Jack of All Blogs » Marketing

Death to the Rick Astley Meme

Andrew G.R. — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:37:56 +0000

If it’s true that fads always wear out their welcome, the same cam easily be said for Internet memes and viral videos. One gag that has clearly outlived its 15 minutes of fame is Rick Rolling.

For those of you living under a rock, or who are intelligent enough to not even know who Rick Astley is, he was (is?) a singer who experienced success in the early 1990s. His two big hits were “Never Gonna Give You Up” and “Together Forever.” These ditties flew up the pop charts and dominated radio play.

For some unexplainable reason, the former pop star rose from the ashes, another phoenix rising as a result of the Web. Some clown, somewhere along the way, decided it would be funny to serve a Rick Astley video instead of what you though you were clicking on. The phenomenon, known as Rickrolling, was born. On April Fool’s Day, the silly prank jumped the shark when YouTube Rickrolled every video on their homepage.

Now, as the dust settles and the sun sets on Mr. Astley again, there are ‘entrepreneurs’ who won’t let the gag die.

RickProof, hoping to defend the world against bad pop songs, promises to protect your Website from becoming a Rickroll victim.

Enter any suspect URL into the field above, and you’ll never get rick rolled again.

Our proprietary RickProof™ engine is trained to sniff out even the slightest mention of Rick Astley. It can spot his dance moves in bytecode, and has his entire discography stored in a database.

You no longer need to suffer the embarrassment of being rick rolled, just check the RickGauge™ and decide if visiting the URL your friend sent you is worth it.

I can only wonder what will spread next. Perhaps Tag Team will experience a resurgence when ‘Whoomp…There It Is’ plays every time you open an e-mail. Or perhaps, every time you exit a Website, Marc Cohn can have you ‘Walkin’ in Memphis.’ And for you XXX surfers, you get treated to Cathy Dennis’ ‘Touch Me.’ Better yet, you should be treated to a video of your parents fully engaged. Now that would be a meme guaranteed to cut down on Internet porn.

I’m all for things dying naturally and running their course, but sometimes, a meme just needs to be put down.

Don’t You Just Hate Sponsored Posts? What About Sponsored Blogs?

capslock — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:47:10 +0000

I do. And that’s because they make the world look cluttered. Imagine my disgust when, checking out a few favorite personal blogs, I realized all their latest posts were about rhinoplasty, botox, hair transplant, real estate agents in San Diego, liposuction and whatnot. And I hear these people only pay a couple of bucks per post–with the sponsored links of course. Sure, some people put in their paid links in the context of relevant posts. But others do it just plain wrong–the whole post is about the sponsored topic.

Heck, sometimes it feels that their blogs have turned entirely into sponsored blogs.

I don’t want my feed reader to get cluttered with posts about all that junk, so I usually just unsubscribe the first sign of having sponsored posts right on the blog post title. And I don’t have the patience of weeding through pages and pages of sponsored articles until I get to some relevant (i.e., non-sponsored) content. I’m okay with those links appearing discreetly within relevant posts. At least I get to read content with sense.

In my opinion, the purpose of sponsored links, anyway, is for link-building, so as long as the link URL and anchor text are there, the sponsors are happy. I don’t think anybody is still gullible enough these days to mistake those sponsored write-ups for honest to goodness blog posts by the author. We should be way past that.

A sign that a blog is going downhill is if it continually spews out sponsored post after sponsored post, again usually with the sponsored listing eating up the whole post.

Bloggers, consider the tradeoff when writing these posts! Is your credibility worth the couple of bucks per post that they pay you? I don’t think so.

Where Will You Blog Next Year?

Franky — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 01:35:26 +0000

Steve Rubel, power marketer raises a good point in yesterday’s entry, Building an Online Identity Through Lifestreams.

Where I will publish in a year’s time is anyone’s guess. However, what you can bank on is that I will have even more community accounts than I do now.

Right now, just as most other bloggers, the number of online profiles I have reminds me of the early days of domaining. You never have enough of them and any semi interesting, or worse even hyped, platform soon has you as member too.

But what’s the point of all those profiles? Agreed, there’there’s Facebook, where one can add almost everything. Or just stick to a Facebook profile and MySpace-ify the formerly geek cyber space of students.
But does exclusive Facebook networking alone satisfy the blogger or does one have to jump the bandwagon and spend valuable time on every possible network? And how much time does all this cost?

But most of all, where will you blog next year? Will any of those profiles, or services such as tumblr, replace your blog?

