We’ve been promised for a while now that our phones will become our personal assistants. Executives from Cambridge, Mass.-based Vlingo sat down with me this week to talk about how they’ve delivered on that promise — and started turning it into real revenue.
It seems like all the big guys are trying to get into this business. The incentive, as a Googler put it when the company launched a similar service last year, is that voice is much more natural than typing as a way to interact with your phone. Apple, meanwhile, showed its interest by acquiring a startup called Siri. And Microsoft included voice commands on Windows Phone 7.
The difference, according to Vlingo’s vice president of business Hadley Harris, is that the startup has built all its basic technology, including speech recognition (something that Siri outsourced) and the “intent engine” that allows the app to translate your words into actions that it understands. Vlingo is working with other companies to integrate a wide range of apps into the system, so that you can use your voice to buy a plane ticket off travel site Kayak or check your updates on Facebook.
Vlingo has been downloaded 7 million times, Harris said. BlackBerry users represent most of those downloads, since that’s the phone that Vlingo focused on first, but iPhone and especially Android are catching up. The company’s strategy is to release new features on Android first, then port them to other phones as resources and technology allow.
The app is free, so Vlingo makes money through advertising and revenue sharing with its partners. Specifically, Harris told me it currently earns $7.74 for every 1,000 Web searches, $49 for every 1,000 local searches, and $24 for every 1,000 “other” monetizable actions, such as a ticket purchase on Kayak. With users performing an average of 30 actions every month, Harris said Vlingo is making about 14 cents per user per month.
That might seem a little low, Harris acknowledged, but the plan is to dramatically increase both the number of users and the number of actions over the next year. Most promisingly, he said Vlingo has made deals with a number of Android handset manufacturers who don’t want to direct all of their usage to Google services. (He said it’s too early to reveal who the manufacturers are.) Not only will that put Vlingo on more phones, it will also make the application more prominent on those phones by turning it into the default app whenever you want to use voice commands.
Next Story: Why display ads are cool again Previous Story: Gamification gets popular, but it’s still finding its feet
Ever since the iPad came out, print media companies have been feeling their way in this new medium, but so far they’ve just been stumbling over themselves.
They are latching onto the iPad as a new walled garden where people will somehow magically pay for articles they can get for free in their browsers. But if they want people to pay, the experience has to be better than on the Web, and usually it’s not.
This sorry state of affairs is true for both magazines and newspapers. The New York Times iPad app, for instance, is gorgeous but crippled. All the links are stripped out of the articles, even from the blogs. Meanwhile, most iPad magazines are little more than PDFs of the print issues with some photo slideshows and videos thrown in. They end up being huge files—I recently downloaded a single issue that was 350 MB, some issues of Wired are 500 MB—with the same stale articles as in the print version. Replicating a dead-tree publishing model on a touchscreen is a recipe for obsolescence.
Despite the poor reviews and uninspiring number of downloads, media companies sold millions of dollars worth of advertising last year for their iPad apps because advertisers want to be associated with anything shiny and new. Make no mistake: advertising dollars are driving media companies to embrace the iPad, not readers. The same is true for the upcoming launch this week of News Corp’s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, but at least it will be built from the ground-up for the iPad. I suspect it will take a while for it to reach its true potential—it’s hard enough to launch a new publication as it is without reinventing the reading experience—but I am curious to see where it goes.
However, I am not holding my breath. I’ve already written my thoughts on what The Daily should look like.
From a reader’s perspective, the optimal iPad newspaper should be three things:
- Social: It should show you what your friends and the people you trust are reading and passing around, both within that publication and elsewhere on the Web.
- Realtime: News breaks every second, and publications need to be as realtime as possible to keep up. A “daily” already sounds too slow.
- Local: The device knows where you are and should serve up news and information accordingly, including, weather, local news and reviews.
At the very least, Apple should fix the subscription problem in iTunes. Right now, each new issue of a paid magazine or newspaper must be bought separately as an in-app purchase. But subscriptions are not going to save the media companies. In fact, they’d be smarter to give the apps away for free and make more money from the advertisers, who want to reach as many people as possible. The ads should also be worth more because they just look better in an app where they look more like a magazine ad and can take over the whole screen when tapped on.
But making these media apps social and realtime is the key. It should be constantly updated like a blog or Twitter. And it should be social like Flipboard in that it shows me what people I follow are reading and retweeting elsewhere by unpacking their links into full articles, images, and videos.
More so than iPad newspapers, iPad magazines have a real opportunity to break the mold, but they can’t do that if they are just trying to repurpose their print publications. Starting from scratch like The Daily is the right idea. But what magazines are better at than newspapers is really packaging the news, distilling big ideas, and presenting stories in a narrative arc that sticks in readers’ minds.
If I were creating an iPad mag it wouldn’t look like a magazine at all. It would look more like a media app, and there wouldn’t be any subscription or even distinct issues. New content would appear every time you opened it up, just like when you visit TechCrunch or launch Flipboard or the Pulse News Reader. In order to make it addictive, it would have to be realtime. But it would also be more selective than simply reading everything that anyone links to in your Twitter or Facebook streams.
Instead, it would present readers with a continuum from original articles and videos to curated streams by topic. The curated streams would combine Tweets from the staff writers and editors with those of other journalists, entrepreneurs, and experts for any given topic or section. These streams would be unpacked Flipboard-style into a magazine-like layout, but with more filters to show trending stories and highlight the ones which are getting the most buzz.
