The only thing worse than a shitty economy are the shitty businesses that use a shitty time to gouge the consumer even more than they usually do.

In Jack of All Blog’s crosshairs today is American Express Blue. I’ve been the owner of the funky translucent card since 2001, and overall, I have been a satisfied customer. The interest rate has been competitive, the rewards program fair, and customer service stellar.

Much to my surprise I received a letter in the mail from Amex Blue that looked a bit more important than the usual credit card company junk mail. It stated that despite my 8-year history of paying on time, I would no longer get to enjoy a fixed interest rate. My first reaction was how dare they change the rate of a long-time, low-maintenance customer. But then the next day my wife received the letter. Then my mom. My friends. And so on.

It was nice to know that I was not being singled out, but the costly proposition of a variable rate is too much for this consumer to stomach. But here’s where I went from pissed to incensed… More →

Regular JOAB contributor Andrew G. Rosen reported over at the Blog Herald the findins of a survey by SAHM and Mommyblog network BlogHer.

The conclusion of said survey is rather simple.

Blogmums to run JOAB!

Wait, let’s try that again. More →

Here at Jack of All Blogs we already established that Techcrunch is broken but things seem to get worse and worse every day for the once so popular Tech/Web2.0 blog.

For months TC has been adding authors and quantity to it’s arsenal, but sadly no quality. One could argue that former blogging Guru and TC full-time contributor Duncan Riley was not the best author either, but at least he knew how to stir some controversy. Ever since DR left TC has gone downhill.

Last week (community) blog Mashable passed TC to become the new #1 tech blog. But things do not only seem to be bad on the quality front, especially the financial department seems to have suffered.

Since weeks, TC has had several adblocks in its feeds. Ads in feeds are nothing new and several bigger blogs do have several ads in their feed. But today TC updated the feed and now comes with not 1, not 2, not even 3 but 5 (FIVE!) ads in the footer.

A whopping 720px*425px of ad space in your feedreader!

Is anyone still pressured by a hard sell? You know the type.

“Just sign on the dotted line. These could be gone by tomorrow! Prices are going up.”

Many industries still employ these irritating tactics, yet I tend to believe that Generation X, Y and everyone in between is more likely to take action with a soft sell.

Sorry Annoying Salesperson Guy, things that I want, sell themselves. You see, I operate on instinct; not just with what I’m buying, but with you. And my Spidey Sense tells me all you are about is making this month’s sales quota.

For some strange reason, salesfolks employ their full-court press routine when BIG purchases are at stake – cars, homes, life insurance and so on. However, these are usually the types of investments that the buyer will have thoroughly researched. They are also personal in nature. The last thing I want to think about when my car breaks down, my home goes up in flames, or my heart gives out, is that some slick-talking charlatan with an associates degree convinced me of what was good for me.

I’m confident that most JOAB readers will agree. But a single question remains: Who the hell still buys from these people?

Clearly, someone is still driving commissions. But why? Are you scared to say no? Desperate to just get away from this creep? Getting filibustered to death?

These might be the same folks who fall prey to Nigerian refugees looking to wire money to your bank account. Or perhaps they are waiting by the mailbox for their “miracle” pills to arrive.

Or maybe, we’re finally experiencing a true societal renaissance: The death of the salesman.

Somebody please shed some light.

Sometimes life isn’t fair. There are the real winners, and there are the rest of us who are the real whiners. Or maybe that’s just in terms of money. But when you read about TechCrunch earning $240,000 per month, you’d be bound to have a double take. Hey, that’s more than what most of us earn in a year.

Today, TechCrunch has a full-time staff of eight. This year, it hired a CEO. In August, 1.25 million people visited TechCrunch or its affiliated blogs at least once, according to comScore Inc. It brings in $240,000 per month in advertising, according to Arrington, and pulls in additional revenue from conferences and parties. Most important of all, TechCrunch is in the black.

“When I started the blog, it was just a hobby,” Arrington said. But, after a while, “It was pretty clear that I could make more money blogging than from anything else.”

If I’d founded TechCrunch I’d be laughing myself to the bank right now. Wait, isn’t that what Arrington does? Probably.

I should stress that this is the exception rather than the rule. There are a very few excellent blogs out there that make really big bucks. Then there are those so-so blogs that still make even bigger bucks. A modest number of us in the blogging business make a decent living, but aren’t exactly swimming in cash. Then most bloggers out there can only dream of making a measly buck out of their blogs.

Yes, some blogs are profitable. Stress on some.

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.

I’ve been fiddling with Text Link Ads on my personal blogs for quite a while now. I’ve been handling technical aspects of Splashpress since I joined the network, and for a time I was responsible for actually applying for site approval and installing TLA code on some of our blogs. It’s great that most of our sites already have text link buyers, though some sites are just recently entered into the system, and don’t have ads yet.

Thing is, while my personal blogs have been on the system for about a year or more now, it’s only now that advertisers have bought links on these sites. I’m not really depending on TLA to earn big money (same with Google AdSense). The blog network pays enough for a full-time income (from where I come from). But the extra funds I find useful to pay the blogging-related bills like hosting, domain charges, revenue share with the team blog writers, and the like.

