Written on December 24th, 2005 at 12:12 am by Darren Rowse
Do you Blog for any Blog Networks? - Poll of the Week
This week’s poll of the week (it could actually run for two weeks while I’m away) asks:
‘Do you Blog for any Blog Networks?’
I’ve just left two options for answers, yes and no.
I’ll leave a definition of ‘Blog Networks’ up to you to define for yourself. I’m not interested in a debate on the issue of what is and isn’t a network except to say that if you think you are a part of one then please answer yes.
If you want to discuss the poll or share why you answered what you answered - feel free to do so in comments below.
Written on December 24th, 2005 at 12:12 am by Darren Rowse
Chitika Earnings Poll Results
With the holidays fast approaching I thought I’d end this week’s poll of the week a couple of days early.
The question this week asked how much readers earned from Chitika’s eMiniMalls. in October after auditing.
The results (shown graphically below) illustrate very clearly that Chitika has a way to go when it comes to getting bloggers to sign up with almost exactly half of the 433 who responded indicating that they do not use Chitika eMiniMalls on their blogs or websites.
The breakdown of the results was as follows.
What’s interesting is to compare the spread of earnings to the recent Adsense poll we ran (although i’ll note comparing the two ad systems is probably not really fair on either system as they are at such different stages of development - it’s also not fair because I was asking about two different months - so keep all this in mind and don’t take the results too seriously). Keeping all this in mind here are a few reflections on the comparisons:
- Obviously many more people responded to the AdSense Poll - this is probably for a number of reasons including the fact that this poll happened in the week before Christmas, that AdSense has a much higher profile than Chitiika etc
- The Category of people who answered ‘Don’t use’ is clearly much larger when it comes to Chitika - this doesn’t surprise me in the slightest as Chitika is much younger and less known.
- What interested me most was the comparison between the AdSense Poll and the Chitika Poll after taking out the ‘Don’t Use’ figures. ie what I wanted to find out was not only how many don’t use the programs but more so - how are those who are using the programs finding the results. The direct comparisons (taking out the ‘don’t use’ results) look like this:
Once again we see that a fairly high percentage of Chitika publishers are earning under $10 per month. Again due to the age of Chitika and some of the issues they’ve had recently with getting their system balanced with audits this does not surprise me.
Having said this - what interests me most is the top end of the earnings spectrum where we see that in the top brackets Chitika matches and even outperforms AdSense in terms of percentages. 8% of those responding earn more than $10,000 per month with Chitika in comparison to 5% of AdSense publishers.
Once again this comparison is not overly fair as the numbers responding to the surveys were not even and they were surveys of different months. As I always write, these surveys are not scientific by any means and need to be taken lightly - however they do paint an interesting picture.
While Chitika have had a lot of negative press for some of their issues (and I think the stories need to be told to give an honest appraisal of the system) it’s also worth noting that some publishers are making decent money with the system.
What will be interesting is to do this same poll in 12 months time to see how the figures have changed once Chitika has become a little more mature as an Ad system.
Written on December 23rd, 2005 at 08:12 am by Darren Rowse
A Story about the Importance of Checking your Blog’s Stats
Robert Blum emailed me this morning to let me know of a post he’d just written titled Four Weeks Of Blogging where he took the idea of my 18 Lessons I Learnt Blogging and did his own version after 4 weeks of blogging. While Robert might not have been blogging seriously for long some of his lessons are great.
Of particular interest is his lesson of starting to track his blog’s stats more. The realization that he made when he did this was that 45% of his traffic was coming from one post.
My Story - I remember in my very early days of blogging having this same realization on a new blog I’d just set up at what was once a photolog where I was posting some pictures taken on an overseas trip. The blog was called ‘Visually Speaking’.
I had grand visions of the blog being followed by friends and family wanting to see my photography. I also posted a short review of the camera I was using at the time.
The interesting thing was that after a few weeks blogging there I checked my stats and found that my photos pages had had absolutely NO page views but the mini camera review had had quite a few people surf in from Google - around 20 people were coming to it every day.
A light went on in my head and I began an inner dialogue that went something like:
‘If 20 people come to 1 camera review - how many people would come to 100 camera reviews?’
At around the same time I discovered AdSense for the first time and I began to see the potential in blogging to pay for my ISP costs and maybe make a few extra dollars on the side.
It was then that I transitioned my photolog into a Digital Camera Reviews Blog - my first blog with an income stream and one of the largest one’s that I run today.
It’s a blog where I follow what is being written around the web by the many many digital camera sites and condense it into a different helpful form. The site is read by between 12,000 and 16,000 unique visitors per day and is well regarded by the sites that it links to and quotes from as a result of the high levels of traffic it sends to those sites.
The moral of the story is that if I’d not tracked my stats and had the realization that that one page on my site was generating most of the traffic I’d probably still have an unvisited photolog and would probably never have discovered how blogging could actually become a full time job.
