Cowpetition - The Price is Right Contest
written by Anthony Dinh
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, I’m sure you’ve heard about JohnCow and Garry Conn competition that started yesterday, and will be ending on Wednesday, June 18th. Basically, the two blogging heavyweights will be going hoof to head, each building a non-IM niched blog from scratch using a virgin domain. After 1 month, whoever sells his blog for the most mooney on Sitepoint will be the champion!
To feed off the frenzy that will be generated around the competition, I will be holding my own contest and giving away $280 in prizes. Below are the official details of the “Cowpetition - The Price is Right Contest“. The rules are simple and the prizes are great, so don’t forget to enter!
Deadline Wednesday, June 18th, 12:00am EST
Rules
- subscribe to the RSS feed via email (1 pt)
- Stumble/Digg this post with a comment linking to this post (1 pt)
- predict the competition winner and the final selling price without going over (1 pt, closest bid gets 3 pts)
- write a blog post about this contest - in your own words, please do not copy&paste (5 pts)
Grand Prize Package
- Self-Portrait Caricature Package by Randy Ariestoteles of FreshMeatDesign.com ($150 valu
e) - detailed site review by me ($50 value)
- sponsored 125×125 ad banner for 1 month ($30 value)
- sponsored link in Featured Sites section of right sidebar for 1 month ($10 value)
- novelty AmazingPopper bottle opener ($10 value)
- guest post opportunity with backlink to showcase your work and gain exposure to new readers - can be brand new post or one of your best existing pieces (pricele$$ - traffic boost, RSS subscribers, backlink, exposure, etc.)
2nd Place Prize (multiple giveaways for
- sponsored link in Featured Sites section of right sidebar for 1 month ($10 value)
- novelty AmazingPopper bottle opener ($10 value)
3rd Place Prize
- sponsored link in Featured Sites section of right sidebar for 1 month ($10 value)
If you wish to enter the contest, simply perform the required actions under the rules section, and leave a comment below indicating which steps you’ve taken so I can tally up the points. Please include who you predict will win and your bid on the final selling price. Lastly, if you write a post, please provide a link to the post as well.
Read more about FreshMeatDesign.com here, or check out their impressive portfolio of logos, banners, caricatures and mascots.
GOOD LUCK ALL!
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Do You Digg It? comScore Says Yahoo! Buzz is the Way to Go
written by Anthony Dinh
Everyone in the blogosphere and MMO niche knows that submitting your posts to Digg can lead to huge boosts of traffic to your site, so we all diligently submit our best work in hopes that it will gain enough popularity to ultimately achieve the holy grail of being promoted to the front page. Heck, it seems like everyone and there mom has a Digg button or link in some form or another on their site these days.
Move over Digg, there’s something leaner and meaner! comScore, a global internet information provider of consumer behavior, has just released some metrics indicating the Yahoo! Buzz is gaining more internet traction and has actually surpassed Digg at it’s own game. For the month of April, Yahoo! Buzz reached nearly 7M unique visitors in the US, while Digg fell behind with just under 6M unique visitors.
Traditionally, Digg has been known to cater to a young, male, techie audience, and Yahoo! Buzz is capitalizing on this shortcoming by addressing the needs of the more mainstream audience. Yahoo! Buzz boasts to be a nice option for the less hard-core social media user, with 50% of its visitors being female. Though these factors don’t mean much to the casual user, it’s music to the ears of eager advertisers. Studies have shown that women and ”technically challenged” users are more apt to click on ads than tech-saavy users.
Being one of the world’s most popular sites, any of Yahoo!’s new projects will surely get a big a kickstart from the enormous amount of traffic that it currently generates. The site is still in beta and unlike Digg, it doesn’t have open article submission policy, so submissions are not open to all sites. For now, submitted articles must come from approved sites only, but you can join a mailing list to be considered until it opens up to the public.
Is Digg losing its touch? Not really. According to Compete, Digg is still generating as much buzz as it did over a year ago, and the site is still exhibiting some steady growth.
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Full Contact Blogging - Garry Conn vs JohnCow
written by Anthony Dinh
After some cow patties were thrown back and forth, things came to a head and JohnCow has finally called Garry Conn out to a fight to the death…well, not really a fight, just a “friendly” competition. The reason I quoted friendly is because we all know, this thing has the potential to get ugly, so you don’t wanna miss it!
The two blogging heavy weights will be going hoof to head, each building a non-IM niched blog from scratch. After 1 month, whoever sells his blog for the most mooney on Sitepoint will be the champion! This is the tentative plan anyway, the exact rules and details are being worked out as we speak.
