Archive for the ‘Finance’ category

« Older Entries

How To Not Use Your Visa Rewards Points

October 21st, 2009

pic-visa-rewardsA few days ago I got a letter from my bank telling me that I earned X amount of rewards point on my credit card and that it is enough to get some cool rewards such as iPod, gift cards and hifi systems.

Excited, I decided it might be time to try and cache these points that I always ignored. But before deciding which present I will give myself, I dived into the rewards web site to do some research on all the various options. Quite fast I noticed something weird.
For 5,000 points I can get $50 right into my bank account. For the same amount of points I can also get a $50 gift card in various stores like Gap, Sears and others. Same goes for 10,000 points. I can get $100 in cache or a gift card for $100.

I have to ask this: Why the hell will someone choose to get a gift card that limits him to use the money in just one place, instead of getting the exact same value in cache he can choose to use wherever he wants???

Well, as you can imagine I decided to forget the gift cards and look for cool electronics. This time I chose a few things that attracted my eye, like a stereo system for the iPod, a portable DVD player and a noise cancellation headphones.
For each of these things, I first searched how much they cost in Amazon. I was surprised to see that the stereo system which will cost e 14,000 points actually cost just $99 in Amazon. Now remember that I can actually get $100 in cache for just 10,000 points.
The same thing went with all the other products.

Conclusion: The best way to use your Visa points is to go for the clean cache option. it’s the less sexy option, but it is the most value for your points.

Comments »

Posted in Finance

Tags:

The Virgin Pricing Revolution

August 17th, 2009

Virgin America Logo

I could probably talk for a few hours about all the benefits of flying Virgin America compared to most other airlines. But here I wanted to touch on just one subject – Air ticket pricing.

Most airlines pricing systems are complex and hard to understand. The system basically tries to understand how desperate or flexible you are in order to decide how much they can charge you for without losing you. This leads to some weird (if not to say stupid) situations. For example, searching Delta.com for a one way ticket from San Francisco to Tel Aviv in early September will result in ticket prices of around $2600. If you search for a round trip ticket for the same date, you will get it for about $1100.

Contrary to this, Virgin charge you exactly the same price whether you book a one way ticket or a round trip ticket. This method not just makes the all process much more simple for us the consumers, but also much better and more flexible. If you want to fly to Vegas, but still not sure if you will stay for 2 or 3 nights, no problem. Simply book just one way, and book your trip back when you decide what to do.

As a frequent flayer, I do hope that the other airlines will learn from Virgin and start to incorporate such a policy. Until then – look for me on Virgin flights.

Comments »

Posted in Finance

Earning More From Google Ads

March 1st, 2007

I stabled over the web site of TopPayingKeyword.com today.
There are a lot of companies that offers keyword research tools, to help bid on the right keyword in Google. At first look I thought this is just another one of them, but it appears they offer something completely different.

When you put Google Adsense advertisements in your site, you share the revenue of every click with Google. Advertisements with higher CPC/CPM will get you and Google more money.
Now, when advertisers buy keywords, some of the keywords are more expensive than others. Following this logic, advertisements that shows up near this keywords in a site are more expensive, thus generating more money to you (the publisher) from every user click.

So TopPayingKeywords actually help you determine what key words you should use in your site content as much as you can, in order to make Google show more expensive advertisements.

Don’t get me wrong, personally I don’t believe in this system. I think that in the long run, good content will bring more users which will translate into higher revenues.
Still, their approach make you think on how Google AdSense works, and if advertisers really gets what they should for their money.

Comments »

Posted in Finance, Google, Marketing

First Incentives Platform for Web Based Businesses

November 11th, 2006

Last week we revealed our first public beta of our platform – NuConomy Studio.

NuConomy Studio is probably the first ever developed incentives platform for the web. We worked very hard to develop an innovative solution, that specifically answer some of the most urgent problems of the new Web 2.0 era.