At the same time, there would be a view showing only the articles from that publication. And there would be other ways to navigate the app than just a reverse-chronological stream of the latest posts. In addition to the hourly drumbeat of breaking news and analysis, there would be longer narratives. These would not necessarily be 10,000-word articles (although those could be part of it), but rather taking readers through a series of experiences to tell a story.
Maybe you start with an article, followed by a video interview with the subject, an interactive infographic, and then wrap up with a selected Tweet stream about the topic. At every point, the reader would be led by the hand from one experience to another, coming away with a fuller understanding of the topic. Supplemental images and data should always be at her fingertips. And, of course, the reader could dive right in by commenting, Tweeting, sharing, taking opinion polls and all the rest.
A digital magazine or newspaper should feel like a media app, not like a PDF viewer. It needs to take advantage of technology to tell better stories. These include both presentation technologies (immersive panoramic photos, interactive charts) and data-sifting technologies to filter the news from outside sources.
What do you want to see in a media app that you are not getting today?
bench craft companyiLounge news discussing the Verizon iPhone 4 antenna problems persist (video). Find more iPhone news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.
On Sean Hannity's program Monday night, pollster Frank Luntz hosted a focus group of Iowa Republican caucus-goers, gauging their reaction of President Barack Obama's Sunday afternoon interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company We’ve been promised for a while now that our phones will become our personal assistants. Executives from Cambridge, Mass.-based Vlingo sat down with me this week to talk about how they’ve delivered on that promise — and started turning it into real revenue.
It seems like all the big guys are trying to get into this business. The incentive, as a Googler put it when the company launched a similar service last year, is that voice is much more natural than typing as a way to interact with your phone. Apple, meanwhile, showed its interest by acquiring a startup called Siri. And Microsoft included voice commands on Windows Phone 7.
The difference, according to Vlingo’s vice president of business Hadley Harris, is that the startup has built all its basic technology, including speech recognition (something that Siri outsourced) and the “intent engine” that allows the app to translate your words into actions that it understands. Vlingo is working with other companies to integrate a wide range of apps into the system, so that you can use your voice to buy a plane ticket off travel site Kayak or check your updates on Facebook.
Vlingo has been downloaded 7 million times, Harris said. BlackBerry users represent most of those downloads, since that’s the phone that Vlingo focused on first, but iPhone and especially Android are catching up. The company’s strategy is to release new features on Android first, then port them to other phones as resources and technology allow.
The app is free, so Vlingo makes money through advertising and revenue sharing with its partners. Specifically, Harris told me it currently earns $7.74 for every 1,000 Web searches, $49 for every 1,000 local searches, and $24 for every 1,000 “other” monetizable actions, such as a ticket purchase on Kayak. With users performing an average of 30 actions every month, Harris said Vlingo is making about 14 cents per user per month.
That might seem a little low, Harris acknowledged, but the plan is to dramatically increase both the number of users and the number of actions over the next year. Most promisingly, he said Vlingo has made deals with a number of Android handset manufacturers who don’t want to direct all of their usage to Google services. (He said it’s too early to reveal who the manufacturers are.) Not only will that put Vlingo on more phones, it will also make the application more prominent on those phones by turning it into the default app whenever you want to use voice commands.
Next Story: Why display ads are cool again Previous Story: Gamification gets popular, but it’s still finding its feet
Ever since the iPad came out, print media companies have been feeling their way in this new medium, but so far they’ve just been stumbling over themselves.
They are latching onto the iPad as a new walled garden where people will somehow magically pay for articles they can get for free in their browsers. But if they want people to pay, the experience has to be better than on the Web, and usually it’s not.
This sorry state of affairs is true for both magazines and newspapers. The New York Times iPad app, for instance, is gorgeous but crippled. All the links are stripped out of the articles, even from the blogs. Meanwhile, most iPad magazines are little more than PDFs of the print issues with some photo slideshows and videos thrown in. They end up being huge files—I recently downloaded a single issue that was 350 MB, some issues of Wired are 500 MB—with the same stale articles as in the print version. Replicating a dead-tree publishing model on a touchscreen is a recipe for obsolescence.
Despite the poor reviews and uninspiring number of downloads, media companies sold millions of dollars worth of advertising last year for their iPad apps because advertisers want to be associated with anything shiny and new. Make no mistake: advertising dollars are driving media companies to embrace the iPad, not readers. The same is true for the upcoming launch this week of News Corp’s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, but at least it will be built from the ground-up for the iPad. I suspect it will take a while for it to reach its true potential—it’s hard enough to launch a new publication as it is without reinventing the reading experience—but I am curious to see where it goes.
However, I am not holding my breath. I’ve already written my thoughts on what The Daily should look like.
From a reader’s perspective, the optimal iPad newspaper should be three things:
- Social: It should show you what your friends and the people you trust are reading and passing around, both within that publication and elsewhere on the Web.
- Realtime: News breaks every second, and publications need to be as realtime as possible to keep up. A “daily” already sounds too slow.
- Local: The device knows where you are and should serve up news and information accordingly, including, weather, local news and reviews.
At the very least, Apple should fix the subscription problem in iTunes. Right now, each new issue of a paid magazine or newspaper must be bought separately as an in-app purchase. But subscriptions are not going to save the media companies. In fact, they’d be smarter to give the apps away for free and make more money from the advertisers, who want to reach as many people as possible. The ads should also be worth more because they just look better in an app where they look more like a magazine ad and can take over the whole screen when tapped on.