The best thing about this competition, is that both bloggers will be offering enrollment into their classrooms so you, the newbie blogger, can follow along and see first hand exactly what they are doing every step of the way! Every strategy, tactic and cheapshot will be laid out on the table for your hungry little brains to soak up! I don’t know about you, but I’ve already enrolled in both and I know that I will definitely learn a ton, so run, don’t walk!….head on over there and sign-up now!
John “The Madcow” Bloxxing Club
Will JohnCow be victorious, or Will Garry make minced meat of the Cow? dun, dun, dunhhhhhhh…stay tuned!
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The Next Best Thing Since Sliced Bread: Behavioral Targeting
written by Anthony Dinh
Most ad networks such as Adsense, which most of you are familiar with, uses contextual targeting to serve relevant ads to users. In other words, if I’m on an auto enthusiast site such as AutoWeek, or I’m perusing the autos section on NYTimes, then it would make sense for me to see a Honda or GM ad right? Well, this isn’t very exciting or groundbreaking technology is it? Displaying an appropriate ad depending on the content of the page, how hard could that be? Not to mention, the ad inventory on these highly prized pages are usually either sold out, or are priced way out of range for most entrepreneurs like most of us who run small operations with a limited advertising budget…enter behavioral targeting.
Since 2001, TACODA, Inc. has been at the forefront of this new and exciting technology. What is behavioral targeting and how is it different than contextual targeting you might ask? We’ll get into that a bit later, but first, here’s some information about the company.
“TACODA®, Inc., a wholly owned division of AOL and a Platform-A company, runs one of the world’s largest and most advanced behavioral targeting advertising networks. Since 2001, TACODA has provided a comprehensive range of behavioral targeting solutions to thousands of web publishers and brand marketers. Its patent pending technologies enable brand advertisers to target relevant messages to specific audience segments. Major advertisers who have run campaigns on TACODA include General Motors, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Cadbury Schweppes, Bank of America, AT&T, GlaxoSmith Kline, and Sears.
TACODA has more than 4,000 sites reaching over 140 million monthly unique users. Major US media partners include Dow Jones, The New York Times Company, NBC Universal, Fox, AOL, Comcast, HGTV.com, FoodNetwork.com, Kelley Blue Book, and USAToday.com.”
At a very high level, BT, as the name implies, is where users are served relevant ads based on the web surfing behaviors that they’ve exhibited. Here’s how it works. First, the publisher (that’s you, the blog author) places the TACODA network data tag, and or ad tag on their site. Behavioral data is then collected from users which then places them into audience segments based on the behaviors that they’ve exhibited on a given site (job seeker, music enthusiast, auto shopper, etc.), but no personal data is tracked, so there are no violation of privacy issues here. The users’ behavior is not only tracked on the publisher’s site, but it will continue to be tracked once he or she leaves that site and visits any of the other 4000 sites within the network. A relevant ad will then be served to the users based on their behavior, not on the page context. If there are no relevant ads to serve, then TACODA does a pass-back to the publisher so that they can serve one of their own house ads, or a PSA (public service announcement) ad will be served by default.
Not only can the user’s behavior be tracked on other sites within the network, but TACODA has the ability to serve a relevant ad to the user on another site within the network as well if the TACODA ad tag has been deployed, even if the current site’s content does not match the user’s previously exhibited behavior. In other words, if I visited AutoWeek which has highly prized inventory (ad space) and is most likely sold out, then I leave and visit the obituaries section of NYTimes where the inventory is probably not sold out and more affordable, through behavioral targeting, TACODA is able to serve me an auto related ad on that page as well! This allows advertisers to attain the massive reach to their targeted audience more affordably and at scale. Additionally, not only does NYTimes get paid for serving the ad, but Autoweek will also get a split of the revenue share since it contributed behavioral data which resulted in the ad being displayed. So, an obvious benefit of joining the network is that you will in essence be leveraging the power of the network by having 4000 sites working as one to generate revenue by reaching 140 million unique users monthly.
To learn more about BT, visit TACODA.com.
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JohnCow.com Sold for $50,000, That’s A Lot of Moooney!
written by Anthony Dinh
Just 9 months after the JohnChow.com parody blog was launched, JohnCow.com has sold for the BIN price of $50,000 on April 13, 2008, only 36 hours after it was posted for sale on Sitepoint.
The author was not very specific on what prompted the sale, but only offered that he will be relocating from Europe to Australia, and that he will be too busy with his personal life to continue feeding the “cashCOW”. One thing’s for sure, he’ll be moooing all the way to the bank!
Site Stats
- Revenue 2,500-3,000/m
- RSS Readers 1746
- Monthly Uniques 40,000
- Alexa Ranking 22,100
- Compete 41,020
- Technorati 1969
- Post 382
- Comments 13,417
- Backlinks 47,412
- Google Index 2,830 pages
* source Abry.biz
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