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On Facebook Advertising

Two things happened recently: Facebook’s IPO fizzled and there was a slew of articles and blog posts about how Facebook ads are ineffective. The majority of the articles follow the same song and dance: we spent $250, got some likes from random people and nothing changed. The one standout it GM dropping Facebook ads. GM’s budget was 10 million dollars, and the way I understand it, this is their equivalent of $250 for a small business.

While I personally dislike Facebook tremendously and want it to fail, I think that the FB ad-bashing articles are off base. Facebook ads are a great deal. I am not an advertising professional, but I drank with a lot of them and I think picked up a reasonable amount of knowledge about the industry. I also stayed at … hmm, can’t remember the name of the hotel, but this is a reference to the TV ads where people say “well, I’m not a [professional that has to be very smart and skilled] but I stayed at [name of the hotel]”.

There are many, many bad deals in advertising. There are big-name websites that have “respectability” plus a huge saleseforce. These guys can charge $15, $20, $30, sometimes even $50 per 1000 banner impressions. cost for 1000 impressions is called CPM: cost per M where M is the Roman numeral 100. At the higher price you get gigantic custom ads known by a variety of names: browser crashers, godzillas, superskyscrapers, page fuckers, etc. There are also “sponsorships” where dumb companies buy little badges on new sites with next to no traffic.

How do these things get sold? Well, the agency people who control how the ad budget is spent are often young and get a lot of free drinks. Also, ad sales people are very good at what they do.

Then there are cut rate ad networks that have 5-20 cents CPM. The traffic for these comes from all kind of low quality sites: lyrics websites, guitar tab sites, all kinds of web farms, dating sites, porn and near-porn sites and the like. Big sites sometimes buy traffic from these sources when they don’t have enough “inventory”, but they’ve already sold a lot of high CPM ads. These are a pretty bad deal, and I suspect much of the traffic is simulated by bots. It is cheap and there’s a lot of it though. Targeting options are pretty weak with the exception of plentyoffish.com: POF allows for very detailed targeting. If you want to target only Canadian redheads between the ages of 18-22 – you can.

Google ads are a better deal: you are targeting people that are searching for something. Google has pretty sophisticated algorithms for detecting fraud, but I suspect click fraud is still rampant. Google’s predominant model is charging per click instead of per 1K impressions, and you have to compete with other people for hot search keywords. For instance, ambulance chasers pay ridiculous money for “mesothelioma” keyword. Mesothelioma is a type of cancer caused by asbestos, and layers apparently can make crazy money suing on behalf of people who have it. A click on an ad can fetch as much as $10 or more. There are many other expensive keywords where even a single click is worth paying actual humans to click on them from time to time. There are also pity clicks and punitive clicks: sometimes people click ads to support sites that they like and to punish ones advertisers they don’t like.

Facebook ads by my estimation cost about 1/10th of Google’s, almost in the low quality network territory. The targeting is amazing though: Facebook knows a lot about what people are interested in and lets you have a sniper-like precision of putting your ad in front of them. Do you want New Yorkers who are into planted aquariums, fishing and knife sharpening? If there are 10 people like that you can reach them on Facebook for a few bucks. Unlike Google users who are searching for something, Facebookers are there for ogling hot people and playing Farmville. They tend to ignore the ads, but you can get an even better deal by buying CPC ads. Massive click fraud is difficult on Facebook, most of these clicks are real.

There are many things about advertising in general that are mysterious: starting with the “if I almost never click on ads then who does” to “do tv and magazine ads actually make me buy anything”. Are funny ads where you remember the joke but not what was advertised worth the money? Are people swayed by car commercials? How about those Coca Cola billboards? How about those ads in New York taxi cabs and ads that annoy in general – are they effective? QR codes ( http://wtfqrcodes.com/ ) – are they the advertising equivalent of “free public wifi” zombies? I have a hunch, but I don’t really know.

What I do know is that compared to other options FB advertising is a pretty good deal at current pricing.

