Monetizing a Website Seems like Day-Trading
by eric on Sep.03, 2010, under Entrepreneurship
I just got back from OpenCamp (http://openca.mp) and had a great time. Many solid people with excellent skills. The .Net track was pretty light but I think the value proposition wasn’t quite clear for that. It was heavily dominated by Drupal folk.
One of the topics that came up frequently was monetizing a website. The theory is that you have a bit of nice content: a review, interesting remark, tutorial, image, whatever and then use either Google AdSense or Affiliate Links to make money when people come to your page and click on the links or buy the product.
I was starting to get really excited, until I realized it was starting to sound like a crowd I hung out with in the 90′s: Day Traders. See how easily you can switch from one genre to another:
Step 1: Analyze lots of companies/content for the right opportunity.
Step 2: Once you find the company/content, look for some key indicators for its stock/keywords to see if it has the right opportunity.
Step 3: Invest some money/time in setting up the deal.
Step 4: Tell friends about the time you made $1200 for 1 hour’s work and imply that all you work is a measly 6.9 hours per week for $400,000 a year.
Step 5: Don’t tell friends about the times the deals didn’t go through.
Other Similarities:
- You are playing someone else’s game: in day trading you are at the mercy of market makers, with monetization you at the mercy of Google.
- Although making tons of money is sexy, doing analysis all day is not.
- Everyone knows someone, who knows someone, who is making $30K per month.
- Bubbles pop.
The good thing about Monetization is that it is more about time than money and there are no naked puts that can put you on the hook for $25K. However, I wonder if we had a better economy and people had steady jobs, would this job, and it is a job, be appealing at all?
Konami
by eric on Aug.29, 2010, under Coding
Need a little cleverness for your site? Trying adding a Konami Easter egg.
So back in the day there was a company call Konami that created games for Nintendo. No the Nintendo of the Wii and DS fame, that was many years later. No we are talking pixel graphics and Pac-Man. In serveral of their games there was a cheat code that was “up, up, down, down,left, right, left, right, B, A” which, if entered, would give you all sorts of in game goodness. Things like this don’t just die so there are a huge number of sites with Konami code Easter eggs (Did you know Google Reader has just such a treat? Try logging in and doing the code.) Go to http://konamicodesites.com/ to get a good list.
When you’re ready for your own pop culture throw back, include the following:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://konami-js.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/konami.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
konami = new Konami()
konami.code = function() {
alert("You have entered the KONAMI CODE! You now have 30 lives. Kinda.")
}
konami.load()
</script>
Now just add whatever javascript you want and replace the alert. Works the best with http://www.cornify.com (ahem, have you tried it here yet?)
Now, if you happen to be running WordPress, check out the Plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/konami-easter-egg/.
Why Hasn’t Coding Changed
by eric on Aug.26, 2010, under Coding
So more than 17 years ago, I was in the computer lab at Trinity College, trying to debug a program. The error, which I spent nearly 2 hours trying to find turned out to be the fact that I used a single equals sign “=” instead of a double equals sign “==”. Last week I was working on an interface between an ecommerce site and a procurement system. The bug, that took about 2 hours to find was that I was not accounting for multiple equals signs in the input.
Why, if we are in the 21st century and are all high tech and stuff, should I still have to worry about the number of equals signs in my programming? Other than the fact that I use a better interface and debugger to code, my programming coding and bugs haven’t changed substantially in 17 years.
