Tag: Internet

Monetizing my Linked In network

This are the stats of my linked in network.

Now having 3219 contacts is clearly more valuable than 32 contacts. But the quality of contacts is important as well.I manage two groups on Linkedin ,Decision Stats and Creative Destruction, have got 1 job , lots of CXO level contacts , got ideas for two websites (including this one), been interviewed once for a website (www.analyticbrdige.com) and get increasing numbers of recruiter calls everyday. But how do I convert this value into a number.

So whats the true economic value of my Linked In network.

1) Lets assume each contact has a minimum value of 10 cents. This is to remove duplication and negate the effect of Linkedin Open Networkers or LIONs.

2) Lets assume each CXO level contact is worth 5 dollars.Thats about 300 CXO networkers.

3)Lets assume each recruiter is worth 1 $. Thats about 500 recruiters.

4) Going forward regional contacts – Lets put the value of a Bay Area contact at 2$ while New York Contact at 1.1 $. New York contacts are less helpful when it comes to technology.

Well, doing the maths I come to a value of 6500 USD or a utility value of around 2 $ per contact. Now compare this with Linkedin ‘s valuation which is at 1 billion for 25 million people. Thats 40 USD per unique contact.

So my calculation assumes a duplication of 40/2 =20 times atleast. Which is reasonable. This assumes of course that LI gets the same value for each contact that I do, which may or may not be true.

So whats the value of your Linkedin Network today. 🙂

Joomla 1.5

Joomla 1.5 is a terrific CMS release. I did some work for half an hour, and the results are here. Its almost as easy to use as WordPress (note almost) and quite powerful in content customization.

https://decisionstats.com/joomla15/

Dear Google

Google.com has added its privacy policy to the main page to conform with California law. Here is a question to the masters of the algorithm that I sent to their query system ”

Dear Google ,

I understand that IP Addresses are stored routinely by you, that these IP addresses can be used as unique keys for analytical purposes, but also be used for identifying and locating privacy of people (like in China) with disproportionate technical effort. Why don’t you run a randomizing algorithm that masks the IP addresses but keeps the uniqueness factor alive, and delete the original IP addresses, thus sparing yourself any privacy concerns. The algorithm should be made in a manner that any masked unique  IP number cannot be unmasked , and all same IP addresses have same masked IP addresses.You retain analytical value, consumers retain privacy and we settle this debate once and for all.”
This is in response to its slightly biased privacy policy whose fine print is here ”

http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/privacypolicy.html

Data integrity

Google processes personal information only for the purposes for which it was collected and in accordance with this Policy or any applicable service-specific privacy notice. We review our data collection, storage and processing practices to ensure that we only collect, store and process the personal information needed to provide or improve our services. We take reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information we process is accurate, complete, and current, but we depend on our users to update or correct their personal information whenever necessary.

Accessing and updating personal information

When you use Google services, we make good faith efforts to provide you with access to your personal information and either to correct this data if it is inaccurate or to delete such data at your request if it is not otherwise required to be retained by law or for legitimate business purposes. We ask individual users to identify themselves and the information requested to be accessed, corrected or removed before processing such requests, and we may decline to process requests that are unreasonably repetitive or systematic,  require disproportionate technical effort , jeopardize the privacy of others, or would be extremely impractical (for instance, requests concerning information residing on backup tapes), or for which access is not otherwise required. In any case where we provide information access and correction, we perform this service free of charge, except if doing so would require a disproportionate effort. Some of our services have different procedures to access, correct or delete users’ personal information. We provide the details for these procedures in the specific privacy notices or FAQs for these services.”

This leaves enough loopholes for Google to pick and choose its privacy policy AND its response. Nice spin, but people understanding law, public relations, databases AND algorithms do exist in the non Google world. The New York Times blog “Bits”: is at the forefront. And its a very good blog for all tech news besides the renowned mashable (www.mashable.com) and Silicon Valley Insider (www.alleyinsider.com)

Watch this space.