But making these media apps social and realtime is the key. It should be constantly updated like a blog or Twitter. And it should be social like Flipboard in that it shows me what people I follow are reading and retweeting elsewhere by unpacking their links into full articles, images, and videos.
More so than iPad newspapers, iPad magazines have a real opportunity to break the mold, but they can’t do that if they are just trying to repurpose their print publications. Starting from scratch like The Daily is the right idea. But what magazines are better at than newspapers is really packaging the news, distilling big ideas, and presenting stories in a narrative arc that sticks in readers’ minds.
If I were creating an iPad mag it wouldn’t look like a magazine at all. It would look more like a media app, and there wouldn’t be any subscription or even distinct issues. New content would appear every time you opened it up, just like when you visit TechCrunch or launch Flipboard or the Pulse News Reader. In order to make it addictive, it would have to be realtime. But it would also be more selective than simply reading everything that anyone links to in your Twitter or Facebook streams.
Instead, it would present readers with a continuum from original articles and videos to curated streams by topic. The curated streams would combine Tweets from the staff writers and editors with those of other journalists, entrepreneurs, and experts for any given topic or section. These streams would be unpacked Flipboard-style into a magazine-like layout, but with more filters to show trending stories and highlight the ones which are getting the most buzz.
At the same time, there would be a view showing only the articles from that publication. And there would be other ways to navigate the app than just a reverse-chronological stream of the latest posts. In addition to the hourly drumbeat of breaking news and analysis, there would be longer narratives. These would not necessarily be 10,000-word articles (although those could be part of it), but rather taking readers through a series of experiences to tell a story.
Maybe you start with an article, followed by a video interview with the subject, an interactive infographic, and then wrap up with a selected Tweet stream about the topic. At every point, the reader would be led by the hand from one experience to another, coming away with a fuller understanding of the topic. Supplemental images and data should always be at her fingertips. And, of course, the reader could dive right in by commenting, Tweeting, sharing, taking opinion polls and all the rest.
A digital magazine or newspaper should feel like a media app, not like a PDF viewer. It needs to take advantage of technology to tell better stories. These include both presentation technologies (immersive panoramic photos, interactive charts) and data-sifting technologies to filter the news from outside sources.
What do you want to see in a media app that you are not getting today?
bench craft company>
iLounge news discussing the Verizon iPhone 4 antenna problems persist (video). Find more iPhone news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.
On Sean Hannity's program Monday night, pollster Frank Luntz hosted a focus group of Iowa Republican caucus-goers, gauging their reaction of President Barack Obama's Sunday afternoon interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company[reefeed]
bench craft company
bench craft companyiLounge news discussing the Verizon iPhone 4 antenna problems persist (video). Find more iPhone news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.
On Sean Hannity's program Monday night, pollster Frank Luntz hosted a focus group of Iowa Republican caucus-goers, gauging their reaction of President Barack Obama's Sunday afternoon interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company We’ve been promised for a while now that our phones will become our personal assistants. Executives from Cambridge, Mass.-based Vlingo sat down with me this week to talk about how they’ve delivered on that promise — and started turning it into real revenue.
It seems like all the big guys are trying to get into this business. The incentive, as a Googler put it when the company launched a similar service last year, is that voice is much more natural than typing as a way to interact with your phone. Apple, meanwhile, showed its interest by acquiring a startup called Siri. And Microsoft included voice commands on Windows Phone 7.
The difference, according to Vlingo’s vice president of business Hadley Harris, is that the startup has built all its basic technology, including speech recognition (something that Siri outsourced) and the “intent engine” that allows the app to translate your words into actions that it understands. Vlingo is working with other companies to integrate a wide range of apps into the system, so that you can use your voice to buy a plane ticket off travel site Kayak or check your updates on Facebook.
Vlingo has been downloaded 7 million times, Harris said. BlackBerry users represent most of those downloads, since that’s the phone that Vlingo focused on first, but iPhone and especially Android are catching up. The company’s strategy is to release new features on Android first, then port them to other phones as resources and technology allow.
The app is free, so Vlingo makes money through advertising and revenue sharing with its partners. Specifically, Harris told me it currently earns $7.74 for every 1,000 Web searches, $49 for every 1,000 local searches, and $24 for every 1,000 “other” monetizable actions, such as a ticket purchase on Kayak. With users performing an average of 30 actions every month, Harris said Vlingo is making about 14 cents per user per month.
That might seem a little low, Harris acknowledged, but the plan is to dramatically increase both the number of users and the number of actions over the next year. Most promisingly, he said Vlingo has made deals with a number of Android handset manufacturers who don’t want to direct all of their usage to Google services. (He said it’s too early to reveal who the manufacturers are.) Not only will that put Vlingo on more phones, it will also make the application more prominent on those phones by turning it into the default app whenever you want to use voice commands.
Next Story: Why display ads are cool again Previous Story: Gamification gets popular, but it’s still finding its feet
Ever since the iPad came out, print media companies have been feeling their way in this new medium, but so far they’ve just been stumbling over themselves.
They are latching onto the iPad as a new walled garden where people will somehow magically pay for articles they can get for free in their browsers. But if they want people to pay, the experience has to be better than on the Web, and usually it’s not.
This sorry state of affairs is true for both magazines and newspapers. The New York Times iPad app, for instance, is gorgeous but crippled. All the links are stripped out of the articles, even from the blogs. Meanwhile, most iPad magazines are little more than PDFs of the print issues with some photo slideshows and videos thrown in. They end up being huge files—I recently downloaded a single issue that was 350 MB, some issues of Wired are 500 MB—with the same stale articles as in the print version. Replicating a dead-tree publishing model on a touchscreen is a recipe for obsolescence.