You can find a lot of information in our company web site or in our company blog (including the official press release), but I’ll try to explain it a little in my own word here:

Our vision is that in today world, in the end of the day, its talent that wins. The web sites that will attract the most talented people, will be the ones to triumph.
We also believe that talented people should be rewarded for their contribution. The situation where people are contributing more and more hours to web sites, and those web sites keeps all the advertising money for themselves can’t go on. The Internet opened a huge opportunity for talented people to show their talent, and they should also be able to earn and live from it.

But how do you do it? How do you know what users should be rewarded and how much?

Until today, it was very hard to answer this question.
Let’s look at the web sites that already operate a revenue sharing program (like Reever.com for example).
Basically, all those web sites ask the user for his Google Ads ID and Password, and 50% of the time they will show advertisements with the user ID. This mean that if someone will click on a banner when you user ID is used, you will get the money.
Although in first look this system sound great, it has a few inherent problems. Probably the most obvious one is that users are not rewarded on their contribution.
Let’s take for example a case where a blogger at blogger.com would have exposed some huge scandal in the Bush administration. This blogger post will result in millions op people going to blogger.com. But how many of them will actually click on advertisers links? Statistically, technology blogs create much more clicks than political blogs.
So in this case, another blogger that will write a review on the latest Dell laptop has a chance to get a higher revenue share from blogger.com.

Is this how it suppose to work?
Does the user that wrote about the Dell laptop is the one we really want to reward and make sure he stays with our brand?
Of course not.
The problem is that we don’t measure users contribution. The current revenue sharing programs are simply don’t base on performance.

So to wrap it up, by using NuConomy incentives platform, you will gain the following advantages over current way of operating revenue sharing programs:

  • Operate incentives programs based on exact users contribution to the business (performance based)
  • Give users incentives to promote your all brand and not just their personal page and content
  • Measure users by long term commitment, making it more profitable to be loyal and not go to one of your competitors
  • Use and combine any advertising network you want and not just Google Ads
  • Users do not need to have a Google Ads user ID

 

I would love to hear your opinion about this. Are we right in our approach? Do you have any suggestions how to make it better?

In order to make all of this work correctly we used some innovative approach to web analytics, and how we measure users contribution. In my next post I will talk about this in further details.

Comments »

Posted in Finance, Internet, Marketing, Web 2.0

The Future of Web Economics

September 12th, 2006

Marshall Kerkpatrick has a good post about the emerging trend of rewarding users in top social media sites. But what I really recommend is reading the comments section. You will find there a really high quality discussion about the future of the web economics. Should we give users incentives for interacting with our site? Should those incentives be based on money? Is it a good or bad thing?

On a side note, this actually show why talkbacks are such important thing today. Sometimes you can find more insights in the comments/talckbacks section that in the actual article itself. In this example, you can almost feel you are reading a live article – an article that updates itself over time by the power of the community.

Not many people know this, but my current start up I founded is working to answer exactly those questions. In the next week we will unveil ourselves to the world, and than of course I will have much to say about the all subject. In the mean time, here is an excerpt of one of my comments to the discussion (comment number 64):

Let me start by quoting Jason: “Quality. That single factor is what determines the winners in our business”.
That single phrase is the honest truth about user generated content and community bases sites.
People are going to Digg and Netscape.com because they can find there the most relevant information for them.
People are choosing a dating site by the number of quality guys and girls there.
You are reading those lines because of the number quality insights and professional users who comment in this site.

So the real question is simply how you attract the most contributing, quality users to your site.
If you are YouTube it could be that your brand name is simply enough. But if you are one of its competitors, you probably need to give users more incentives to come to you.
If the incentives should be based on money, reward points or mare recognition simply doesn’t matter. It will change from business to business. Most of the time it will probably be a combination of a few.
The real question is how you know to recognize these top tier users and how can you reward them in a way that will give them incentives to not just glorify their own names, but to try and help making your site better.
By paying users Jason done much more than just getting top users, he made them feel part of Netscape. In order to get the most of your users, you should treat them not as users but as partners. Their success is your success. Your success is their success.
A smart man once said that if we want to learn about the future we should look into the past. What we see today in the Internet is not different from what happened with other “old” media platforms. In the early days of the radio and TV everyone was armatures, mostly doing things for the publicity. But as the years passed we started to see talent emerge, and than even stars and today also super stars.
I believe this is exactly what we will see also in the Internet. We will see some of the users going from mare users to media super stars. Those users will be the ones that can make the difference between a business success and failure. Those users will be worth enough for us to pay to in order to keep them.

