Today’s site snapshot is on Quality Traffic Supply. If you’re interested in getting your site reviewed, please contact me. QTS is a bulk traffic purchasing business - pay $90, get 20k visitors. Are these visitors quality, or even real? I’m having some difficulty telling, since there are no examples of sites that are part of this network, nor is there any way to join it. At 200 visitors per dollar, their contextual network prices decimate adSense.
But really, how much value can such cheap visitors have? If even a small percentage of those visitors convert, you might have a fantastic deal on your hands, but you know the old adage: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
May 17th, 2007
posted in Site Snapshots |
no comments
UPDATE: I’ve decided to cancel the Alexa project for a variety of reasons including lack of time, and I apologize for this. I’m going to give this one to Jason, unfortunately - I challenged and I lost. Without using special scripts, I was only getting my ranking up to about 50k - reaching 12k would have required, by my estimate, at least a quadrupling of real traffic, give or take some.
Additionally, the challenge should have been a three month one, as Alexa rankings are rolling on a 3-month basis. This is a fact that I was hoping to overcome (and possibly could have), but would have required even higher traffic numbers.
Finally, real life got in the way. Graduation, moving, and all that fun stuff took up much more time than expected.
Here’s the original post:
I’ve seen a few posts talking about how to manipulate Alexa rankings, so I decided to come up with a challenge:
I’m going to pick one prominent blogger, and beat his Alexa ranking in one month
The target is Jason Calacanis, rank 13,710, an “entrepreneur in action”. My current rank is 168,726, which means I need to go up 155,016 spots to beat him down.
Here are the rules:
- The start date is today: May 17th, 2007
- The challenge must be completed in one month, by June 17th, 2007.
- No using any of the scripts/sites out there that profess to boost your rankings
- If I beat Calacanis before the end date, I’m going after Shoemoney (Rank: 1860)
Once this project is over, I’ll reveal the secrets on how to make massive Alexa gains.
If you want to help me in this project, please link to this post as: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://www.mikebogo.com/the-alexa-project.php
Update 5/23:
So this may be a little bit more difficult than expected. The highest daily ranking that I’ve managed to get so far is about 53k. That means that I’m going to have to work harder on boosting my Alexa, although the amount of effort I’ve put in to getting to 53k was pretty minimal, which already shows how flawed Alexa is.
May 16th, 2007
posted in Alexa |
9 comments
I’ve recently been tagged in an Alexa Link Train by Vince Cordic. The rules are simple:
- Someone starts a link train, they post the rules and links to the initial participants on their blog.
- Everyone who was linked to then copies the original list and adds links of their own to the train, so it grows.
- The newly added participants copy the link train list and add their own links and so on..
This link train’s purpose is to boost the Alexa rankings of its members. While being heavily biased towards the tech industry and easily gamed, Alexa rankings are still used in many places to determine a site’s value. The value of your site is based on a geometric mean of how many people visit your site, and the average number of pages that are viewed - there are other ways to quickly rise your ranking, and I’ll be including that in the next post.
Original List
New Tags
Enjoy the link love and Alexa boosts! While you’re here, check out my post on The Alexa Project that’s running from May 17th to June 17th.
May 16th, 2007
posted in Alexa, Top |
4 comments
I’ve been seeing a decent amount of questions regarding how StumbleUpon makes a profit.
SU profits in 2 ways: Sponsors, and Sponsored Stumbles. Read on to find out how each of these affects you.
Sponsors
In SU, you have the option of donating a certain amount of money (suggested $20 for a 1 year membership), and you get a cool green icon instead of a blue one next to your name. Additionally, you can start groups, get messages emailed to you, as well as turning off sponsored stumbles.
Sponsored Stumbles
How else does SU make money? Every once in a while, a site that you’re taken to is there because an advertiser paid $.05 to bring you there. This site will generally be related to your interests, and you can’t tell the difference. Generally, less than 2% of all Stumbles are sponsored.
I hope this answers some of the questions you have about how StumbleUpon makes its money.
May 14th, 2007
posted in StumbleUpon, Top |
one comment
So there’s been a lot of news about StumbleUpon being acquired by eBay, including a Wall Street Journal (Subscription required).
First, a recap of some of the major theories:
GigaOM had the first feasible argument: “By marrying the toolbar to Skype client, eBay can do an end run around Google’s dominance of the search business. ”
Valleywag claims that it’s basically a random purchase: “Ebay has more money, from its outrageous monopoly on online collectibles and other auctions, than sense.”
eBay Strategies presents a detailed analysis of the situation and believes that eBay may be looking at a long term angle to getting into the search business that will sidestep Google. If not, at least they’ll have a powerful recommendation engine for eBay.
My thoughts? eBay is acquiring it as a defensive measure.
I don’t think StumbleUpon and eBay can directly integrate, although I can easily see the StumbleThru feature recently introduced as working on the eBay domain - this wouldn’t require a buyout though. Frankly, SU is mainly an entertainment, and not a product-purchasing tool, and converting users into buyers will be a difficult task.
I do think eBay considered how powerful of an asset Google would have if they bought it out, and so part of the value of the purchase is in a defensive measure. Google could easily integrate Stumble into it’s toolbar (what it half-assed with the dice) and reach millions more users, receive direct feedback on websites, as well as acquire a strong social network. eBay already feels threatened with Google Checkout (competing against PayPal) and Google checkout products (against eBay) - they don’t want to give Google more ammunition.