However I’m quite concerned with the fact that Google is now penalizing sites that sell text links. Maybe they’re not directly downgrading the search ranking of these sites, but some argue that Google is downgrading the link juice from these sites. That means that even if your blog or site is already a trusted site with high authority, your links to external sites (particularly those identified as paid links) are likely to not be given much weight by Google’s algorithm in computing for the linked site’s authority or credibility.

This might turn off advertisers. And for a blogger, this might mean that sites I link to (whether paid or not paid) get less benefits from the linkage. So in the end, if this really pushes through, then that means the power of the link would be diluted all across the Web.

Somehow that makes me want to rethink the concept of selling text links on my site.

Over the last months one thing has been annoying me pretty much in the b’sphere : internet blog marketing.

You also know them and admit it, you hate them too.
Or are you one of those people who believes everything they say/write?

They promise you that their tricks will bring you lots of traffic, you will be long-tailed aso. Thousands of marketeers all leading their readers to the Alexa Top 1000.
They tell you all the tricks you need to know. For free!

But why are they the biggest internet community whores you find online?

More →

Duncan Riley writes over at 901am that Wikipedia has expressed financial difficulties unless it gets more funding real soon. I agree with Duncan that this smells of an attempt, indeed, to get sympathy from the general public.

In a rather extraordinary example of begging for money, Florence Devouard, Chairwoman of the Wikimedia foundation has told an audience at the Lift07 conference that Wikipedia has the financial resources to run its servers for another 3-4 months, and that without further funding Wikipedia “might disappear”.

Does Wikipedia really need money to keep on running? Probably, yes. It is one of the most visited destinations online (I’d say 30% of my daily surfing is on Wikipedia–checking out episode recaps of my favorite shows). And that amount of traffic requires a ton of processing power, bandwidth and people to make sure nothing screws up. But should Wikipedia really have difficulty sourcing funds? I think not.

After all, as I just said a few sentences ago, Wikipedia is one of the most visited destinations online. and it’s only reasonable for a site of Wikipedia’s stature to be able to raise funds easily.

However, it may not be that easy for Wikipedia to find a good business model. First and foremost, it’s seen by the public as a trustworthy and authoritative source of facts and information. Wikipedia practically controls the truth. Now any monetization activities might just taint that reputation. If Wikipedia starts to get corporate sponsorship, then there is a risk that the site gets branded as a sell-off (possibly biased towards the interests of the advertisers). If Wikipedia gets acquired/bought by another company (say any one of the biggies like Google, Microsoft, News Corp, etc.), then there is also a high likelihood that the site might be seen as serving the interests of its new owners.

Is it really that difficult to make a business out of Wikipedia? Well, in the first place, I would say something of Wikipedia’s status in the community is really difficult to turn into a business in the first place, if it intends to keep the trust value high. When money is involved, there will inevitably a general perception of self-serving interests being catered to.

But Wikipedia has to keep afloat. It would be useless if they choose principle over money but end up closing shop.

Here’s one question to you: Would you feel comfortable having ads served on Wikipedia pages?

Okay, so Shiny Media, UK’s (and Europe’s, as claimed) largest blog network has recently received venture funding.

The UK’s Sunday Times newspaper yesterday broke the news that Shiny Media have secured US$4.5m worth of funding, thanks to Bright Station Ventures who now take a 50% stake in the company.

Now the next question is what they would be doing with that money. If I were Shiny, I’d be asking for wads of cash in a few backpacks so I can just run off to some unknown island and splurge there. Okay, kidding aside. Here’s what Shiny Media says it will do with the dough.

1. Compete with mainstream media.
2. Develop the commercial side of the business.
3. Get into video production.
4. New projects and ventures.

The plans actually look promising. I mean if you’ve got several millions at your disposal, then you won’t have to worry about paying the bills and putting food on the table–at least in the medium term. That goes the same for your employees, mostly your bloggers who are the creative talent behind it all. They won’t have to worry that the network might suddenly go bankrupt one day. But then again there’s the question of creative control. Shiny’s investor now owns 50% of the network.

Well we have worked really hard to develop Shiny and we wanted like-minded entrepreneurs who were prepared to ‘sweat’ with us, not just look over our shoulder. Shaa and Dan are both dynamos who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. They don’t just bring the backing of an exciting new fund to Shiny, they also bring experience, contacts and the kind of commercial nous Shiny needs to achieve its goals.

The investors seem to know what they’re doing, with apparent experience in new media. This notwithstanding, I can see potential problems here. Sure, there’s no single entity that owns an actual majority (more than 50%), but at the end of the day, it’s he (or she) who has money who usually has the say. Remember the rumored DIGG buyout?

[R]eports came in that News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch was offering over $100 million for Digg. In Leo Laporte’s TWiT podcast netcast ( This Week in Tech Episode 77: Kiss My Ring, 1:16:25), he mentioned that Kevin (and maybe even CEO Jay Adelson) wanted to take it.

BUT and that’s a big but, the investors weren’t willing to settle with anything less than $150 million. Now, that’s what happens when you take investors. You don’t really get to say when and how you want to get compensated with a pet project that turns out get a lot of attention. Kevin’s original $10,000 capital turned $100 million in 2 years is a huge success. He surely deserves to reap the fruits of his success, and if he wants to cash in now he has every right to do so.

But then again I may be wrong. And the business model in this case is different. DIGG is surely a Web 2.0 behemoth, but blog networks aren’t probably big enough to warrant a quarrel over a matter of 50 million bucks or so.

Good luck to Shiny!