Category: Business

Hating Your (Potential) Customers: Content Licensing from a Major Record Label

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Have you ever wondered what’s involved in licensing a popular band’s music?  A few years ago I was curious and wanted to see about using a rock band’s song (signed to a major record label, Sony’s Epic music) for a marketing project.  There are some bands who get the internet, and some who don’t, and this band (one of my favorites) is probably somewhere in between.

First, I had to spend quite a bit of time googling and navigating around their record label’s website.  Finally, I found an obscure reference to call a certain phone number.  I called it, and had to navigate through a maze of IVR options, pressing several numbers to wade through several different menu levels.  Finally, I got dumped out to an answering service that played a message instructing you to write a physical letter describing the band, song, use you had in mind, and several other criteria.  The message helpfully repeated itself, then hung up.

I remember being shocked at how arcane the entire thing was, despite the well documented track record of major media labels and distributors to make things as difficult as possible for consumers.  Needless to say we never sent in the physical letter, and I never actually found out what it would cost.

I like to remember this experience when thinking about the barriers our customers have when attempting to give us money.

The Efforts of a Generation – Some Thoughts on PPC Advertising

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I’ve been spending the last month or so setting up, honing, and dialing in our Google Pay Per Click (PPC) strategy.  I have a few thoughts on this experience that I’d like to share and see what the current conventional wisdom might be on these topics.

A little background – we’re decidedly in the “long tail” camp of online advertising, which means we’re going after search terms that are very specific.  We’re not bidding on keywords like “cheap software” or something that would broadly appeal to all consumers.  Our target market is training companies who need software to help them manage their training businesses.  Search terms like “training management software”.  Even terms like “training business” are much too broad for us as this would usually refer to people starting a personal training business, and while they could use our software, we’re more geared to the type of training company that delivers many different classroom style courses (online and offline).

Is Google Adwords Designed to Scam You (or at least Mislead)?

Google’s motto is famously “Do No Evil”, but I believe that the way Adwords is configured by default is designed poorly at best and possible designed to flat out scam you.  Let me explain.  When you start a new campaign and begin adding keywords, Google accepts keywords you enter as a “broad match” type, which their documentation describes as “synonyms, related searches, and other relevant variations”.  This is totally reasonable on the face of it, and I’ll bet that most if not all campaigns get started with these parameters.  They’re the default and everyone would like to include synonyms!

Here’s the problem – Google buries the only way to sanity check which keywords your campaign is actually being clicked through on in a very hard to find option.  They also don’t update these stats until 24-48 hours later, when every other stat available through Adwords seems to be updating hourly or better.

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What does this mean?  It means that the default report you see which shows your keyphrases and the clicks via those keywords is not accurate – users aren’t actually clicking on those keyphrases, they’re often clicking on things that have almost zero relevance to your campaign particularly for those campaigns that are designed to go after “long tail” keywords.

Instead of showing you the real keywords that you’re paying for, Google hides these away on another report in a dropdown menu labeled “Keyword details”.

Google repeats this tactic of (at least from what I can see) in not allowing you to whitelist display network sites.  They allow you to select sites on which you’d like to run your ads, but they also require you to run on “automatic placement” display network sites which were all 100pct irrelevant and probably would be to most companies.  Sites like screensaver downloads, free software download sites, or a wide variety of other sites that seemed designed to be Adwords honeypot properties.  From what I can tell you can either disable all display network advertising, or login every day and manually “Exclude” sites where you’ve potentially wasted money the previous day.

Why does Google do this?  It’s clearly in their interest to extract as much revenue as possible, but the thing that’s weird to me is the entire approach here seems to be designed in a way to ensure a negative customer experience, at the expense of a few bucks of revenue.  Consider the client who doesn’t care, has unlimited budget, and wants to blast out to as wide an audience as possible – let him start with a specific audience, then suggest that he loosen up his criteria and increase his spend.  In fact, Google already has this tool – their “Opportunities” tab.  The flip side is the long tail client who without really careful exploration and attention is going to get hosed.  I’m sure there are millions of small adwords advertisers (mostly small businesses) who are getting taken for a ride and will never know it.

At the very least, the keyword clickthrough report should have a one-click drilldown to the actual keywords clicked to help users see and hone their campaigns.  I mean, certainly this is one of the most valuable reports (if not the most).  This report only increases in value as you widen your net of keyphrases.  Why effectively hide it?  Because you might rethink your spend when you see what you’re actually paying for.