Comments »

Posted in Finance, Internet, Start ups, Web 2.0

How much is a year in Web 2.0 time?

September 7th, 2006

They say one year of a man worth seven years in a dog life. I wonder how many years it worth in a Web 2.0 start up life? ten? twenty?
I left my job and went on my start up adventure almost 7 months ago, but for me it looks like a all life time already. All I can say is that I’m happy I had enough friends who already took this journey, so I was actually fully packed and ready for the road.

Jason Calacanis blogged about how people forget that the all social news/search field is quite new, and it will take a few more years until the masses will understand it and adopt it.
The point is actually very relevant to a lot of other Web 2.0 technologies out there.
We that live inside this bubble, the ones who read Techcrunch, Mashable and Engadget every day, tend to forget that most of the people living with us on the planet don’t adapt to changes so fast.
Think about the Internet 10 months ago and the Internet today. It’s amazing to see how many things has changed in this time. Suddenly video is everywhere, wireless and 3G are again the hot stuff, Kazza is out and free legal TV on the web is on. The old media companies are still “dead” but now also the “old” traditional news sites are yesterday story. If you don’t have a MySpace account you probably came from Mars and the best way to correspond with your grandmother is via IM and Flickr.

This is how we, the bubble guys, see the world. And we sometimes forget that most people don’t wear the same ”reality glasses” we use.
We already decide which are the companies that will survive and which are the ones that will go down, even when the company is just six months old and the market itself is here for less than a year. When the true mass of the population will adapt the new technologies and services, it will be a completely new ball game.
There will be much more room for more competition.
There will be much more room for variation.

Think for example on the all concept of social networking and communities. Today, hot is more. More users. More features. More gadgets. People want to be part of the largest communities. But in order to learn on the future, we must all look into the past. Look at how life and communities evolved in the real world.
Does big is always the best option? Well… sometimes. But other times people are actually looking for just the opposite. They are on the look for a warm, close, small community. Where they can learn to know everyone, where they can feel “at home”. People are leaving the big cities with all the commotion and go to the suburbs. To the more quite life.
Are we going to see the same trend also on the web?
Think of it also in economical terms. What do you think is easier to monetize. A huge group of changing, different people or a smaller, more focused group? Where will you get the best CPM?

No. I’m not saying MySpace and Xanga will go down. I’m just saying that we will probably see much more space for more niche sites. As in the real world. We will always have Wall Mart, but we will also have our small grocery store.

Finally, we must all remember that as our world has changed so much in the last year, it can also change again in the next one. We all still got a chance to find our spot in the Web 2.0 world.

Comments »

Posted in Finance, Internet, Start ups, Web 2.0

AJAX Design and the Page Views Holy Grail

August 29th, 2006

In his post about the new Netscape mail system, Jason Calacanis made an excellent point about site design. When you design pages using AJAX, you actually lose page views. In today Internet economy losing Page views means losing money.
This brings up a very important question – What are you going for, better user experience or better statistics for your site?

I wonder if there is anyone out there who measured the number of page views sites are losing because of the use of AJAX. How many page views did Yahoo lost after redesigning their home page to use more AJAX? Did in turn the use of AJAX brought enough more traffic to compensate this loss? If MySpace would use a more slick AJAX design, would they still be the most successful site on the Internet?

I guess those questions just emphasize the problem of traditional measurement of CPM. Instead of simply measuring the number of times an ad was served, it is probably better if we could have measured an ad effectiveness using the following criteria:

  1. Number of unique user sessions the ad was served to
  2. Amount of time people watched the ad
  3. The rate between number of times the as was served to the number of times it was actually clicked on

Put those criteria into a formula that gives each one a factor, and you’ll get the real CPM an advertiser should pay for the ad.

