kinds of interesting worldwide statistics.

entertainment, geek stuff

I take my work pretty seriously (stop laughing!!!), so naturally there comes a time to measure up to your competition. For ZinText, that would be other in-text advertising networks like Kontera. So recently I found an average publisher that by chance was running both Zintext and Kontera on the same page. Aside from being a little shocked the code was all working properly with the two competing for space, I got a unique opportunity to see my lil baby in action against arguably the best among the competition (certainly the biggest).

On the homepage, we both linked the word “Nokia” in the first paragraph since it was mentioned twice. Here is what their ad looked like:

Uh, No Xplode? which links to: http://www.toseeka.com/search.php?q=No%2BXplode?? I don’t even know what No Xplode is or why it’s $39.99, but this didn’t seem too relevant to me.

Here’s our ad, same page, same paragraph:

Now I am not knocking Kontera, I know first-hand how hard it is to match relevant keywords to relevant advertising and I am not saying my product is perfect, but come on.

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing in-text advertising, kontera, marketing, zintext

Ok, so I admit that sometimes I get like in a grumpy old man phase and I will refuse to try new things. Most of the time I am right, new things are weird and scary. But twitter is something I wish I had gotten the second it came out. It’s like old school IRC but the conversation is all around you, like walking into a loud room you can turn up or down. You can also really see the power of this, Jason Calacanis has amassed an army he calls the “JasonNation” and he makes them do funny stuff like add people on twitter and digg his SEO spam. I mean, he got 150 diggs on a spammy review in like 20 minutes.. if he could figure out a way to meter that flow so it looked like legit traffic he could DOMINATE the front page of digg.

Speaking of digg, the other cool thing I have now because of twitter is near daily live videos from kevin rose’s phone on qik. Pretty funny, almost makes me want to work in a dot com office again - wait no it doesn’t.

geek stuff digg, jasoncalacanis, twitter

Big news today, well I guess not big but rewarding for a nerd like me, ZinText finally got the blessing from eBay, meaning we get to use this cool logo:

And take the scary “not approved by ebay” text out of the terms and conditions. Pretty cool, thanks eBay!!!

geek stuff, ventures ebay, zintext

Was just reading about MySpace’s revenue woes on gawker and I was just amazed. Apparently their plan is

an ad network which lets his salespeople sell ads all over the Web, not just on MySpace and other News Corp. sites.The idea is to take what MySpace has learned about its own users and share it with publishers and advertisers, to better target ads. What behavioral insights Bain expects to garner from “thanks for the add” isn’t clear. But at this point the Fox Interactive Media Audience Network remains little more than a thought bubble

So I thought to myself, what would I do if I owned MySpace? Well, look at their top users. Mostly mainstream music acts, Models, etc. All people out there pushing a brand and making money through their profiles. So why not create an AdBrite type system where advertisers can buy ads on specific profiles, and MySpace shares revenues with the users? More traffic, happy advertisers, and happy users. You guys can just send the check to my PO box.

geek stuff, rant, web marketing internet, marketing, myspace