Despite the poor reviews and uninspiring number of downloads, media companies sold millions of dollars worth of advertising last year for their iPad apps because advertisers want to be associated with anything shiny and new. Make no mistake: advertising dollars are driving media companies to embrace the iPad, not readers. The same is true for the upcoming launch this week of News Corp’s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, but at least it will be built from the ground-up for the iPad. I suspect it will take a while for it to reach its true potential—it’s hard enough to launch a new publication as it is without reinventing the reading experience—but I am curious to see where it goes.
However, I am not holding my breath. I’ve already written my thoughts on what The Daily should look like.
From a reader’s perspective, the optimal iPad newspaper should be three things:
- Social: It should show you what your friends and the people you trust are reading and passing around, both within that publication and elsewhere on the Web.
- Realtime: News breaks every second, and publications need to be as realtime as possible to keep up. A “daily” already sounds too slow.
- Local: The device knows where you are and should serve up news and information accordingly, including, weather, local news and reviews.
At the very least, Apple should fix the subscription problem in iTunes. Right now, each new issue of a paid magazine or newspaper must be bought separately as an in-app purchase. But subscriptions are not going to save the media companies. In fact, they’d be smarter to give the apps away for free and make more money from the advertisers, who want to reach as many people as possible. The ads should also be worth more because they just look better in an app where they look more like a magazine ad and can take over the whole screen when tapped on.
But making these media apps social and realtime is the key. It should be constantly updated like a blog or Twitter. And it should be social like Flipboard in that it shows me what people I follow are reading and retweeting elsewhere by unpacking their links into full articles, images, and videos.
More so than iPad newspapers, iPad magazines have a real opportunity to break the mold, but they can’t do that if they are just trying to repurpose their print publications. Starting from scratch like The Daily is the right idea. But what magazines are better at than newspapers is really packaging the news, distilling big ideas, and presenting stories in a narrative arc that sticks in readers’ minds.
If I were creating an iPad mag it wouldn’t look like a magazine at all. It would look more like a media app, and there wouldn’t be any subscription or even distinct issues. New content would appear every time you opened it up, just like when you visit TechCrunch or launch Flipboard or the Pulse News Reader. In order to make it addictive, it would have to be realtime. But it would also be more selective than simply reading everything that anyone links to in your Twitter or Facebook streams.
Instead, it would present readers with a continuum from original articles and videos to curated streams by topic. The curated streams would combine Tweets from the staff writers and editors with those of other journalists, entrepreneurs, and experts for any given topic or section. These streams would be unpacked Flipboard-style into a magazine-like layout, but with more filters to show trending stories and highlight the ones which are getting the most buzz.
At the same time, there would be a view showing only the articles from that publication. And there would be other ways to navigate the app than just a reverse-chronological stream of the latest posts. In addition to the hourly drumbeat of breaking news and analysis, there would be longer narratives. These would not necessarily be 10,000-word articles (although those could be part of it), but rather taking readers through a series of experiences to tell a story.
Maybe you start with an article, followed by a video interview with the subject, an interactive infographic, and then wrap up with a selected Tweet stream about the topic. At every point, the reader would be led by the hand from one experience to another, coming away with a fuller understanding of the topic. Supplemental images and data should always be at her fingertips. And, of course, the reader could dive right in by commenting, Tweeting, sharing, taking opinion polls and all the rest.
A digital magazine or newspaper should feel like a media app, not like a PDF viewer. It needs to take advantage of technology to tell better stories. These include both presentation technologies (immersive panoramic photos, interactive charts) and data-sifting technologies to filter the news from outside sources.
What do you want to see in a media app that you are not getting today?
bench craft company
bench craft companyiLounge news discussing the Verizon iPhone 4 antenna problems persist (video). Find more iPhone news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.
On Sean Hannity's program Monday night, pollster Frank Luntz hosted a focus group of Iowa Republican caucus-goers, gauging their reaction of President Barack Obama's Sunday afternoon interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company
bench craft companyiLounge news discussing the Verizon iPhone 4 antenna problems persist (video). Find more iPhone news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.
On Sean Hannity's program Monday night, pollster Frank Luntz hosted a focus group of Iowa Republican caucus-goers, gauging their reaction of President Barack Obama's Sunday afternoon interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft companyiLounge news discussing the Verizon iPhone 4 antenna problems persist (video). Find more iPhone news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.
On Sean Hannity's program Monday night, pollster Frank Luntz hosted a focus group of Iowa Republican caucus-goers, gauging their reaction of President Barack Obama's Sunday afternoon interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft companyiLounge news discussing the Verizon iPhone 4 antenna problems persist (video). Find more iPhone news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.
On Sean Hannity's program Monday night, pollster Frank Luntz hosted a focus group of Iowa Republican caucus-goers, gauging their reaction of President Barack Obama's Sunday afternoon interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company bench craft company bench craft company
bench craft company bench craft companyiLounge news discussing the Verizon iPhone 4 antenna problems persist (video). Find more iPhone news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.
