Breaking100

I tried AuctionAds service for a while and now it is time to explain why I will not use it again.

If you don’t know what the service is, this is from the home page: “Auction Ads allows you to monetize your website by displaying live eBay auctions next to your related copy“.

The idea is simple, you insert a banner like this

in your web site. When a user clicks on the ads gets to the eBay site, if the user does some actions you are paid.

The idea is good, the banner is pretty nice and the system has some cool features:

• the ads are not related to page content, you have to specify a couple (15) of terms used for retrieving auctions. So if your site is about cell phones you can have computer ads too.
• the payments are really quick and easy. “We send out payments the first of every month via PayPal. The payment is for all revenue generated the previous month. There is a $10 minimum for earnings“.

Despite of these aspects, I think that the system is not really useful because of:

• the only way to get paid is using PayPal;
• currently the system is english only;
• you are paid ONLY if the user does a Winning Bid, a Buy-it-Now or a confirmed user registration. I think that this is the big problem. I would appreciate more the program if there were some kind of pay per click (even with low revenues) because every click is always a user that I send to eBay’s web site. And this has a commercial value, IMHO.

If the guys at AuctionAds will add internationalization and revenue from clicks I think that this service could be a killer application for publishers. Until that moment I will not use it.

Starting from these two statements:

• 99% of webmasters use Google’s AdSense program for earn something from web sites (actually the percentage is not 99, but 99 is more impressive).
• Also Yahoo started the YPN service, that is very similar to google’s (at time of this writing in beta testing).

The question: what would YOU do if you are in Yahoo’s marketing staff?

My answer: 3 things.

First, enjoy the Google’s AdWords program and starting to get impressed on adsense powered sites with a YPN ad (this is legal, the problem is that google wouldn’t allow Yahoo to do so).

Second, conversion premium if someone migrates from google to yahoo. Something like: “if you migrate from google to yahoo you will receive a bonus of the amount of 70% of your last google check” (I really don’t know if this is legal).

Third, the most important one, I will start systematically spamming the adsense banners on target web sites in the hope to get a lot of adsense users to get banned from the service. And, if a user get banned from google, in how many seconds you think he will request a yahoo account ;) (this is illegal, I am pretty sure).

What do you think? I’m too a basdard? And you, what would you do?

Please note: I am not a marketing expert and these are only theoretical ideas, for these resons I wuold like to know what do you think about this post. 

In a recent post I pointed out a new (I think) spam method (see New ideas for spam and for better filtering #1).

Now it’s time for a brand new idea.

Noticing that automatic generated mail from mail servers are not stopped by gmail spam filters, a spammer could, using one of this mails, write a special modified version for spamming purposes.

Let me explain with an example. Using the same sender and receiver as previous post I prepared this mail

This is the Postfix program at host postfix.fakedomain.tld.

I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be
be delivered to one or more recipients.

For further assistance, please visit the help page.

The Postfix program

Obviously the help page is a “standard” viagra selling page on where the reader will be redirected if he clicks the link ;)

I think that this spam method will be less effective than previous but has the same implications for filters. I think that only RBL could stop this kind of spam. Of course, bayesian filters can stop ALL the automatic server generated mails, but is really what you want?

As you can see by the image, the mail arrived in InBox folder without problems

If there is some spam expert that would confute this, I will appreciate it.

Last week I was reading some web pages about spam filtering.

This paragraph about Bayesian filters sounds not so good to me:

Bayesian email filters take advantage of Bayes’s theorem. Bayes’s theorem, in the context of spam, says that the probability that an email is spam, given that it has certain words in it, is equal to the probability of finding those certain words in spam email, times the probability that any email is spam, divided by the probability of finding those words in any email. [from Wikipedia]

If filters operates only on the probability of finding certain words in a mail it would be very easy to pass them. Let me explain, if I want to sell Viagra and I know that Viagra is a bad word I can, like most of the spammers do, write W1AGRA, V I A G R A or something similar. Yes, this is quite simple to fight with some reg-exp haking. But wait a moment and keep reading.

The next step is clear, can such filters manage words that are NOT in the mail? What happens if I do not write Viagra at all? Can this be a flaw in the antispam filters? Let see …

Since I’m not an expert and I doesn’t have a mail server for testing I used the well known Gmail spam filter (yes, the spam directory on the left).

First of all, the choice of the two mail accounts. The sender is a mail account of one of my domains and has the form subdomain@subdomain.domain.net, the receiver is a standard gmail account. No mails were sended in the past between the two accounts, this make me sure that gmail filter has not tagged as nospam the sender mailbox.