Best Marketing Website of 2008

Note- This is not an endorsement. This website is most effective in its purpose and utilizes many cutting web 2.0 tools. This is purely a technical evaluation.

We liked the other newly revamped website as well. Great theme design and better graphics but

a bit too loaded.Given the rise in budgets and dependence on survey data, analytical targeting, political

response models might just be around by 2012 !!

Have a happy 4th July if you are from the US.

Linked In Maths

Linked In maths says that out of 10.008 million professionals now connected with me (thanks to my 3023 connections), most of them  9.358951million professionals came in my network since June 28 th. Today is June 30 th. I am thus adding 4.6 million professionals /day (or there is something wrong with this 🙂 )

-I am about to join myspace.com who needs this traffic to catch up with facebook.com…..

but only if they pay me .

Get (or Atleast Try ) Clicky

After writing about various tools on online analytics, a good favorite is Clicky from http://getclicky.com/

It is recommended especially to WordPress users because it has a customized WP Plugin (which means all the fun without any of the code), has an affiliate referral program (it’s a tough economy !) and can help you track individual visitors with a great deal of analytical value.

You can view the www.getclicky.com site for their own benefit list.

Short of actually building a click stream capturing application (which is quite useful for tracking and building models for web mining), clickstream data is extremely helpful in generating insights as it is at a record /visitor level and can be sliced /diced and viewed for your custom insights.

As for building automated models using web data, their is another software from Kxen (www.Kxen.com). They have been around for some time , though losing out on a couple of big chances , but their web scoring module is definitely worth a dekko.

Future Online Advertising Revenue Sharing Models

Imagine if one company had control to 60 % of all advertising in other media channels like Television ,Newspaper or Radio throughout the globe.

Given Google’s current dominance of the online Online Advertising revenue, there are likely to face significant anti trust operational risk within the next three years.Especially if they continue to play hardball on Uncle Bill from RedMond like the one they did with botched Yahoo -Microsoft deal.

The current model of pay per click for Adwords and earn per click for Adsense is unfair to both content generators and online advertisers leaving them vulnerable to  Google’s algorithms trying to cope with increasing click fraud perpetuated systematically.

Future  Online Advertising Revenue Sharing Models could include –

1) Pay per impression or time spent on site for content generators getting a higher weight age for  content generators and Pay per actual purchase for Adwords/online sales.

This removes the cost per milli (C.P.M) model to cost per customer model for advertisers which is only fair.

2) Enhanced social network and Instant Messenger advertising- If blog owners can make money from popular blogs,emails can contain ads , why can’t social network users on myspace and Facebook and orkut make some money atleast from people visiting their pages/profiles.This may involve some discreet ads below posts /messages.

This can only boost Google’s revenue in the long run and be good for the whole industry also.

3) Text Ads to Banner Ads – Banner Ads /Flashier Ads to actually increase appeal on online plain vanilla text ads. Also include some flash ads in all You Tube or Video content. This content /ads will be priced much differently and distinctly than treating it as just glorified text ads like it is treated currently. It could also create a new wave of new media advertising creative professionals savvy in Silverlight and Flash.

4) The 100 $ limit for adsense – Google really should disclose to investors how much money it owes to people for the adsense revenue below 100 $ as the long tail on the Internet can be very very long. Why have a limit on the internet anyways especially if the adsense customer is willing to provide electronic transfer details or Paypal equivalent payment transaction details, then those limits should be much lower as transaction costs per unit transaction would be lower.

What prevents Microsoft from launching a lower priced alternative to Adsense/ Adwords really beats me !!

5) Offline advertising/Microsoft moves – Imagine ads on your windows desktop like any other software supported by ads. Lets say Office without discreet ads on right hand side comes for 250 $ and Office with ads comes for 100 $ lower .(Assuming lifetime value of a customer to be  100 $ here). Tying ads to sell more Vista ?!!!Might just work.. 🙂

The online ad world is  ready for price wars —-as economies slow down, advertisers demand better bang for the buck from media partners and competition ready to heat up in the lucrative online ad world.