On Sean Hannity's program Monday night, pollster Frank Luntz hosted a focus group of Iowa Republican caucus-goers, gauging their reaction of President Barack Obama's Sunday afternoon interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company 1-Motivation- In most cases this is a top reason why people do not accomplish anything. If you're not properly motivated then nothing will get done. One also needs the right motivation. How many debt collectors or repo's can you face before taking drastic action to improve the quality of your life? Now if someone was holding a gun to your face and said "I let you live if you create a website that produces revenue" may get you started but it is not the best motivation factor. To actually produce money online you have to be motivated by something that allows you to stay in the game and work through times of boredom and the necessary but mundane tasks like writing out emails for your auto responder.
2 The Plan- We can definitely achieve making money online with the right game plan or business plan. Some people that are not achieving desired revenue from online activities should look at creating a plan of action, which will outline the various aspects to your business. Include everything from product or service to how you will contact potential buyers. Having a plan will help guide you and keep you on track when working online. Plus it will help you gage what activities will allow for growth and which activities should be put aside due to non-production.
3. Product or service- One way to make money is to get behind a product that you believe in. If you are not producing any income from marketing online perhaps getting involved in a service or selling a product that you have a passion for would help. How many times have you bought an item or used a service because the message you saw or heard created a strong desire inside of you. This passion of a service or product will benefit you to sell to others. It is also easier to talk or create written material because you have such a strong belief in what you are marketing.
4. Education- In order to achieve any kind of continued success when you work online or want to make money online then you should educate yourself. From new email auto responders to marketing techniques to finding ways to streamline business processes. Continual education will help you stay on top of the trends that are ripe with profit as well as help you teach others.
5. No Money- Sure, we all see and hear about those who do not have money that succeed however this is simply not true. It may not take the same amount of money to run a brick and mortar business but you will need money for hosting, auto responders, PPC campaigns and other recurring costs. You may be able to get away with needing $500 -$1000 dollars per month until your efforts are producing money to cover these costs (with the eventuality of profit). You may be able to get started for as little as $100 dollars which would give you the ability for a simple web page for sales and an auto responder, who knows if done right you may turn a quick profit.
6 Targeted Traffic- It is important to have a steady stream of people hitting your website in order for you to make money online. By targeting the service or product toward the people that are looking or would best need the service or product will greatly increase profitability. Promo articles posted on specific directories, web 2.0 networking and connecting via message boards with people are great ways to find targeted traffic. Writing articles will allow for backlinks to you web pages, web 2.0 will allow you to network quite easily and free and message boards are a great way to connect to individuals that are potentially looking for your product or service.
There are other reasons that you are not making money online, but for those that are looking to generate extra money to a full time income from online activities then these 6 reason are important to work on.
Urban Legend has it that the Bud ad was paid for by the board personally in 2002
Comment by EricPWJohnson — 2/7/2011 @ 6:41 am
I thought the ad was a little strange in that it seemed about 85% an ad for the city of Detroit.
If Chrysler wanted a really good add, have the E-Trade toddler talk about buying shares of Chrysler stock, or looking forward to buying shares of Chrysler stock when they are openly traded again.
The careers of child actors are so brief, I liked him better as an infant… by the time he’s 3 he will need to be teaching his little sister or brother (intellectual property claim on the idea).
Comment by MD in Philly — 2/7/2011 @ 6:42 am
MD
actually the brilliant thing about the e-trade baby thing is that since its all or mostly computer generated, you have to wonder if there is any concern about the baby growing up at all.
Comment by Aaron Worthing — 2/7/2011 @ 6:54 am
1. Was angry at the car companies for giving in to government cake and always found it interesting that Ford, the only big one who didn’t take Washington money, was also the only big one to keep posting a profit in the months after the bailouts. (Don’t know how they’re all doing now.)
2. How was GM not able to keep making Saturns? It was one of their most popular cars IIUC (really miss my two – a bad driver totalled my last one last fall).
Comment by no one you know — 2/7/2011 @ 6:57 am
BTW: for some reason I really like Eminem — he’s got great rapping talent (unlike the actual Vanilla Ice) – but he used his talent badly, and, along w/ others, coarsened the culture.
Never bought his albums or movie, just because I didn’t want to support that coarsening. But he is a good musician IMO.
Comment by no one you know — 2/7/2011 @ 6:57 am
Good Point, AW. I imagine there was an original child scanned for the basis of the image, right?
If the maker’s of the ad use a computer generated image (based on the original picture) for an older child, does the child (or his trust fund) still have a financial interest? I would think so, or anybody could do a slight edit of a photo of someone and claim “but it’s not so and so”.
Comment by MD in Philly — 2/7/2011 @ 6:59 am
Good post. Patriotism has always been a big part of Super Bowl commercials (lets not forget the John Cougar Mellancamp “My Country” ads, for example). And Chrysler has a specific problem worth addressing, I think – it was bought by Fiat! To the extent that’s a stumbling block to sales, it ought to be addressed in the commercials.
Personally, I thought that it was the best ad of the Super Bowl. Much better than the overhyped Volkswagen-Darth Vader ad (an ad about the *key*? really?).
Not to mention that Chrysler had to advertise in the Super Bowl when (almost literally) every single other car company in the country advertised on the same program. Not advertising would mean losing ground.
Comment by A.S. — 2/7/2011 @ 7:00 am
NOYK
well, the rumor about killing saturn is that it had everything to do with their lack of unionization. its really hard to understand it, otherwise.
And yeah, i have liked that company from the beginning. I got one in 1998, a leftover on the lot from last year, so a 1997 SL1. that lasted me until two summers ago when the car was totaled in the moving day from hell. i mean seriously if it didn’t get hit by an idiot driver i would be driving it today.
and now i drive a 1995 Vue (their smaller SUV). and its running great.
btw, my wife was in the car in that accident. she had some minor neck injuries, but she has pretty much recovered. if you saw what the car looked like, though, you would be very impressed she wasn’t seriously hurt.