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Catching the Vintage Train

New York Transit Museum operates a special subway train made out of a ragtag selection of vintage trains.  Normally these trains are used as a stationary exhibit, sometimes as a vehicle for special events (like the Old City Hall station tour), but sometimes all straphangers are in for a treat: the train operates on normal subway lines.

Most people view subway trains as uniform utilitarian objects, stainless steel worms that swallow them in point A and if everything goes well spit them out in point B. But in reality the modern NYCTA system is made out of a hodgepodge of different train models, a legacy of three different subway systems. Many old train models have been retired, like the beloved “Redbird” trains. And by retired I mean dumped into the ocean to become artificial reefs in NJ. I remember riding redbirds, and sometimes used to encounter other old trains before they have been scrapped in favor of the more technologically advanced, but poorly designed R160-style trains. The museum train is a special case of this.

The rivets and a mishmash of large windows and steel panels give the old R1 cars look of living prehistoric creatures. Graffiti writers of the 70s hated these cars because they did not have a lot of flat surface to cover in paint and called them “ridgys”. Modern train cars mostly do away with the front windows, cutting off the whole front for a spacious machinist’s cab.

This unfortunate design decision leaves less space for passenger and does not allow kids of all ages to get “machinist’s view”.

 

These trains don’t sound like the new ones: they don’t make the “ding-dong” sound when the doors are closing, but produce a pleasant “ksssht-pfft” noise of a pneumatic actuator. Instead of whining a few melodic notes like the R160s, R1s roar like propeller planes.


One unique feature is the lack of large plastic American flag stickers that were added to all trains after 9-11.

Helvetica was not dominating the typography of the subways yet. In fact, it was not yet created.

The alternate reality feeling permeates the cars. Dangerous looking ceiling fans, exposed incandescent lightbulbs and vinyl seats were from an era less concerned with vandalism.

State of the art pre-war climate control: rider-accessible vents

and futuristic fans

 

The tiny little rattan seat behind the machinist’s cab and the completely different design of the hand strap.

One of the biggest difference with the modern trains is how the conductor works. He operates the train with the two hand grips while standing precariously between the cars.

 

Here’s a video that shows this a little better

One of the coolest parts is the fact that you can ride between the cars (something that is against the modern MTA rules. “<a href=”http://www.deadprogrammer.com/looking-at-the-things-flashing-by/”>Looking at the things flashing by</a>” normally gets you a ticket, even if it’s an amazing experience.

 

Here’s a video:

Gold and pinstripe “CITY OF NEW YORK” signs are gorgeous, but the ad reproductions are more entertaining than authentic.

A friend of mine who remembered these trains from his youth told me that the part that he hated the most about them were the rattan seats: they tended to fray and fragment into pin-sharp pieces of fiber. Rattan seats look beautiful and are extremely comfortable when new, but I indeed sat down on one seat that had a broken section that was uncomfortably sharp. On the other hand all of these trains feature “conversation-style seats” turned 90 degrees to each other instead of the horisontal rows of benches that are the standard today.

Some dubious advice, although I’ve seen this happen.

I’m pretty sure this patent ran out by now.

Currently this train operates every Saturday through January 19th. This page lists the schedule of departures. A round trip to Queens takes about an hour. The best way to catch the train is to arrive on 2nd Avenue stop of the F line in Manhattan. The train spends about 10-20 minutes standing in the station there, so it’s easier to catch. In Queens it does not stand on the platform, but the departure times are pretty accurate. If it’s more convenient, you can just spend a 15 mintues to half an hour waiting along the weekday M train stops, like 47-50th Street/Rockefeller Center.

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wi.nr

A couple of my friends created a new url shortener. Wait, stop booing. There’s a twist – it has the coolest url ever – http://wi.nr. And you can win something or other by just using it. And you get statistics. Well, I guess it’s about it. Did I mention these are my friends that are doing that?

Why should you care how short your url is? Well, it’s basically because the retards at Twitter don’t allow for inline urls (if they will one day, url shorteners would die like they deserve to), and if you want your stuff retweeted, you need to leave a couple of characters for RT and the username. Of course url shorteners are evil in general, and people at Twitter are incompetent technologically, but very lucky. And being lucky is more important than being competent.