Safari for Windows Debuts. So What?

capslock — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 15:32:09 +0000

Some folks would believe that Apple is the biggest liar that the world has seen. Sure, their products are hip and cool (not to mention outrageously expensive by some standards). But the marketing whizzes the people over at Cupertino, CA are, the general public just tends to believe that anything that comes from Apple is heaven-sent. Sometimes what they say isn’t exactly 100% true.

Case in point: the PowerPC. For many, many years, Apple has claimed the PowerPC is faster than a comparable Intel (or compatible) chip because of differences in architecture. Sure, it’s a “reduced instruction chipset” (RISC) after all, and does tasks differently than a more complex Intel chip would. But lo and behold, after hitting some speed bumps (meaning Apple couldn’t get past some speed ceilings for the PowerPC), they switch to Intel processors and declare their new computers 5 times (or more) faster than their comparable predecessors.

Another case in point: Safari. It is a known claim that Safari is the fastest browser around. Come on. What’s so fast about a browser if all your data gets shot through the pipes anyway? That means if your Internet connection is running at a snail’s pace, then you don’t get your webpages, streaming videos, or whatnot loaded up any faster.

Maybe they render the pages faster, but so what? It’s all about perception. I still go to the loo or brew some coffee when loading up big webpages anyway. And I take my sweet time.

My point is that Apple has just introduced its previously Mac-only browser to 90+% of the computing population who use Windows. A lot of people are excited. You get “Safari on Windows” posts from the A-listers, news blogs, and all that. How has the (re)launch of an old web browser ever gotten a blogging A-lister giddy like a schoolgirl (not that I find anything wrong with giddy schoolgirls)?

Maybe it’s because it’s the rise of a new platform? Come on–the browser has been the battlefield of web-based businesses for years now. But come to think of it, the iPhone is said to be running some form of Mac OS X, with Safari as its main UI.

Or is it because it’s kind of a novelty? Like how people got excited over iTunes for Windows. For the second time around, ~~losers~~ Windows people will get a feel of how it is to use a Mac.

I don’t think this one is worth jumping for joy about. I think we had this coming. Ever since Apple switched to Intel, all things OS X are theoretically compatible with PCs. When Apple starts selling boxed sets of OS X for PCs–now that’s something to get excited about.

We Want Results, Dammit!

The Sheriff — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:10:46 +0000

The cost per click payout method of Google AdSense has been controversial since the time it was invented. There has always been the possibility of manipulation, which translated to advertisers paying more for worthless ads. Click Fraud, as they call it. Advertisers just end up wasting their money on fools who click on their own ads for the sole purpose of generating a payout.

But of course, Google is smarter than the rest of us, right? They banned such curiosity clicks from their terms of service, and created a method to detect whether an account’s click ratio is within acceptable limits. But then the unscrupulous AdSense publishers worked around this by hiring click monkeys to click on ads randomly, and still maintaining the click to page-view ratio. This was mostly from overseas (where labor is cheap). So Google invented the smart pricing. Clicks cost more if they originated from higher-income countries, or countries where the advertiser’s product is actually sold.

But you still can’t get stop wasting money. That’s because even if those clicks are from legitimate users–even your actual market–all they ever do is visit your site. And what happens next is up to them. Even if the conversion rate was zero percent (meaning no one actually buys your product or service), you still end up paying for the click.

Google is exploring a better system: cost per action. Similar to how affiliate marketing schemes pay out publishers. You only pay when people actually do something, like buy a product or sign up for a newsletter, or give you their contact info.

Even the New York Times gave it some attention lately.

Under the “cost per action” system, advertisers decide what they are willing to pay for a specific action, like a purchase or a software download. Armed with that information, Web site publishers then choose whether to run a specific ad or group of ads on their sites.

Many advertisers find cost-per-action appealing, as it greatly reduces their risk, since they are not charged for ads that are ineffective. The model has long been used online by “affiliate marketing” companies like ValueClick, which have created networks of hundreds or thousands of Web sites that display small ads for e-commerce sites. The publishers are paid when they refer a user who makes a purchase.

Cost per action ads are appealing both to advertisers and publishers. Advertisers can finally get 100% (or close) conversion rate, and they won’t have to pay for wasted clicks. And if the price is right, publishers, meanwhile, would be happy to earn more from affiliate sales rather than live by with the few cents that a click can bring you.

Of course, this is still wait-and-see. The advantage of AdSense is that you don’t really have to push your advertiser’s products (in fact, it’s illegal to encourage users to click). But with the usual affiliate systems, you have incentives to push the products yourself since you don’t earn until someone actually makes a purchase. I wonder if Google’s cost per action system will allow for this.

We hope this new results-oriented Google advertising scheme works.