Comment by Aaron Worthing — 2/7/2011 @ 7:09 am
Chryler should of been let to die the first time. Then( maybe ) Ford and GM would of been in better shape.
Chrysler can go now. We already have plenty of choice in the market place.
Frankly, I support foreign car makers now. They don’t get the government to assfist me to give them money. Let the Japanese, German and soon Chinese citizen get worked over, again and again, by their corporations government.
No domestic auto company means one less big, really big, corporate/union welfare teat sucker.
Comment by Paul — 2/7/2011 @ 7:13 am
I’m not much persuaded by the opinion of musicians… or of almost-musicians like Eminem. But I did like the tag line, “Imported from Detroit.”
Comment by Gesundheit — 2/7/2011 @ 7:20 am
Paul, also, Honda and Toyota PAY taxes to the US Government. They also pay their workers a very fair wage in places like Texas and Ohio.
Like Chrysler, they are not American owned, but they do have a lot of engineering and management in the USA.
I see them as better citizens than Chrysler. Unfortunately, Toyota and Honda don’t make a truck I really like, nor do they make cars like the Suburban or the Mustang.
Fortunately, Ford has me covered (the new Explorer is the only SUV that doesn’t look ridiculous to me, too). They are still union tainted, but they make a good product and I think their success relative to GM and Chrysler sends a message.
I really hope GM and Chrysler fail. Sure, that would mean all the bailout money was wasted, but if these companies succeed, those bailouts will be repeated over and over in other industries. Companies fail. We should let them, so new blood can succeed.
Anyway, I think the Chrysler commercial was ghastly and wonder about the mind of the person who thinks their cars are better because Eminem likes D-Town. At least GM, for all their many faults, sometimes shows some effort (like Volt or Camaro). Look at that Chrysler 200! It wouldn’t have turned heads ten years ago.
Comment by Dustin — 2/7/2011 @ 7:22 am
Comment by Aaron Worthing — 2/7/2011 @ 7:09 am
Very glad your wife was OK. That driver last fall hit me in such a way, in the driver’s side, that I should have been injured but not a scratch. (Seat belts help too, but those cars are sturdy.)
Have always felt about cars “don’t need any bells and whistles, just start up every single time and get me where I want to go with no breakdowns.” That’s why I was so loyal to Saturn. Can count on one hand the problems I had with those two cars in almost 20 yrs.
What’s funny is, bought the second one when the first was about 10 yrs old and I’d just gotten a new good job. “It’s getting old so I’ll play it safe so I can get to the new job w/ a new car.” Sold that Saturn locally in a private sale, and still see the woman on occasion, almost nine years later, driving my old car around town. *weeps*
Comment by no one you know — 2/7/2011 @ 7:24 am
Car companies that have taken bailout money can indeed advertise.
And I can complain about it. And will.
Comment by SPQR — 2/7/2011 @ 7:25 am
Aaron, the mid 1990s Saturns were quite good, though noisy. Cheap, reliable American cars. I know one guy’s SL1 is over 300k miles.
the car company took a major turn for the worse when GM started rebadging Chevies with Saturn logos. The Saturn experiment worked, but the union bosses understood that meant their days were numbered if they didn’t kill it. GM kills a lot of their most interesting ideas (EV1).
There’s a lot of legacy and heritage in their company, and I had hoped some of their IP would be bought in bankruptcy. Some Aptera or Tesla style young company could take a stab at making Corvettes. It could have helped the economy quite a lot, I think.
Instead, GM won’t sell their Pontiac or Oldmobile IP because it’s obvious if someone began selling 442s and GTOs untainted by bailout and unions, GM would cease to be relevant to a lot of people.
Comment by Dustin — 2/7/2011 @ 7:28 am
While I understand the temptation to compare Vanilla Ice to Eminem in the way you did, you really shouldn’t.
For all his faults – and he has many – Eminem is a *top notch* rapper, easily one of the best, and he remains one of the few musicians to make a *good* movie when trying to make the jump into film.
Vanilla Ice, on the other hand, was just awful.
Comment by aphrael — 2/7/2011 @ 7:33 am
aph
actually yeah, it was harsher than deserved. but i just felt cranky this morning.
Comment by Aaron Worthing — 2/7/2011 @ 7:37 am
aphrael, you don’t seem to be willing to credit Vanilla Ice’s creativity as expressed in his current reality show … as a general contractor.
Comment by SPQR — 2/7/2011 @ 7:39 am
Yes, they can advertise, but I expect them to be a bit more frugal with their money. Chrysler paid for the longest Superbowl spot in history, and retained an expensive spoiled rap star to star in it. Only the rapper didn’t *rap*, you see, and he also starred in a silly cartoon soft drink commercial earlier in the game, so his gravitas is somewhat, um, questionable. You’ll have to excuse me if I see this as but an extension of their previous mismanagement.
Comment by mcg — 2/7/2011 @ 7:42 am
Eminem is driving a minivan in his rap commercial.
Come on. Sellout. I thought the rules were that we can mock him a lot now.
Comment by Dustin — 2/7/2011 @ 7:44 am
well, the rumor about killing saturn is that it had everything to do with their lack of unionization. its really hard to understand it, otherwise.