The funny thing is, I absolutely legitemately won their first $5 Amazon gift certificate.

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Stop Your Nailbiting!: Permanently

This book provides the definitive cure for adult problem nail biting. The information and the technique supplied in this book offer effective, well-documented, and permanent relief from this frustrating habit. By reading this book, habitual nail biters can finally and permanently free themselves from the habit. It is the goal of this book to spread the message that life can be free from the pain and embarrassment caused by unsightly and unattractive finger nails and hands.
This book starts by carefully describing and defining the habit. There is more to this than many realize, and nail biters will benefit greatly by the information contained here. The knowledge and insight in this section form the foundation for beginning the journey to long, healthy and gorgeous nails. For example, many habit owners do not realize that nail biting is actually a two step habit. Both steps must be recognized and treated for the habit to be completely eradicated. The habit frequently also rears up unconsciously, and so the book also provides an effective tool for recognizing and altering unconscious behavior. Many questions are answered here and misconceptions about nail biting are discussed in detail and debunked.
After carefully defining the habit, the book then delves into why habitual nail biters pursue their habit. Incidentally, stress is rarely the cause of problem nail biting. Nail biting patterns that are frequently seen are then also discussed in detail. Reading about themselves in print will reassure nail biters that they are not alone in the world. Incidentally, research data indicates that the habit is wide spread across nationalities, age groups, and demographics. All of this information results in a powerful understanding of the habit. Many readers state that this understanding alone helps them to significantly reduce or even eliminate their nail biting problem.
However, sometimes information alone is not enough. So then, contained in the book is an ingenious and almost perfect cure to the habit. Described in the book is a simple to perform but highly effective technique for stopping nail biting. Many people who have tried the approach mention that they simply cannot believe how effective the cure is at permanently and efficiently treating their nail biting. Internalizing the information in the book and applying the technique described results in a very powerful therapeutic combination. Even long term habitual nail biters need just several weeks to completely and permanently break their habit. Some readers have even reported success just after several days. Once cured, the habit rarely resurfaces. Curing the habit increases self confidence and self esteem considerably.
After detailing the cure, the book provides documented and real case stories of notable successes with the treatment method. Case histories, pictures and testimonials are posted frequently on the book’s accompanying web site http://www.stopyournailbiting.com. Readers are invited to browse there at will and watch the anonymous and free forum discussion board to learn more. To complete the loop, the book details why other methods of nail biting habit control are not as effective or easy as the cure discussed. Many nail biters have tried various approaches to curing the habit. Such attempts often end in disappointment and frustration. The use of spicy creams and foul tasting lotions as a treatment option is addressed. Readers will learn that bad tasting lotions are not effective for nail pickers for obvious reasons. Finally, the book discusses children, and provides tips and tricks for working with children nail biters. The cure’s application to other similar ailments (cheek biting, hair pulling, and joint cracking) is discussed and readers are welcome to post tips onto the free web site forum for the benefit and well being of others.

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A Recipe for Disaster

Have any of you seen an episode of The Simpsons where Lisa becomes a vegetarian? If you haven’t, too bad, because it has a lot to do with my first paid review on this blog.

Lisa: They can’t seriously expect us to swallow that tripe.
Skinner: Now as a special treat courtesy of our friends at the Meat Council, please help yourself to this tripe. [Class cheers and runs to table loaded with tripe.]
Lisa: Stop it Stop IT! Don’t you realize you’ve just been brainwashed by corporate propaganda?
Janie: Hmmph, apparently my crazy friend here hasn’t heard of the food chain.
Uter: Yeah, Lisa’s a grade A moron!
Ralph: When I grow up, I’m going to go to Bovine University.

