Almost two years ago, I posted about the big push by Yuku staff to get users to switch browsers to Firefox so they could enjoy the best Yuku “experience”, i.e. fewer crashes and failures, because they didn’t appear to be testing on the most popular browser out there. They also wrote a Firefox extension to encourage people (though guess what - they’ve forgotten to make the latest version widely available…)

The problem is that Firefox can run a number of extensions including those that block the precious advertising they rely on so much… Oops!

Of course, the fact that it still isn’t cross-browser and cross-platform compatible even after all this time doesn’t help their cause - see this recent thread on issues with Safari on the Mac.

Le plus ça change…

According to the Office for National Statistics, inflation is running at 2.2%. Clearly no-one told South Norfolk District Council about this as our new council tax demand is up 4.0% on last year.

Talking of last year, do you remember how last year Norfolk Police Authority couldn’t keep to any sort of budgeting and raised their bill by 6.9%?

Well this year, they’ve surpassed themselves and increased it by 8.3%! Clearly proper business governance is anathema to Norfolk Police Authority/Norfolk Constabulary. They say:

“Budget Issues
Norfolk Constabulary has suffered from successive years of under-funding by Government to the point where we regularly had to dip into our reserves. We can no longer afford to keep doing that.”

Erm, isn’t that what reserves are for? And yes, we know you claim to have suffered in previous years: you’ve been more than happy to share your pain with us by never living within inflation-matching rises and instead passing it on to us.

Oh and they also say that they are “Performing Well”:

“…our detection rate rose to 32% - the highest we have ever achieved…”

Which means they didn’t detect 68% of reported crime. Still, as long as they detect those heinous speeding motorists on the main trunk roads, eh… Yes, they’ve decided to increase transport costs from £3.33M to £4.03M this year, that’s a 21% increase!

Then when you look at South Norfolk Council’s budget, it’s good to see that they intend spending over £28M (out of £50M) on “Finance, Staffing and Property, including Revenues & Benefits, Human Resources, IT Services”. That’s not housing by the way. Nice little earner and a cushy job if you can get it.

Yes, this self-proclaimed “World’s No.1 Webhost” are showing that they are in fact the world’s no. 1 useless bunch of tossers.

All the websites we host with them that rely on databases to function are down. Their new premium rate customer services number allows you to call them, start racking up the charges and then after being put on hold they tell you that all their advisers are busy, goodbye and insist you hang up.

Nice little earner for them, eh?

If ever there was a company whose senior management’s witterings were to be treated with a pinch of salt, it was Yuku under the leadership of Robert Labatt.

When he made the famous “better than free” launch video at DEMOfall 2005, he claimed that Yuku was better than free because they shared advertising revenue with the community leaders - watch from around 3 minutes 40 seconds in. At 4 minutes 20 seconds, Labatt says:

“…we’ve done modelling on the hundreds of thousands of communities that we have on ezboard and we believe that an average large community should be able to receive somewhere in the neighbourhood of three to five thousand dollars a month if their site is working well and they’ve got lots of people on it.”

So then. Lots of modelling done and a statement that they expect “average large” communities to be making $3-$5,000 a month in shared advertising revenues. Now Yuku was not and is not a charity or not-for-profit organisation, so I would have expected them to take by far the lion’s share of advertising revenues those communities were generating. After all, Yuku would have the infrastructure and bandwidth provision to think of as well as the support and development costs. But even if we suggest that no, they’ll actually do a 50/50 split, that would suggest they were expecting ad. revenues for “average large” communities of $10,000 a month or $120,000 a year.

Wow! That’s a lot of revenue. And that’s just the “average large” boards.

But wait a minute. One of the board owners of one of Yuku’s headline boards, Survivor Sucks, recently posted in the support forum with a pricing query as he was struggling to understand the costings. Yuku Gold pricing is explained here. It says:

“To work out in advance what 1 year of ad-free page views could cost you, use the No Ads/Opted total for 1 month, and apply it to this equation:

(ad-free page views/1000) * .2 * 12 (ad-free page views divided by 1000, then multiplied by .2, then multiplied by 12)”

Right. The board owner’s post quotes a load of stats. but not a whole month’s worth. So I’ll take the middle seven days from his quote (19/2 to 25/2):

02-25 123644 18115 59942
02-24 91601 16377 62084
02-23 91765 14114 57279
02-22 116085 16880 70602
02-21 128017 18510 67227
02-20 129372 17541 67069
02-19 116161 19595 68929

Tally up the last column and the total “No Ads/Opted” is 453,132.

So (453,132/1000) *.2 *52 (for weeks instead of months) = $4,712. In other words, Yuku would be willing to forgo any advertising revenue income from Survivor Sucks in return for receiving $4,712 a year.

Now don’t forget that Survivor Sucks is a favoured/featured board at Yuku: it even appears as one of the three shown on this page and has a special mention on KickApps’ Cameron Shaw’s Yuku profile page. So how is it that Yuku will apparently accept less than $5,000 to refrain from adding adverts on Survivor Sucks when Labatt was saying that they should easily have expected to be sharing revenues 20 to 30 times that large at the very least?

Or maybe all that supposed cost/data modelling and all that bluster at DEMOfall was just to try to get someone to buy Yuku/ezboard for as much as possible?

KickApps must really be kicking themselves…