Another really annoying thing possibly designed for lockin reaons (although probably just an oversight) – you can’t export your keywords.  Yes, it’s true.  You have to “spreadsheet edit” then copy and paste them out.

This is Probably a Conflict of Interest

It’s a really uncomfortable feeling to know that you’re bidding on keywords within Google Adwords while trying to optimise for those same keywords via Google Webmaster Tools.  This is a massive conflict of interest and Google would be well served to break these into separate companies or at least detail what kind of protections they have in place to prevent the obvious issues that could crop up should the teams begin to collude together.

Click Fraud

Google allows you to pay for ads based on conversions, which is something we haven’t experimented with just yet, but on the face of it seems like a good idea.  Good fora business and for Google as in theory it makes click fraud irrelevant.  Who cares if they fradulently clicked the ad as long a they didn’t buy your product?

Since we’ve been live, we’ve noticed 1-2 signups per week that come with good names, reasonable email addresses, and plausible phone numbers.  Some of the phone numbers are even real, but are innacurate.  I’m pretty sure these are due to click fraud that’s designed to earn money for sites that get paid based on conversions.  If you’re a site owner, you won’t know how your ads are being paid for but it’s a good bet that no matter what a “real signup” will look less like click fraud and could net you a few extra bucks.

I’m not sure what the best solution here, but I am sure that click fraud is probably responsible for at least 10pct of clicks (more for higher value products or “shadier” industries).  I wonder if Google releases its suspected rate of click fraud over time?  That would be really interesting.

The Alternatives are Poor

Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time

– Winston Churchill, Speech in the House of Commons, 1947

The alternatives to Google Adwords seem to be Facebook, LinkedIn, and Bing (which services Yahoo as well).

Bing’s ad platform doesn’t work with Google’s Chrome browser.  Their coupons they send you for free ad credit upon signup don’t work for companies outside of the USA.  Fail.

LinkedIn’s ad platform currently has a bug where your ad previews don’t work for reporting or management purposes. This means you stare at a report of metrics by ad and can’t actually see which ads are generating those metrics.  You have to clone the ad, then cancel, then go back to the report to even see which ad your stats are referencing!  LinkedIn also only lets you target based on things like title or group associations.  You can’t actually target companies by any kind of meaningful industry criteria from what I can tell.  It’s genuinely bizarre.  Their tool also has about 1/10th the information that Google’s platform gives you.

Each of these is unbelievably painful compared to Google’s options.  It’s really hard for me to believe that multibillion dollar companies are built upon these platforms (exception of Bing), or at least see them as their route to profitability.  If an entire generation of techies gave their lives to these platforms, they should be ashamed of themselves.

I haven’t setup our Facebook campaign yet, so we’ll leave them aside just now.

Google Should be Ripe for Disruption, but Isn’t

The really sad thing about this, is there’s very little chance of Google getting dethroned or even having someone to compete agains in the next couple of years.  It’s possible mobile ad networks will provide some heat, but it seems really fragmented and Google already targets these through its existing Adwords tools.

I’ll Probably Never Hire Another Pure SysAdmin

johnjpeebles3 Comments

NOTE: Updated Oct 17, See Below

This is a thought that’s been percolating around in my head for the last year or so, but has recently become even more crystalized: I’ll probably never hire another Systems Administrator.  A corollary to this thought would be: if you are currently a Systems Administrator or want to be one, you need to seriously begin planning on how to manage a career that will be mostly deprecated within the next 10 years.

Take a look at the current state of the art in cloud computing:

  • Spin up a server at your favor cloud provider (AWS, Rackspace, etc.), then use Puppet or Chef to deploy your software stack.  Now you’re done.
  • OR, Spin up an App at your favorite cloud platform provider, then push your code out using Git.  Now you’re done.
  • For both solutions, plug in some off-the-shelf monitoring, and you’re operating.

What’s missing here is the configuration, setup, provisioning, doc writing, black magic and/or prayer of setting up the software, hardware, and getting the code running that used to be the domain of the Systems Administrator.  In just a couple of years, deploying a web application has now become almost identical to deploying a desktop application – instead of an installer we’re using Git or Puppet/Chef. Instead of a customer’s computer we’re using a cloud platform or cloud server.

There’s plenty still to do on the networking side, but that’s headed in the same exact direction due to the same exact reasons: we want to be able to clearly define and programmatically execute the deployment of complex networks, just like we can with complex server offerings.