Joel Spolsky has his underpants in a bunch because spoiled grade A… I mean, A-list bloggers are currently being showered with fancy laptops, all expenses paid trips and other goodies by PR agencies. Next thing we’ll see is the Webbys attendees start getting Emmys-like gift baskets. It’s a widely known fact in the entertainment industry: if you want the A-listers to attend your crappy awards show, you better give them some stuff that they can buy with their pocket money.

Since I am not an A-list blogger, nobody is trying to bribe me with a drool-inducing HDTV TIVO or a shiny new laptop, so if I want to shed some of my credibility, I’ll have to do some work. I decided to try out the very controversial http://www.reviewme.com.

The deal is simple: an advertiser asks me to write a review on my blog, and if I do, I get some money. I do have pretty good pagerank and a decent amount of readers (aka blog juice), so after a month or so of waiting, I got my first paying reviewee, chefs.com. They want me to review their recipes. Fine. Off to http://www.chefs.com/recipes/default.aspx I go. I do like to cook, and I do use recipe sites all the time.

The last time I searched for a recipe I was looking to do curry. See, I purchased this really awesome Maharajah Style Curry Powder from PENZEYS Spices. It’s pricey, but unlike curry powder that you might find in a supermarket, it’s made out of the best and freshest ingredients with a pound of Kashmir saffron for every 50lb of curry.

So I type in “curry” into chefs.com and sort by cook time (a seemingly useful feature). What do I get? 133 results overall, which is not stellar, but a number of curry recipes that take 0 minutes to prep and 0 minutes to cook. A boon to a busy web developer and blogger like myself. Just to think that I was using Joe Grossberg’s How to Make a Simple Curry “Anything” that takes whole 15 minutes!

Ok, so the supefast curry recipe turned out to be just a case of bad data, a lazy developer and a company (it could be that it consists of that one lazy developer) that does not use it’s own product(or does not care about it).

Moving on. Some time ago I had to look up a recipe for another exotic delicacy, Ä°ÅŸkembe çorbası. It’s a Turkish soup made of tripe. I have it regularly at a Turkish restaurant near my house, and it’s extremely delicious. Tripe can be very tasty when prepared right.

So I type in “tripe” into chefs.com. Here’s what I get:

To my disappointment, the first result, “Lighter Fresh Applesauce in Puff Pastry” does not contain any tripe. Neither do the rest of them.

From what I know, recipes are not really copyrightable. Because of that, it’s possible to get a couple of cds with recipes from somewhere or just scrape the web and start your own site. For instance, the recipe for “Lighter Fresh Applesauce in Puff Pastry” shows up on different websites with the same phrasing down to “Bake puff pastry shells according to package directions.” One of the sites even has nutritional info, but also omits the source of the recipe.

To conclude my review, chefs.com has reviews available elsewhere with one of the buggiest search interfaces I’ve ever seen. The owner of the site probably used some Bovine U-trained developers, and not that the site is generating pretty good revenue, is looking for a way to improve the search engine positioning. He or she has no clue about web development and marketing. I could provide that clue, but it’ll take a bit more than the $50 I should get for this review.

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Take That, Rupert

The majority of deadprogrammer.com traffic these days consists of myspace.com users hotlinking images. I really don’t mind hotlinking, in fact, I encourage it, but the thing is myspacecadets never ever link back to me. It’s common courtesy – if you use somebody’s image as well as server resources, provide a link back.

Well, now I use this little snippet of code that in my .htaccess file to replace any hotlinked image from myspace.com with a tasteful ad for deadprogrammer.com:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.*\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png)$ photos/hotlinked.jpg [L]

All of a sudden, hundreds of popular myspacers are promoting me:

Classy. If you have a better idea for a replacement image, let me know.

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“Dear Japanese Newspeople”

“No news is good news” – that’s what one of the old Usenet newsreaders used to say when there weren’t any new articles to read in your subscriptions. Is that a coincidence that CNN, one of the two evil companies that employs Lord Vader himself as its mouthpiece, is so obsessed with violent, fiery death? Cartoonist Jeffery Rowland even felt that he needed a special new word coined for this phenomenon.

