LetsBuyIt Blog

After many rumors and a long time of waiting (since July 22nd, 2007) it has been made public by Ryan Hayward on AdSense Blogspot now that Google launched its AdSense for Feeds in beta. With your Google AdSense account, it is now possible to push for Google advertising in your feeds in order to earn money with your blogs and feeds now. It is similary customizable as the other AdSense applications however this is only the beginning. The efficiency is questionnable as we are using feeds in order to minimizing the time spent for reading news and blogs hence we doubt that that Click-Through-Rate will be very high.

To find out more on how to integrated AdSense in your Feeds (interesting for publishers) click here for more info.

We found plenty of articles on the Google Blog but has this been existing in the other countries since 2005 as stated here on the Google Blog dated May 7, 2005 or is the date of the blog post just wrong?

It comes as no surprise that Google is trying to monetize its Readers now as well because Google is struggling to monetize their other projects such as YouTube, which just recently had to stop its project of live-streaming (article here) because investors are having a hard-time accepting those massive investments with no nice returns.

In the last few months we have come across some start-ups that focus on contracts and legal templates, which offer platforms to share, edit, adapt and exchange contracts. The inspiration for the article was originally the mulitilingual OECD Privacy Policy Generator, which generates your individual Privacy Policy after going through a long questionnaire with you. The result is quite minimalistic but quite a good starting point for further research.

However then we have a discovered a start-up last year, which is called Tractis. This a portal where you can share and discuss your contracts or find contracts of all sorts, which you can than adapt to your needs. You can gather your “contracts online and use them offline” they say, the applicability however is questionable because I doubt that contracts can be standardised (except maybe Non-Disclosure Agreements or Power of Attorneys) and be fully useful but again it is a good starting point.

Now we have come across a recently launched start-up in Germany, which is called “Vertrag-tauschen.de” or translated “contract-exchange”. This is an interesting portal, which will definitely create an interesting discussion, because there you can offer to exchange, sell or buy transferable contracts. Most probably all of us have had problems with lock-in periods for contracts, be it with mobile phones, gyms, club subscriptions, leases, or even hosting contracts. Therefore we consider this portal to have a lot of potential on the C2C market. Maybe this is the place to get rid of your contracts and obligations and perhaps even push the market to liberalise the contractual frameworks that are present everywhere such as the 2 years contractual obligations for telephones in Germany!

Do you know of any other contract sharing, swapping or creation websites?

Some of you might remember that we have written about Loopt in July last year (here) already but we would like to introduce Loopt to the rest of you because Loopt is the proof that we are living in a new era. Loopt is a mobile phone application, which acts like a social network (incl. groups, chats, etc.), the difference being that your current location is indicated on a map and you can see the location of your friends on that same map in real-time. Needless to say that the notion of people/companies tracking your whereabouts 24/7 is more than frightening but finding Apple promoting its iPhone Application Store with Loopt is even more fascinating. This is how far you can go in one year with people-tracking technologies.

After having previously reported (blog post here) about Telebid we now read in the FAZ that apparently Telebid has not only expanded to the UK and Spain but is also planning to open up in the US, Korea, Japan and China and currently has a daily subscription rate of 3,000 new members per day! We had also discussed the business model previously in the blog and we know now that apparently Telebid is making a daily turnover of almost 30 000 to 35 000 Euros per day, according to FAZ!!! Judge for yourself.

Concerning the recent eBay sale of Yieeha, a Social Community Shopping Portal, the new owner has been made know now on their blog and is the Net-Line Onlinedienste GmbH from Heilbronn. After quickly checking out their website the company turns out to be a live-erotic-cam provider, which gives the Yieeha slogan “Social winning” quite a new twist! It is good to know the user info in safe hands.

First of all we would like to share some more hidden internet jokes that we have found. There is quite a range of Google jokes or hoaxes that somebody dedicated an entire Wikipedia “Google Hoaxes” article to them. For more jokes or Easter Eggs, as they are also called, check out the site eeggs.com. Back in the days Microsoft used to be quite funny and there were hiding quite a lot of easter eggs in their programs like Excel but that has been reduced because people were complaining about the waste of resources (how mature!).

Secondly we have noticed that the Ebay Sale of the Online Shopping Community Yieeha (we have previously reported) has come to an end at the stunning selling price of EUR 24.550,00 incl. VAT. The Sale has not been commented on their blog as of now (no new entry since June 23, 2008) however the average sale price of 2EUR per registered user is definitely not very satisfactory but it was definitely worth a try. There are not that many Shopping Community Sites for Sale on Ebay to compare with but our feeling is that the price could be more!

After having talked about branded communities there are also the Social Shopping Communities that are widely discussed now. What we found most interesting was that the German Social Shopping Community Yiieha is up for sale on Ebay. It has given all the necessary information that you need to know when buying a shopping community portal on Ebay Alexa Ranking, Page Impressions, Adranks, and much more. Check it out and we will follow it very closely what is happening with it. The bidding is finished on 03.07.08, 14:45:25 German Standard Time.

Jupiter Research published a study saying that branded communities are a failure and don’t reach their consumers. As stated in Internetworld and Acquisa the average number of members of branded communities in Europe are 6,494 members with more than have half of the communities only counting 1,000 members in comparison to the investments sometimes going far beyond EUR 100,000. Viral marketing is also out of date and is not lucrative anymore for those branded communities in most instances because most companies don’t understand the modern internet users. They try to just give information to the members instead of making the effort of understanding their consumers and providing them with interaction possibilities or even reasons to communicate. According to a report by David Eicher, CEO of the internet agency Robert & Horst, one just needs to merely be smart and integrate the users at the beginning of the development of the community instead of creating an expensive “community platform” and then looking for members. That sounds easy! What do you think?

Fleishman-Hillard Inc. and Harris Interactive have published an excellent study about the influence the internet has on modern consumers. Their “Digital Life Index Study” highlights the main aspect of the modern shopping behaviours and compares the different impacts between the UK, Germany and France. The four key findings of the report are worth reading up on:

You should read the article, which you can find here.

It seems that they are currently more company acquisitions happening than dealipedia could hold but we were wondering what are the latest Key Performance Indicators (KPI) besides the known ones:

What else comes to your mind when you think about analysing the performance of your online retail site?

We have previously mentioned viral marketing however we were wondering whether anybody has examples for the monetary value of viral ad campaigns?

We read that the campaign “Will It Blend”from Blendtec generated $50,000 in ad revenue with 100 million views in total.

Apparently “Ask a Ninja” generates an unbelievable $100,000 a month in ad revenue and income from merchandising and licensing for creators Kent Nichols and Doug Sarine.

According to Wiki.media-culture the BMW viral ad campaign in 2001 generated BMW a sales increased by 12.5% compared to 2000 with peak times even crashing the servers.

What examples do you have for viral marketing campaigns where the benefit can be expressed in monetary value?