All of this falls under yet another buzzword: Dev/Ops.  Just like the cloud, we’re seeing this being adopted by smaller, nimbler organizations that are focused on web products, but the trend is clear, and there’s really no benefit in doing things the Old Way.  Even if you’re still running your own physical metal servers, you’re going to want to make sure that your own datacenter can leverage this type of workflow.  Now, the watchword to the development team is: it’s not done until I can one-click deploy it.

The laggards on this will be those industries that have regulatory or legal hurdles to overcome with using cloud services (read: healthcare) or the very large companies with services and technology that’s dozens of years old with no migration plan.

SysAdmins and future SysAdmins, you need to figure out where you’ll live in this new workflow.  Probably in the margins around monitoring or desktop support.  Possibly serving as the gatekeeper in a sort of “operations Q/A” role.  Expect small companies to have SysAdmin openings dry up over the next 5-10 years and get prepared.

Updated October 17: Hello Reddit/r/programming and Hacker News!  I wanted to take a few minutes and respond to a few themes that seemed to pop up in comments on HN and Reddit.

  1. I’m not saying Sysadminning is dead – just that the role is quickly changing.  Seems like a lot of people (anecdotally, many Sysadmins) thought I was saying the entire profession is dead.  Yes of course we’ll still need Sysadmins on some level, but the crucial difference is that for many areas of a business these needs will be less and much much different.
  2. Software development is changing too.  On complex deployments, developers can’t absolve themselves of the responsibility to design infrastructure considerations into the solution they’re building on the front end.  It’s a scary thought to think that organizations are out there that don’t have this level of partnership between ops and the devs.  This is why the puppet scripts should be written first and deployed on a test environment that’s identical in as many ways as possible to the ultimate operating environment (another benefit of using the cloud).
  3. Of course, any more complex deployment will need devoted SysAdmins, but like I said above, the skillset and day-to-day job will be dramatically different when wrestling with hundreds of servers instead of dozens.  More and more programming will become the norm and more and more upfront input into the solution will be an absolute requirement.
  4. I received a very thoughtful email from a former SysAdmin of mine (previous company) who pointed out that the job is much more along “system integrator” lines now, and that the internal vs. external network distinction is essentially going away.  I agree.
  5. Whenever your’e generalizing, counter examples abound.  Sure big companies and certain computing environments will still do things the Old Way but I’d challenge readers to objectively think if most business decision makers really want to hire someone and run their email server internally or just pay Rackspace/Google/Whomever to do it and worry instead about their money-making applications.  Even those organizations that need their clusters in house will invest in tech that allows them to mimic cloud operations on their own bare metal infrastructure.
  6. A couple of amusing anecdotes – the comments on HN immediately became more positive after a well known commenter defended the post, and a Googler chimed in as well.  That’s when the upvotes really started coming it seems.  On Reddit, the story was quickly downvoted!  Most users chose either a “genius” or “idiot” assessment of the post.  No real middle ground.

 

Steve Jobs

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There’s been so much written about Steve Jobs that there’s not much to add.  Like millions of others, I remember the first time I ever used an Apple product.  It was to play Number Munchers and Oregon Trail.  My first Macintosh experience was on an LCII in one of the few airconditioned rooms in Taiwan – my elementary school’s computer lab.  While I was too young to appreciate the differences between the (at the time) very outdated Apple II and our fairly outdated IBM compatible XT Turbo, the Macintosh was clearly completely different.  I managed to swing an editor job on our 5th grade newspaper which afforded me almost unlimited time to learn how it worked.  Everything was exciting on that machine, even word processing!

I bought my very first Apple product in college, the 2nd generation iBook with a 500Mhz G3 processor and OS X.  It was a little underpowered, but the hardware design was incredible and I remember being thrilled when I got several OpenGL school projects to run on Windows, Linux, and my new Mac.

To me, Steve Jobs embodies hope.  A college dropout becomes a billionare.  A man with limited technical skills becomes the an incredible driver of technology.  Fired from his company, failing at NEXT, he stakes almost all of his personal fortune and strikes gold with Pixar.  He affects industry after industry, despite many many setbacks along the way.  Sure, he was a jerk, but that’s a hopeful story too – jerks can learn to movitate people and soften when they get older.  Of course, none of these thoughts are based on personal experience, but it’s the perception I get.  Steve’s life to me is a story of hope triumphing over reality.

I’m excited to read his biography, and I’m sad I never got the chance to meet Steve, except through his products, but here’s to a legacy of hope.