CNN.com is a news site that I frequently visit, mostly because the url is so much nicer than http://news.bbc.co.uk, which is superior in all regards to CNN. As far as news goes, I am mostly interested in what’s happening in five countries: the US, Russia, Ukraine, Turkmenistan, Israel and Japan. Why Turkmenistan? Because of the Great Serdar, of course. In any case, not many interesting things happen in Canada or the UK, and I could not care less for France, Germany and the rest of the Snootyland. Communist China and North Korea do not let out any interesting news and news from the entire African continent are usually too depressing.

Japan, on the other hand, is very close to my heart. Recently I found an outstanding English language Japanese news source, MSN Mainichi Daily News. There’s even an RSS feed for it.

What’s different in Japanese news? Well, first of all there’s a lot more sex-related news. American news are heavy on violence, but light on sex. MSN Mainichi Daily News are full of headlines very much in the spirit of one famous hacker’s “Dear Japanese People” posts.

Right now, the headlines are full of stories about a 57 year old fortune teller living with a “harem” of “about 10 women.” An older popular news story featured an embezzling accountant who spent stolen money on 17 mistresses.

Swimwear photo specials are frequent and highly detailed. Booth bunnies also get photo coverage. Sadly, Japan Swimsuit Association does not have its own website.

There’s some coverage about “maid cafes” for “otaku” in Akihabara (you can see Kitya’s post for photos.

Unhealthy Japanese obsession with schoolgirls is clearly present in the news: not a day goes by when there isn’t a schoolgirl sex-related article on Mainichi. Here’s a typical one:

“A man who licked the tongues of more than 30 young girls after making them open their mouths, telling them he was checking for tooth decay, has been arrested, police said”.

It gets more complicated than that:

“The two 18-year-old, third-year high school girls, whose names are being withheld under the Juvenile Law, threatened on Dec. 29 to reveal that the 19-year-old private 1st class had sex with one of them unless he handed over 2 million yen, local police said.

They forced a 21-year-old lance corporal who was accompanying the private to withdraw 400,000 yen from an automatic teller machine at a convenience store in Sasebo and received the money from him.

The girls subsequently demanded 1.6 million yen from the GSDF soldiers. However, the soldiers consulted police, who arrested the two girls.

A fisherman and two other men were earlier arrested for giving the girls advice on how to extort money from the victim.”

US military men are frequently in the news for murder, rape, tresspassing, and robbery. This is not good, and mostly unreported here, in the US.

Japanese news agencies are no stranger to violence. A particularly unsettling trend that I noticed is an abundance of stories about family violence in Japan: “Man stabbed parents because they wouldn’t drink his miso soup“, “Man arrested for leaving bed-ridden, elderly mother to die“, “Woman nabbed for fatally kicking boyfriend“. It gets weirder, too: “Jobless man sets fire to futon in house after mom refuses to buy him dolls.” Overall, all these stories feature jobless people.

Violent (“Homeless man stabs abusive youth in stomach“) and non-violent homeless people (“Homeless man can officially register a public park where he lives as his residence, a court has said“) are often in the news.

We all think about how safe life in Japan is, but according to the news that I see, if the jobless, the homeless and the US servicemen won’t get you, train crashes, heavy snow, natural gas or sticky rice cakes will: “4 die after train blown off tracks in Yamagata“, “Elderly woman trapped in heavy snow freezes to death“, “Natural gas kills mother and children at hot spring“, “4 Kanto residents choke to death on sticky rice cakes“.

All those people got killed in heavy snow, yet mount Fuji was missing it’s snow cap last year. Strange.

The conflict of Japanese whalers and Greenpeace activists gets a lot of coverage: for some reason I’ve never seen this picture of a Greenpeace dude nearly harpooned to death anywhere else.

Two Japan-specific stories that don’t get much play in the US news is the Livedoor scandal and the badly constructed “twin” condo buildings. The Livedoor news get funny sometimes: “Convenience store chain am/pm Japan has decided to pull an energy drink developed by former Livedoor President Takafumi Horie off its shelves because it doesn’t want to sell items associated with scandal-tainted people, it has been learned“.