Now I need to write my first spam mail that I will send from the sender to the receiver, quite clear ;)

I looked around in my mailbox trying to find some good (that is bad) spam mails that passed the filters. Mmhhh nothing interesting, only a huge amount of confirmation mails for sites registrations (recently I have joined a lot of 2.0 sites) … one moment … that’s that, this is the perfect spam mail. A mail that has only few words (no viagras or cialis inside) and the words are commonly used together in real good mails.

To now five seconds and the mail was ready, something like this:

Welcome john,
these are your account details
Username: john
Password: d7d493a
Use this login page to activate the account
Login Page

mail sended and perfectly received (please note the url of the login page ;)

This is a quite normal mail for users eyes but the “Login Page” is like a trojan horse link, once in, you have to click and you will be redirected to the famous viagra web page.

Obviously, if you realize that is spam, you can use the “Report Spam” button on Gmail accounts, but in this manner you risk to train the filter in a bad way and, in the end, you can loose some no-spam registration mails.

This is my idea, but if for some reasons you think that is not so good because filters do this and that and blablabla, let me know with a comment.

Cheers and as always I apologize for my spamming english

This month I will point out an interesting service for contextual advertisement.

If you are looking for something different from Google AdSense flat text banners you have to give a try at TTZ Media Network.

This company offers a real time pricing comparison banner with images and text, in the next image an example:

as you can see every single ad is divided into two sections:

1. on the left an image of the product is shown (green)
2. on the right some product-related text, mainly product name and some tech details, and a list of direct links to sellers web pages (red).

very interesting is the fact that the link list gives you information not only on where to buy the product (buy.com, buydig.com, walmart, …) but also the effective price of the product.

From the official TTZ Media Network web site:
Because of the highly targeted nature of these links, click rates are far above the industry average. That means more money for you than any other advertising system on the net.

Maybe this is only a marketing statement, however the idea is really interesting and I think is something to look at.

Unfortunately this service is restricted only to “high quality content sites with at least 250,000 page views per month” but if your site is eligible for the service start from the join-us page:

http://www.ttzmedia.com/index.php/join-us/

Yesterday I was travelling by bus when I saw a wall with lots of advertising billboards. The fact is that every single billboard was overwritten by people using pens , felt-tip pens and similar things. I thought: “what an extreme example of web2.0” and from that the idea.

Why not letting the people communicate through billboards, could be an example of web2.0 communication-style, but outside the web2.0.

So here an example of writable billboard (I am not a designer as you can see;):

and after a period you could have something like this:

mmmmhh yes, is not a great example of social art but, if you think that a kind of marketing like this include thousands of billboards, some of them have to be interesting or funny or artistically notable. However a billboard like that really captures the attention since is something unusual.

What do you think about this idea? Maybe somewhere around the globe there is already something similar …

Please note that the text logo in the bottom part is something explicative and not related to any existing company.

This idea is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Yesterday I signed up for a free account on www.myopenid.com where I found probably the best example of CAPTCHA ever seen. If you are asking what CHAPTCHA is, here a definition:

A CAPTCHA (an initialism for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. [From WikiPedia]

As a matter of fact spam prevention is a key aspect on web sites, blogs, community portals and, if you do not trust me, have a look at [MSN launches Dutch Digg clone, but forgets spam prevention] to have an example of weak web system ;).

Well, now that we all agree that avoiding spam is a good practice let me show this ex.ex (extreme example):

mmmmhhh, my 2 cents on SKIL or SKJL …

Really no automatic subscription can be done, nor human =)

Everybody knows what is contextual advertisement. No? Have a look at the picture.

This is the best example of contextual advertisement I have ever found!! It is a screenshot of the well known OSnews web site during a mysql server fault.

I have never seen before this kind of double-contextual advertisement:

1. contextual because the site has a web technician target;
2. double-contextual because makes an intelligent use of web events that can scare a technician.

It would be interesting to find out how many click that banner received during the server fault …

=)

If you have a web site and you want to make some money from that a good way is to add some banners. Recently Google AdSense, and others, added to their good text banner service the possibility to use old-style image banners. Now we can choose from a banner like this

or a banner like this

but what is the best choice?

