Garaphernalia 7.5

Read the initial post here:

Blue face doesn’t really get any reasons for what he says. Just makes assertions. When I claim site value should be de-linked from drops, he simply says “I disagree”. Ok….why? No reason is really given, he just disagrees. Likewise, when I say that tags should be used instead of categories, he says “Bad idea to remove the categories completely. Adding tags is a good add on, but it should not replace categories completely.” Why is it a bad idea? No reason is given.

I wrote a long reply, then realized I have something far more powerful: actual data.

• Based on current Ebay prices, 1000 credits is going for around US$5. You can see buy it now auctions for US$7 for 1,000 credits and the actual bidding is less than that. We will use $5 = 1000ec as the conversion rate. (You can move that ratio around a lot and it wont change the outcome of the demonstration)
• Entrecard and PW both sell the exact same inventory (125×125 ads) for the exact same length of time (1 day). Credit vs dollar comparisons will be very straight forward.
• I searched for sites which carry both PW and Entrecard, or have Entrecard and independent sales of 125×125 ads. If independent, I used a per day basis (month/30):

Site	EC Value	Converted EC Price	PW Price	EC difference
http://fantasyleaguebaseball.blogspot.com/	522	$2.61	$0.10	2610%
http://ahkong.net	482	$2.41	$0.09	2677%
http://saphrym.com	537	$2.67	$0.10	2685%
http://controversialmarketing.blogspot.com	214	$1.07	$0.04	2675%
JohnChow.com	253	$1.27	$16.67	7.6%

The lessons are simple:
1) assuming a site sells 125×125 ads for money and is on Entrecard, you are better off selling your credits on ebay and buying the ad on PW with cash. You come out ahead. We can quantify the amount by which the Entercard pricing system skews value: it is about 2600% for the top valued sites.

2) John Chow is losing $1000 a month by putting Entrecard on his site instead of 2 more 125×125 ads.

So of course Blue Face wants to keep the system. He is making out like a bandit.

There will be periodic posts like the one before. I don’t want to gunk up my main site, so I’m going to use this site for link exchanges, contests and other stuff I don’t want elsewhere.

Also, I broke the Technorati 50,000. I was way off on what was possible with my Q1 goals with that.

I recently came across this website. What they are planning to do is pay for 30 people to travel around the world for a year.

This is something which I happen to know something about.

Let me run the numbers:

At a minimum, it would cost $10,000 a year to travel around the world. This would be visiting the poor countries, eating instant noodles, and not really spending much money on anything other than what you’d need to survive. That averages to $27.40/day, every day for a year. Realistically, you are looking at $20,000 to travel for a full year.

Traveler 2.0 is expecting their travelers to visit a new city every 3 days on average. That means you are actually moving around and paying for transportation. This puts the expense at least $20,000/year if not more. Moreover, if you want people to follow along, you’ll want to visit the sexy places, and those are mostly in Europe, Asia and North America and those are expensive.

Lets use $20,000/year as a base. I think it is very low for a schedule of 1 city per 3 days, but it is a good lower estimate.

$20,000 x 30 = $600,000 for the first year, just for paying for travel expenses. Everyone and their brother will be applying for this, so the application process will be difficult and there is a high probability that they will get a lot of stinkers who are no good at blogging. Toss marketing, administrative and other expenses on top, and you are looking at a minimum of $1,000,000 the first year alone.

They expect to have 100,000 unique visitors per day in the first month. This is total horse shit. I follow most travel sites, including major ones. The only sites with that sort of traffic are the ones who have established brands outside of the Internet: National Geographic, Discovery Channel, Frommers, etc. You aren’t going to get that much traffic in the first month. It is absurd. It takes time to build an audience. They are just sort of assuming success in the business plan.

Take the top 30 travel bloggers (of which I’d easily count myself as one) and you don’t have 100,000 unique visitors per day. Nothing close. Take the top 1,000 and you probably don’t, because most travel blogs are only followed by friends and family.

Here is how they describe how they will make money:

Under precondition, each traveller is required to maintain a blog site, for the aim of creating a following and gaining
interest in the TRAVELLER 2.0 brand. All travellers will be expected to review any services and products they
utilise during this campaign period and encourage suppliers to register their services with TRAVELLER 2.0.

So, they don’t even have the suppliers lined up. The people traveling are supposed to be doing sales.

If you are visiting a new city every 3 days, plus doing all this, where are you going to find time to do anything interesting that would make people want to read your blog??? Shit, I can barely do what I’m doing and I’m not trying to do sales and review products I use.

What is the incentive of the people traveling to do this? I assume there will be some sort of contract which will probably make a bunch of disgruntled travelers after a few months. They will be stuck trying to enforce a contract on a 20-something with no assets who is out of the country.

Read the small print at the bottom of the page. “* Conditions and set criteria apply. Remuneration based on profit outcome.” So, there is a good chance you wont get a dime if they don’t make any money….and they wont. Certainly not if they are basing it on “profit” and not including travelers as a cost.

Scam.

Where On Google Earth?

Basically, an image from Google Earth where people can guess what the image is. When someone gets it right, a new image goes up.

I’m really looking forward to getting to Melbourne and getting work done. I am finding it hard to find someone who can do PHP and help me make some changes to my WordPress template.

I’m on track for several of my Q1 goals:

• I’ve already cracked the top 60,000 on Technorati. The top 50,000 should be obtainable by the end of March
• I’ve hit 212 RSS subscribers. I’m aiming for 350 by the end of March.
• My daily readers has increased to about the 400 range. This is on top of the RSS. Getting to 1000 might be difficult. It might require a big spike in traffic.
• I’ll think I’ll get some sort of spike when I’m in Australia as I can spend some time on site promotion.
• If you are reading this, please give me some feedback on what you changes you think I should make to Everything-Everywhere.com.