UPDATE: An after thought… How does HitWise and Comscore measure page views statistics? If I do 5 AJAX calls when I load my page, do they “catch” them and count them as 5 page hits?
Maybe the use of AJAX is actually doing the opposite – inflating your page views count?

Comments »

Posted in Design, Finance, Marketing, Web 2.0

The Future of Marketing

August 24th, 2006

PaidContent.org reported today about a new campaign CBS is running for its new prime time programs.
The campaign will be based on interactive posters.
What are interactive posters you ask? Well, basically these are posters that can interact with you using Bluetooth.

Yes… exactly what you hear… Imagine yourself passing near a poster for the new Madonna album and getting a streaming of the album hits directly to your mobile phone or iPod. Wow. Is this cool or not?? Just think of the possibilities!

Cinemas could use this to broadcast you the movie trailers when you stand near the movie poster… While standing outside of cloth shop you will be streamed the latest fashion show… While browsing a computer shop you will get a video demo of the product you are looking at… This market is simply huge!

Of course that a lot more people should have Bluetooth and video enabled phones in order to have a real impact, but as with every technology, this is just a matter of time…

Comments »

Posted in Finance, Marketing, Media-Biz

Predicting the future and shopping for less

August 21st, 2006

Techcrunch reported today that Farecast is taking their service nation wide (US) today.
If you don’t know Farecast, I really recommend having a look. Their idea is one of the most interesting I have seen in a awhile.

In their own words:

We use data-mining algorithms to search for patterns, in the accumulated airfare data, which are associated with significant price changes. These patterns are represented and stored in models, and the models are then rigorously trained. Once created and trained, we use these models to predict the future

Simply said, Farecast can tell you if you should buy the ticket in the current price or wait for it to go down.

I would love to have this kind of service in Europe. Buying an Easy Jet ticket in Europe is like playing the lottery. You never know if you should have bought it a week before or a week after. There are huge differences in price for tickets to the same flight.

But what I’m really interested in is finding out if you could take Farecast prediction engine and tweak it to work in other markets. Think about a tool that tells you how much you should pay in an online auction (eBay or any other vendor). Or trying to predict stock market changes… Now – this is one hell of a start up.

Comments »

Posted in Finance, Start ups, Web 2.0

The Video Market Boom is still to come

August 17th, 2006

Bill Tancer from Hitwise noted yesterday that the spike in Google Video visitors (cause by the addition of Google Video link to the Google home page) did not hurt YouTube. On the contrary both services are keeping to grow in tremendous numbers.

I think this just shows how much more potential the video market has. The big fight today is not just between the different services, but also on educating the masses that video on the Internet is easy and fast.
There are many people who went broadband just recently (or still using dial up), and they are still not aware of the fact that video on the net can be a comfortable experience.

The video market still has much more places to go. There are a few technologies still to come that has the potential to take this market to new heights:

  • Video searching - Searching videos based on content and not meta data is a technology we all still waiting for.
  • Advance Tagging – Most video sharing sites like YouTube lets you tag videos you upload. The next generation of services will let you tag specific moments in videos. How many times we find ourselves watching a 10 min video when all we wanted is to watch a specific minute inside. There are already a few start ups that goes in this direction. Read for example Techcrunch post on latest joiner Viddler.
  • Video compression – As someone who lived in a few countries in Europe I can tell you that video experience in most of the world is still far from TV. Most of the time you need to wait around 30 – 60 seconds of buffering before the video will start and too many times the video will simply stop in the middle for more buffering. In this conditions, the TV “zapping” experience is just impossible.

Now take all this and add the fact that we will see the Internet and our living room TV set getting along much better in some way, and you can start and understand how big this market is going to be.
Suddenly all the millions that gets poured into Silicon Valley start ups don’t look that much…

Comments »

Posted in Finance, Google, Start ups, YouTube