It actually was unionized but the union boss at Saturn was really interested in new quality initiatives. This caused resentment in GM (not Chrysler) executives and the UAW president, Yokich, was not interested in cooperative ventures, He is remembered as the UAW president who built the country club for UAW executives.
The story is in “Crash Course.”
Comment by Mike K — 2/7/2011 @ 7:48 am
fwiw, Eminem is having a resurgence and is up for 10 Grammy Awards this year. Drug issues had him down for a few years. I haven’t paid attention to him since his big 2001 year but apparently he is blacker music-wise than many black rappers and can actually rhyme. Also he starred in 8 Mile with Kim Basinger playing his mom. He admits to taking pills he had no idea what they were at times, along with vicodin.
Comment by Calypso Louie Farrakhan — 2/7/2011 @ 7:52 am
Eminem and Vanilla Ice? That is like comparing Scalia to timmah, or Clapton to Yelverton, or a normal non-obsessive human to epwj.
Comment by JD — 2/7/2011 @ 7:59 am
You know, I still remember how the Cutlass Supreme was a ridiculously obvious rip off of the Saturn SL1, even though Saturn wasn’t cooperating on design. GM simply ripped the hard work from Saturn and put the Olds out first. It wasn’t a rebadge, it was simply a lack of creativity.
And even though the Olds was bigger, had a more powerful motor, and a much more prestigious brand, the Saturn SL1 was a much bigger success because it was built better.
But that episode was a great example of how Saturn was constantly fighting uphill.
Comment by Dustin — 2/7/2011 @ 8:10 am
SPQR – I know nothing about Vanilla Ice’s current tv show. I’m mostly out of the tv loop.
Comment by aphrael — 2/7/2011 @ 8:18 am
SPQR – I actually checked after I first saw an episode of The Vanilla Ice Project…
Seems that after we all thought he died (seriously, who here hadn’t thought he was dead?), he actually did end up flipping McMansions and the like in Miami.
My only problem is the fact that he apparently doesn’t use a lot of licensed trade-folks to do the work. I highly suspect the people doing the plumbing, for example, are actual plumbers.
Mike Holmes would have a heart attack.
Comment by Scott Jacobs — 2/7/2011 @ 8:25 am
I found it quite appropriate that Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” was featured in this commercial. Rvera was a an outspoken communist which he reflected in his art and specifically in this fresco. Not really the best imagry to use for a company trying to convince the American public that it’s a solvent, self reliant business. Do you think the director was being sly?
Comment by Jason Moss — 2/7/2011 @ 8:47 am
Scott, Holmes has created a career out of having hissy fits.
Comment by SPQR — 2/7/2011 @ 8:50 am
Yeah, but it would be hard to argue that his hissy-fits aren’t justified.
Have you seen some of the stuff he’s had to fix?
The fact that he frequently goes out-of-pocket personally when doing a job is impressive to me. I think the line was “It isn’t unusually for him to have put in $50,000 by the end of a season – if he thinks that the kitchen would be vastly improved by custom cabinets, he’ll pay for them himself.”
Yeah, he can be a slight drama-queen, but for what he does, I’m willing to let that slide.
Comment by Scott Jacobs — 2/7/2011 @ 9:01 am
Who watches sports events in real-time anymore? What % of viewers run the feed thru a DVR, wait 30 min, then watch the game but skip the commercials & other mindless downtime? Do the Nielsens audit this? What’s happened to rate cards over the past 5 yrs? Or are the media geniuses (& the clueless board members who enable them) stuck on 1995?
Comment by Sporf — 2/7/2011 @ 9:48 am
Jason Moss – interesting, I didn’t know who the artist was but I immediately thought “New Soviet Man art? Really?”
Comment by Phil Smith — 2/7/2011 @ 10:56 am
What a completely liberal ad.
Run down into the ground by Democrats and now they are claiming the city is NOT what others who “have never even been here” have being saying for decades.
Yeesh. That place deserves to remain economically savaged.
Comment by RogerCfromSD — 2/7/2011 @ 12:52 pm
I sink Eminem stink. Chrysla stink too. Whez Bobby? Themz wuz da daze. Eminem is a peanut dipped in chocolate. Vuzzz is loos?
All kidding aside, the ad was stillborn. Eminem is dated goods. The ad was as enticing as the lame Black Eyed Peas. Why can’t we just have the Negro College bands play at halftime? All those white suits reminded me of the sperm cells in that old doofus Woody Allen movie about “Sex”.
There were so many government made car ads. And then the MVP gets that red pile of junk called a “Camaro”. Hell, give him a full restored Camaro muscle car. It was made during the era when GM didn’t stand for Government Made.
$100,000 per second for that tripe on American cars. The Euro car ads were just as stupid. Puff Doody? Are you kidding me? Looking helpless and ripped off. The boy has zero shame. Like President Zero. So glad I didnt have to see his mug at all yesterday. His face is a nightmare.
How many ribs did Moo-Chelle eat yesterday? Any red soda to wash it down? I hope she has the trots today. Go walk the Presidential Pooch.
Comment by Lawrence Welk — 2/7/2011 @ 1:57 pm
Hi, Kilgore Trout.
Comment by Dustin — 2/7/2011 @ 2:01 pm
Yahoo has a list of the 20 most miserable cities in the US. Eight are in California. Miami would have been #1 instead of 2 if not for sun and no state income tax. Corruption beyond rampant. Of course plenty of northern liberal heavily black cities on list too. My own area is #8 despite the wealth, mostly because of unemployment and housing market still crashing. Funny I don’t see Arizona in the toilet in the same way. Few states are not going bankrupt. Unemployment very low in the Dakotas but who wants to freeze their asps off there?
