The annual bloodletting is a result of the unusual freedom allowed to shooting parties under Italian law. They can go on to private property and fire anywhere not within 50m of a road or 150m of a house.Via.
As a result, I suspect that Gawker Media’s pageview numbers will fall substantially when the new design is introduced. A lot of sites have tried to emphasize the primacy of audience metrics over clunky old pageview metrics, but the chase for pageviews stubbornly persists—even sites which carry no advertising have been known to do things like break stories up into multiple pages so that they can bask in artificially-inflated pageview numbers.That last observation makes me a little sad. I love magazines, and love blogs even more because they're basically magazines, only better. I never liked tv very much, and typically just used it as background noise for whatever else I was doing (playing gameboy, reading magazines, doing homework).
That’s maybe why no other major site has decided to adopt this kind of design, and it might also help explain Batty’s departure. The way that Denton explains it in his memo, he’s chasing audience while Batty was chasing revenues, and as a result “Chris and I diverge seriously over strategy.”
Denton spins this admission as a result of being “allergic to corporate boilerplate,” but it still sounds like corporate boilerplate to me. So let me try to be more specific still: if there was one area of disagreement between them which took long-simmering tensions to the point at which the two had little choice but to part ways, it was the fate of the sponsored post. Batty is a huge fan of the format.
[p]
The CPM game, then, is looking increasingly like a race to the bottom, where publishers desperately try every trick in the book to boost their pageviews and ad impressions, just to compensate for the fact that their revenues per page are very small. The results — sensationalism, salaciousness, and slideshows — only serve to further erode the value of the sites in the eyes of advertisers, and put ever more downward pressure on those CPMs. It’s a vicious cycle, and Denton has decided that now is the time to break it: no longer does he want to deal with advertisers looking idiotically at clickthrough rates. “Clickthroughs,” he writes, “are an indicator of the blindness, senility or idiocy of readers rather than the effectiveness of the ads.”
To break out of the current painful loop, Denton has decided to emulate his beloved television and move to “a programming grid which owes more to TV than to magazines.”
"I don't know what a liquidity event for Boing Boing would look like," Doctorow continues, "except for a job. If we were acquired by some content giant, if Yahoo or someone bought us out, it's just a job at Yahoo." (This is purely hypothetical, he says.) "If I wanted a job at Yahoo, I'd go look for a job there; they post listings pretty regularly. I'm glad not to have a job. I don't want a job."I came to that same realization after an extremely short-lived experiment blogging elsewhere earlier this year. So short I didn't even have time to mention it here.
(1926 - 2006) was a Korean movie writer, director and producer, who studied film in Japan and returned to South Korea, where he gained fame and became the uncontested leader of the film industry in the 1960s, in a time when regulations on the industry limited other studios. In the 1970s under the Fourth Republic of South Korea, the film industry was even further limited, which lead to Shin's studio being closed. Things went from bad to worse, when "the Orson Welles of South Korea" was kidnapped by request of Kim Jong Il, the son of North Korea's dictator, Kim Il Sung. The reason? Kim Jong Il wanted the nation's film industry to promote the virtues of the Korea Workers' Party to a world-wide audience.He eventually escaped and went on to make a movie with Hulk Hogan. Via.
-He gets 33% of his hits from direct traffic, 33% from search results, and 33% from third-party links. (That last number fascinates me, and I wish the interviewer had followed up. Kottke posts some interesting links, but he very rarely posts images, video, or text that's worth linking to. I suspect he gets that traffic from successful blogging friends that are part of the same ad network. By comparison, only a tiny fraction of my traffic is from third party links.)3. Speaking of ads, here's one author's experience using Google TV ads.
-When he took two months off from blogging, his traffic fell by 50%, and it took nine months of work to get back to the former level.
-He's been unsuccessful selling RSS feed ads, and thinks John Gruber is uniquely successful in selling such ads (because people are desperate to promote their iPhone apps). (When companies approach me about ad space, they're uniformly interested in banner ads only, and show no interest in exploring more creative options such as sponsoring the RSS feed.)
-His advice to anyone who wants to make money blogging? Do what he did - - spend ten years of hard work before making any real money. (My advice is to find a lucrative niche no one else has thought of, or only blog if you enjoy it. Expert couponing will probably be a more certain money saver.)
I've got a lot of yakuza friends and cop friends and reporter friends. They all die early. It would be nice to be able to do their funerals for them.2. A look at the benefits and difficulties of writing a legal blog (pdf). Via.