New Year’s cards (“nengajo“) are apparently a very serious business in Japan. From what I understand, they are supposed to be delivered exactly on January 1st. There was a flurry of news items like “Feces in 2 mailboxes stain 140 New Year cards“, “Post office to redeliver New Year’s postcards that arrived too early“, “Post office in Osaka to deliver 35 New Year’s cards a year late“. Big whoop. By the way, while we are on the subject, check out Japanese New Year’s prints by master woodblock printmaker David Bull.

There’s a section called “WaiWai“(with its own RSS feed). I am not sure what it means, as Wikipedia tells me that “Wai Wai” is a noodle snack.

The headline writers for Mainichi are prone to using puns and old-fashioned American slang, although not always very smoothly: they really overuse the words “nab”, “pinch”, “clink” (prison). Sometimes it feels like you are reading an old detective story.

This quote also is kind of unsettling:

Foreign sex workers get dirty digging for Japanese roots: “Gentlemen may well prefer blondes, but Japan’s not-so-gentle men seem to, as well, sparking a rapid increase in the number of South American sex workers with more yam than Yamato running through their veins to claim Japanese heritage, according to Spa!”

“More yam than Yamato”? What the hell?

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Three Years of Poor Grammar, Bad Spelling and Procrastination

I started this blog in May of 2002. I got my first digital camera around this time as well. So, it’s time to look back at my 3 years of blogging and 3 years of digital photography.

My mostly backed up (is yours?) photo folder holds about 27 gigabytes of photos, which translates into about 16,500 files (I use Picasa to organize them and a usb drive for backup). That’s about 458 rolls of 36 exposure film. At 5-6 bucks a pop for film and then a couple of bucks for processing that’s a lot of mon-ay. Of course I print a lot less and mostly show pictures in the blog, but still this is a huge economy.

In three years of blogging I wrote 824 posts containing 117,274 words. Considering an average of half an hour per post that’s about 50 eight hour work days. That is a lot of time, people. Considering that I do not write posts at work, this is a very sizable chunk of my free time. I could have written a book in this amount of time.

According to Feedburner my current readership is puny. 47 (a special number, isn’t it?) livejournal readers, 8 from Bloglines, and a couple of others, some of which are probably bots. When I hosted my site in Livejournal it seemed like I had about 250 readers, but as it turned out most of those were just “you added me, I added you” kind of deals. Even then I was far behind Ripley the Cat (and I find it very hard to get over this fact).

So, sob story about the number of readers aside, now I am a member of the elite group of bloggers who have been doing this for 3 years. How elite, you might ask? Let’s ask Mighty Google. Here is a graph of how many results come back to “x year(s) of blogging”, where x is “one”, “two”, “three”, etc. This, of course has just a slight correlation with the number of years people have been blogging, as “hundred years of blogging” brings back three results.

My website that hit the Information Superhighway back in 1996. It helped my future wife find me and gave me some rudimentary skills for my first web job. The blog hasn’t been so useful or popular, it seems. Maybe back then there was less good content on the web, and now there are shite waterfalls of it. Or maybe I need do something to market it. Like asking my staunch 47 + 8 + x readers to link to their favorite post or two (all of the old posts are searchable from http://www.deadprogrammer.com). Right?

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Looking at Design.ru and Remembering Dot Com Ads

I was browsing http://www.design.ru and a few associations formed in my mind.

Latest set of images with quotes from Tema remind me of Kenneth Cole ads with obligatory quote from Mr. Cole himself. By the way, I am glad to see that kennethcole.com is back to an almost original state similar to what it was when I worked on it, from a horrible flash monster that it became later. I’ve met Kenneth Cole at the time, maybe I’ll meet Lebedev some day too.

Illustrations by Yana Moskalyuk look to me as if Lavalife.com ads mated with Bluefly.com ads. It’s interesting to see that bluefly.com is still around. I only bought something from there once, when they were giving away $50 gift certificates.