And eBay strategies has a valid point - if they can build a recommendation engine on eBay with StumbleUpon-level relevancy, it could easily increase sales and mean massive profit boosts. Could eBay be considering entering the search with SU? Doubtful, unless it plans to buy out Ask.com or Live and integrating the two - StumbleUpon is NOT a search engine, its primary purpose and use is entertainment.
Thoughts?
May 11th, 2007
posted in StumbleUpon, Top, Google |
one comment
I’ve been using Kontera for a few weeks now, and I have to say that I’m not pleased with it. Kontera is a contextual advertising service that highlights keywords on your webpage and links them to advertisers. Hovering over a contextual link provides a popup with a quick blurb.
Installation is easy - just add a javascript to any page that you want to hold the content, and you’re golden.
My biggest problem? Deceptive statistics. We know Apache logs are flawed because they can’t tell robots from people, and we know javascript logs are flawed because they miss people with javascript turned off or adBlock.
Since Kontera and Statcounter are both javascripts, they should return approximately the same number of impressions. Right? Apparently not - for the same period of time, Kontera received 872 impressions, and Statcounter had 1,818. Somehow I lost 52% of my page impressions in Kontera’s count. Does it just not load for some people? What’s going on here? If someone could explain this discrepancy, I would greatly appreciate it.
Beyond that, how profitable was Kontera? According to their statistics, I had a CTR of 1.26%, 11 clicks, and a revenue of $1.30 (about $.12 per click). This amounted to an increase of $1.49 CPM overall, since it doesn’t interfere with advertising.
However, taking into account the actual impressions, CPM only increased only by $.72, which isn’t worth the time it takes to load.
Add to that the fact that there is no automated process for adding additional sites to your account (you have to email them), it just seems like too much hassle for too little gain. However, it doesn’t conflict with other forms of advertising, so if you’re looking to squeeze out every buck out of your site, this may be just what you need.
Goodbye Kontera!
Update Monday, May 14, 2007: I just received a reply back from support about my issue - total response time: 35 hours, 37 minutes. That’s already much better than most companies, but that includes weekend time. Business hours: 3 hours, 21 minutes. Not only that, but the person that responded to my e-mail, David, had already taken the time to look at my site and see if there were any obvious issues and suggested several possibilities. A+ so far for customer service.
I’ve put Kontera back up temporarily to see if we can find what the cause of this may be. Roman commented (below) that the impressions are ones where the ads actually ran (”prods”) which can vary depending on page content, page length, geo-location, OS, browser, etc. Since I’ve noted it sometimes takes a few seconds for the highlighting function to run (page has to load fully), it may be that certain groups of people who only visit for a few seconds (Digg, StumbleUpon) are mostly ‘lost’. Another possibility is that a sizeable portion of my audience is using AdBlock.
Additionally, David informed me that they are currently working on an automated system for submitting additional sites, which I’m looking forward to using for additional sites later on.
May 11th, 2007
posted in Kontera, Top, Monetizing |
7 comments
I’ve got a big apology to make. While tweaking the site, I broke commenting, preventing the blogger/visitor interaction that is the cornerstone of Web 2.0. This is fixed now, and I owe Vince Cordic a HUGE thanks for pointing out the error. This one goes out to Vince:
You da man!
P.S., Regular posting will resume once my finals are over. I love blogging and the internet, but reality still comes first. At least until Google Life comes out of beta.
May 10th, 2007
posted in Blog History, Top |
one comment
I was searching through Google for funny homework answers like this one:
and lo and behold, 10 of the top 12 responses were from Yahoo! answers, including duplicate content from malaysia.answers.yahoo.com.
While this isn’t a malicious action on Yahoo!’s part, it does show that Google’s duplicate content filter isn’t foolproof.
May 8th, 2007
posted in Top |
no comments
In the recent update, five of the twenty PR 10 sites dropped to PR9 rankings. They are:
- apple.com
- apache.com
- statcounter.com
- ibm.com
- cisco.com
Just a fun fact.
May 5th, 2007
posted in Google PageRank, News, Top |
no comments
Now it’s just the last few weeks of school here at Brown University, and then I enter the real world. Really, I’m already halfway out - I’ve got a job in Ft. Lauderdale, working for Citrix as a tech consultant. Only a couple more exams and papers are in my way.
In any case, I decided to dip my fingers into the flash gamespace and see how that does. I created a prototype website called Zombie Haven with an assortment of random zombie games. As you can see, the design is basic, the layout is basic, and the advertising is minimal (One line AdSense). I stumbled the main page and started seeing hits almost instantly - over the last four days I’ve had between 1.5k and 3k visitors, mostly from StumbleUpon (about 2/3), and 1/3 from www.motika.com.mk (I’m going to assume that’s Greek).
Advertising revenues, as expected, have been pretty dismal. The first 3 days had a CPM of about $.03, although today it bumped up to about $.27 CPM. If this level of traffic and CPM is maintained or increases, this may be an area I’d be willing to look into, although it seems that it would be a high maintenance project. There are additional monetization possibilities that I’ll explore and experiment with once I believe traffic is more stable.
I’m curious to see if there’ll be an upswing in traffic around the time that 28 Weeks Later is released. Personally, I’m just a huge zombie fan and can’t wait for the sequel to 28 Days Later to come out.
May 3rd, 2007
posted in Top, Google Adsense, Monetizing |
2 comments
