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Sent from my Blackberry

| Richard

I just received a delivery receipt for an e-mail and at the end of the message, before the sender’s contact details it reads “Sent from my Blackberry”.

Who gives a toss?

Maybe I should end all my e-mails with “sent from a computer using Outlook”. Or maybe I should end all my letters with “signed with a ballpoint pen and sent in the post”.

Why am I so disgruntled*? Well apparently my new job brings with it a Blackberry of some sort, so presumably I’ll be telling everyone and their cat that I’m contactable this way all the time too…

Sex with Richard

| Richard

The perfect gift … for Mothers’ Day.

I love the telly adverts. Anything like Mothers’ Day or Valentine’s Day brings out adverts for the crappiest albums imaginable … “the perfect gift for Mother’s Day”.

Bless ’em!

Ryanair in Schoolie Shocker

| Richard

Ryanair Schoolie AdSo Ryanair have been criticised by the ASA for their amazingly tacky advert featuring a model dressed as a schoolgirl: the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the “irresponsible” image appeared to link teenage girls with sexually provocative behaviour.

Now personally, I have reservations about people who find images of women dressed as schoolgirls sexy, but that’s probably because I have a daughter of school age.

Needless to say Ryanair knew exactly what they were doing as they obviously think there’s no such thing as bad publicity:

“The ASA becomes more Monty Pythonesque by the day.  This latest ruling shows how absurd and out of touch this quango really is.  It is remarkable that a picture of a fully clothed model is now claimed to cause “serious or widespread offence”, when many of the UK’s leading daily newspaper regularly run pictures of topless or partially dressed females without causing any serious or widespread offence…”

Maybe because they’re not regularly dressed as schoolgirls to broaden Ryanair’s appeal to the frequent paedo flyer…

PayPerPost

| Richard

As readers of my blogs should by now be aware, I have been running Google AdWords on them for a while now; they generate a small amount of revenue every time a visitor to the site clicks on one of them.

Always keen to ‘monetise’ my blogs, I came across payperpost by following a link from another blogger’s website (I forget who now).

PayPerPost basically act as the middle man between potential blog advertisers and bloggers: we are given the choice of “opportunities” whereby an advertiser wants bloggers to either review a product, website or service or to simply help create a ‘buzz’ about something such as the launch of a new website, artiste or whatever.

The potential advertisers then make an offer to pay x number of dollars for a blog entry that matches their criteria: as a blogger I can see what they want and if I am prepared to review or mention the product or service or to help create that buzz then I can.

Some advertisers will want only a positive flavour to the potential blog post in which case as a blogger you can choose whether to write it that way, or – as is the case on this blog – choose not to write the review at all.

Advertisers can choose either to invite the whole blogging world to write a blog entry or they can approach individual bloggers to write a review for them. There’s a button over there in the sidebar to allow potential advertisers to contact me directly to negotiate a blog entry here.

So it’s early days yet for me: I’ve only just received approval for this blog from PayPerPost. We’ll see how they do … and yes, they are paying me for this entry!


Snap Shots: All Good Things Come to an End

| Richard

I used to use Snap Shots on this and my other blogs and on one of my main websites as a way of enhancing “the user interface” for visitors (lol).

Understandably, they need to support the service and they’ve chosen to introduce advertising within the pop-up preview windows. Despite softening the introduction of the ads. by sharing revenue with the sites with what they call Snap Shares, I’ve removed the system from my sites.

Why? Well on my blogs, I already display adverts using Google AdSense (click on the button in the sidebar to find out more and join up) and the revenue they generate is shared between Google and me. Why would I want to display more Google AdSense adverts and yet get a smaller share of the revenue?

The way Snap have approached this is by claiming that the ads. will effectively be macro-targetted and hence more appropriate to the link being displayed and that may well be true, but for the end user, they’ll simply be seeing far more adverts than they did previously.

Mercedes C-Class: Pretentious? Moi?

| Richard

There’s an advert presently running on the TV in the UK for the latest version of Mercedes’ C-Class. It’s cringeworthy in the extreme. Why? Well how about this exchange between a couple of voices from the ad.:

“I’ll see your design and raise it!”

“That’s how real design works.”

Does it, bollocks!

I had no idea that “real design” involved a couple of wannabe yuppies exchanging pretentious and indeed meaningless phrases. The things we learn from TV … like not to buy Mercedes in case we get tarred with the same brush as those commissioning such utter shite or the ‘lifestyle’ it tries to convey.

The Trouble with Google…

| Richard

I’m one of those people – as you’ve probably noticed – who displays adverts on their web sites, in my case, Google’s AdSense ones.

Now these adverts generate income for me whenever someone clicks on one of those links. What happens is an advertiser pays Google to display their adverts on sites where certain keywords chosen by the advertisers trigger their ads being displayed. In turn, Google give a percentage of that revenue to the sites displaying the adverts. I pay for some advertising his way as well.

What I’m noticing more and more these days though is that the revenue from displaying these ads. on my sites is coming down despite the fact that I am displaying ads on more web sites than before and the sites having become more popular.

I’ve never made a lot of money from Google – at its best, I was making roughly a dollar a day which was more or less covering my own spend.

But last month, for instance, my ad. revenues were down by a third. Now we’re talking small beans here with me, but if I were running an online business that relied on Google AdSense for its entire income, I’d be seriously worried.

I wonder what’s causing this squeeze? Ad-blockers? Too many sites chasing too few advertisers?

Stupid Domain Names

| Richard

I’m sorry but I could never do business with a company based upon a stupid domain name. Online insurance brokers like elephant.co.uk or confused.com. I mean to say, what have those domains got to do with insurance?

Or moonpig.com which – obviously! – is a site for personalised cards. What else would it be?

Might as well call these sites fecktard.com or something like that.