Personally I prefer simple text banners, and these are the reasons:

1. I spend time, and sometimes money, to create a pleasant site layout and graphics, so I DO NOT want to dirty the page color equilibrium with a insane image banner (color speaking);
2. doing a kind of auto user testing, I realize that during a year of navigation sometimes I click on interesting text banners but I NEVER click on image banners (it is a habit to ignore that colorful blinking images);
3. I know that I’m not a very good representative set of the entire web users so I started reading some papers. I found out this one that points out well the question, USERS ARE BANNER-BLIND.

It’s a thing that designers know till the first web banners on the 90’s, do you remember that image-blinking-horrible banners? I do, and like me all the web surfers learned to ignore that rectangular colorful boxes.

“Since advertisements began appearing on the Internet, the user reaction to banners has been disappointingly low. Williamson (1996) reported an average click-through rate of 2.1%. According to Nielsen (1997; 2000), click-through rates have since then constantly decreased from 2% (1995) to 0.5% (Oct. 1998), and reached 0.2% in May 2000. Sutherland (1999) also found that click-through rates had declined to 0.5% in 1999. […] users simply do not notice banners on Web sites. [Why Are Users Banner-Blind? The Impact of Navigation Style on the Perception of Web Banners]”

This is more true if the user has a goal in his navigation like find an information, a product, read mails, and, unluckily for web managers, most of users have something to do on the web. This is the point, users have something to do/find while navigating across pages and text based banners could help in this. With in mind the concept that image banners are ignored, look at some task examples:

• if I’m searching information about a book, I could be interested on the official page of the book (and in that page I can also accidentally buy the book ;);
• if I’m booking a fly for, let say New-York, I could be interested on booking an hotel too;

these are examples of standard tasks done by users and, in this and others similar situations, text banners have a high appealing.

I can admit that there are situations where image banners could, and note that is a ‘could’, make a better job than text banners. One clear example are the teenager sites, the reason of this is that the users have nothing to do, only waste some time enjoying themselves, and so the blinking banner of the latest brand new amazing video game could attract some clicks, more than a text saying “brand new amazing video game” ;).

Now you know why I prefer text banners, so GO TEXT and win!!

The article of this months is about page titles, I would like to make some considerations about the words to insert into a page title, or not to insert.

First of all let me say that I have a web site (perdomani.net yes I’m italian so I apologize for my bad english) that doesn’t make lot of profit, is a new site (4-5 months old) that I use mainly to experiment (yes, I do nothing on a production $ite!!).

So, let’s start with some numbers to introduce the question.

The first thing to look at is the number of visitors.

As you can see the last week I had a sensible reduction of daily visitors (from 80-90 a day to 18- 25 a day). But how to find out the reason? Well, I need some log analisys. Focusing the attention on what are the sites from where visitors come (referring source in google analytics language) is a good starting point. Infact, after some searching, I found out the point:

• the week from 1/19/2007 to 1/24/2007 I had 430 visitors from google
• the week from 2/2/2007 to 2/7/2007 I had only 22 visitors from google (that is a reduction of about 94%).

Now it’s time to start to do some googling. I know that my site was first in results if I search the domain name without the “.net”, that is “perdomani“. Wow, what appened!?! My home page is no more on the first 10 results and, as a paradox, a site that speaks about my site is first. Trying to find out the quibus I looked at the google cache of my site and with surprise I found that the same day my visitors dropped down google updated the index informations about my domain.

So now the question is clear: I DID SOMETHING BAD ON MY SITE. Trying to remember the last upgrades that I did on my site template I was able to find that the only change is on the page titles.

Let me explain the facts. Till some week ago my site had a title like this “perDomani - Risorse per la scuola” that traslated is something like “forTomorrow - School’s resources” and an internal page title had this look “Dante - Paradiso - Canto I - perDomani - Risorse per la scuola” with the name of the page’s content followed by site name. With this title style I received visitors from about 450 different google searches a week (lots of students searching Dante’s resources).

Few days ago I tryed to change the titles to include some other words of interest like maturità, esame, appunti (translated is exam, notes, …) in the hope to capture more visitors and this was the mistake. Now a title looks like “Dante - Paradiso - Canto I - perDomani - Risorse per la scuola (tesine di maturità, appunti, ricerche)”, too looooong. The result is that now nobody can reach my site searching for “Dante” because I have too many words in the title and so the single word “Dante” loses power in the query.

Immediatly I made a roll back of the changes and now I wait for google to come back.

So, as a conclusion, I can say that is better to lose some general marketing words if this allows you to gain lots of specific words.

The results of the roll back on a future post … so keep in touch ;)