Seems the Koreans are making top-quality cars now. GM has bigger sales in China than do in USA. I was thinking how the ouster of Gov. Gray did not guarantee improvement in Ca. government. Is that because of liberal unions, legislature and catering to Latinos? Auhnuld tried to get along with liberals but I expect Collyfournya got what it wanted. But then we are told W was responsible for the Housing mess and Barney,Dodd and Obama blameless. I wonder if that tomato picker in Ca. who made $14k a year still has his $750k house?
Comment by Calypso Louie Farrakhan — 2/7/2011 @ 3:25 pm
I no longer root for GM’s or Chrysler’s success. I will never again buy a product from either of them under any circumstances.
I realize that this may be contrary to my indirect financial self-interest. The Obama administration turned them into corporate zombies, undead companies that aren’t allowed to die even though they really, really deserve to and that would be the best result for the American economy in the long term. The Obama administration trampled on the rule of law to reach that end.
So no, I will no more buy a GM car or a Chrysler car than I would have bought a Lada from the Soviet Union.
Comment by Beldar — 2/7/2011 @ 8:05 pm
Tagline should have been, by the way: “Imported from Detroit (but controlled from D.C.)”
Comment by Beldar — 2/7/2011 @ 8:10 pm
Agreed, Beldar. Never a GM or a Chrysler.
Though I’d be willing to buy a Ford.
Comment by Scott Jacobs — 2/7/2011 @ 8:33 pm
Whatever union and internal company politics may have had to do with the shutdown of Saturn, I think you’re overrating the brand. The extra safety of the early models was lost after the first few years, and from the Wikipedia page about the company, it seems the later models were really just Chevrolets or Opels with a different logo on the back. (Parts of that Wikipedia page seem frozen in amber.)
And I don’t think it was as popular as your anecdotes suggest. I can remember one neighbor on my whole street who ever bought a Saturn, and they eventually traded it in for a Honda Civic, which is parked next to a Toyota truck. They told me that Saturn was simply too pricey for their budget.
My parents, when I was a kid, stuck to Chevrolet–the ones I remember are my father’s Impala and my mother’s Nova. Eventually my mother switched to Mercury Cougars and then Toyota Camrys, and my father went for Buick because my stepmother worked for a dealership. I myself now drive a Corolla. It’s the fourth one in a row I’ve owned, and I’ll probably be trading it in sometime in the next twelve months for Corolla number five. The only complaint I have with the Corolla is that the brakes seem to wear out rather quickly. But that may be me. I drove it almost exclusively to work and on errands, and almost never more than an hour’s distance from the house–standard metropolitan traffic.
Comment by kishnevi — 2/7/2011 @ 8:43 pm
Yeah, I’m driving a 2000 Taurus made in Atlanta. It’s not nearly as much fun as the BMWs I used to drive, but I’m a more sedate driver now than I was then, and it’s been a pleasant, safe, and reliable car. When I replace it I’ll surely give Ford’s lineup a close look.
Comment by Beldar — 2/7/2011 @ 8:43 pm
I will always think of Nissan as my first love for cars.
My first car was an 1987 Nissan Sentra, and it only was gotten rid of because I treated it like crap. My fault, and a lesser car would have died way sooner than the 2+ years I owned it.
Comment by Scott Jacobs — 2/7/2011 @ 8:46 pm
I think the new Taurus is one of the best cars America has ever produced. It’s also sharp. Ford really has caught up with the other great automakers.
A car like that should be low hassle. One of the reasons Chrysler and GM failed was that their cars were often quite a hassle to keep on the road. I’ve only owned one Ford (my present vehicle), but it’s on par with the two Hondas we’ve had.
Comment by Dustin — 2/7/2011 @ 8:48 pm
From my grandfather down my family owned Impalas/Caprices for 40 years until they stopped making them. My mom (the little lady who drove it 2 miles to work and back every day) still has her 1989 Caprice. Trading in my 199-something caprice wagon was a mistake.
Just bought a Ford Focus today. Having a brother-in-law with the company helps get a better deal, as well as “inside scouting reports”. Even without that, though, I would still not buy GM or Chrysler. (FYI, the 2012 model year Focus will be coming out soon, so if you want a good deal more than the latest style, big incentives on the 2011 Focus.)
Comment by MD in Philly — 2/7/2011 @ 8:57 pm
Beldar
Well, i think that is a reasonable view, to say that you hope they fail so that this horrible experiment will not be repeated. i can respect that.
Comment by Aaron Worthing — 2/7/2011 @ 9:04 pm
Comment by MD in Philly — 2/7/2011 @ 8:57 pm
Best wishes on the car..may the wind be at your back and the traffic jams only on the other side of the highway….
I can’t say I intend to boycott GM because of the bailout. I boycott GM because of the lousy engineering they did. My first two cars were Chevy Cavaliers, and they had constant engine problems after the second year on each one. That was the main inducement to switch to Toyota. Much better in comparison (although the onboard computer in my current car seems to be getting finicky, but only after it hit the five year mark, past the time I usually trade in my cars (after five years I got a new one on the premise that engine problems were to be expected in a car that old. But not this year–combination of less income last year because of the recession and the recall hoo-has. Probably a new Corolla before the end of 2011, however.)
Comment by kishnevi — 2/8/2011 @ 8:01 pm
Thank you, kishnevi.
Comment by MD in Philly — 2/8/2011 @ 8:05 pm