Written on December 23rd, 2005 at 02:12 am by Darren Rowse
Buying Blogs - What to Look for
Here’s one I’ve been meaning to link up to for 24 hours now (I’m getting absent minded in my old age). Andy Hagans wrote a good post on his Blog Buying Checklist. It has a good list of things to consider and look for when looking to buy a blog and trying to determine it’s value. Andy knows what he’s talking about having just bought a blog on SitePoint.
Written on December 22nd, 2005 at 04:12 pm by Darren Rowse
BlogKits Announces They’re Back…. Almost
Jim from BlogKits (a blog ad system that went on hiatus for the past few months) has just posted that BlogKits Is Back! and to expect an announcement on the system in the new year. It’ll be interesting to see what they’ve come up with - blog specific ad systems will always be difficult but hopefully they’ve come up with a winning formulae.
Written on December 22nd, 2005 at 02:12 pm by Darren Rowse
Duncan goes Pro
My fellow Aussie and b5media director Duncan Riley from the Blog Herald has just announced that he’s become a enternetusers. While I think this was always his goal it’s come a little sooner than he expected by the seems of things having being told this week that he’s being ‘restructured’ out of his full time job.
Duncan’s seeing this as an opportunity rather than a threat and is throwing himself into blogging with everything he’s got in 2006. All the best with it Duncan!
Written on December 22nd, 2005 at 02:12 pm by Darren Rowse
Kinja Relaunches
Kinja has relaunched. It’s a Gawker service that incorporates elements of an RSS reader with some other interesting web tools. In a sense it’s also a blog directory. I’ve never been a big user of it because I have other tools which do everything it does and to be honest I’ve always been a bit confused about what it’s main purpose is.
Having said that - I’m sure it will be useful for some and the relaunch is a real improvement on the previous incarnation with lots of new tools and a nice redesign. Here’s the Kinja enternetusers page.
found via lifehacker
Written on December 22nd, 2005 at 12:12 pm by Darren Rowse
AdSense Begin Serving Themed Holiday Ads
Google AdSense have begun serving their special Holiday Ads to publishers who have elected to allow the themed ads to show on their sites.
The only problem is that the designs don’t take into any consideration the designs that the publisher already had on their site.
For example check out the following screen captures from my Digital Camera Blog which I just spotted the themed ads on.
First here is a screen cap of two of the themed ads. You’ll see they are a rather ‘blue’ design with the Christmas watermarks behind.
And now here is the design of the ads I designed and have put on my blog originally. You’ll notice they are much more blended and fit with the total design of the blog.
I wasn’t aware when i signed up for themed ads that the who ad would change like this - I’d though they would just serve my normal ads with watermarks. I’ll be interested to see how this impacts CTR in the next few days. Obviously not every AdSense ad is being served up with the themed ads which will make it hard to track their success from a publishers end.
Lastly I would have thought a red/green color combination might have been a little more Christmas like.
Written on December 22nd, 2005 at 09:12 am by Darren Rowse
Clipmarks and Copyright
Has anyone ever heard of a site called Clipmarks? It’s a social bookmarking type site except they seem to give the full content of the pages being submitted. For instance here is a Clipmark of my 18 Lessons I have lernt about Blogging which has the full content of the article I wrote in a little scrollable box - including the comments! It even pulls in the images from my post. To give them credit they do give a link back etc - but I wonder if they’re going to get themselves in trouble reposting full posts from blogs etc.
They do have a copyright policy in place but it seems to heavily put the onus on the owner of the copyright to enforce it. It’s not just as simple as sending them a ‘please remove my content’ email. Here’s what you have to do:
If you believe that your work has been copied, framed or otherwise used in a Clipmark in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, or your intellectual property rights have been otherwise violated, please provide Amplify’s agent for notice of claims of copyright or other intellectual property infringement (”Copyright Agent”) the following information:
1. an electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright or other intellectual property interest;
2. a description of the copyrighted work or other intellectual property that you claim has been infringed;
3. a description of the material that you claim infringes on the intellectual property and the location of such material;
4. your address, telephone number, and email address;
5. a statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright or intellectual property owner, its agent, or the law;
6. a statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in your Notice is accurate and that you are the copyright or intellectual property owner or are authorized to act on the copyright or intellectual property owner’s behalf.
My reaction is not overly positive. I don’t mind excerpts of my content being reproduced but to have a full page reproduced goes too far. This is why I have partial RSS feeds. To set up a service that has at it’s heart the reproduction of others work seems to me to be an unwise move - I can just imagine the legal fights they will have on their hands.
What do you think?
Written on December 22nd, 2005 at 09:12 am by Darren Rowse
More enternetusers ‘Summer Series’ Guest Posts Needed
I’ve had some great submissions to the Write for enternetusers ‘Summer Series’ post of a day or two back. There is still a few spots left though if you want to join in. I’ll extend the deadline for another 12 or so hours if you need the time.
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enternetusers Sponsors
Team Blogs
Blogs from b5media management and staff members.-
internetusers
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Active Apparel website 1cecilia392
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Active Apparel website 1cecilia392
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network Apparel website 1cecilia392
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enternetusers
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Active Apparel website 1cecilia392
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b5media Mobile RSS
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