Technically Speaking

As Todd blogged about the supposed 40 cent CPM guarantee on the company blog a few moments ago, I just wanted to make sure the bloggers of the world really picked up on this. The story here is that unless some ad network wants to be a real game changer, they need to offer the 40 cent global CPM guarantee. I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Being that Todd has been in this business for awhile, and myself in one year with Lookery, I can tell you that our guarantee was the first in social net advertising. Every ad network seemed to follow on with some sort of guarantee, and they still are to this day as shown by the Bebo guarantee.

Not all guarantee’s are the same. You really need to figure out what they are guaranteeing. With Lookery we were doing the first guarantee of 12.5 cents CPM for 100% of your traffic. We have a full inventory so every ad impression you generated, you were making money. Now many people laughed at us in the front, and than eventually signed up for the guarantee in the rear.

Quite funny as the day we announced that, people were out there on one side bashing the number, and on the backside – they were beating down the door to get in. In fact, as the months went on, and we crossed over 3 Billion ads served, more people tried to latch on to the program.

Best thing going? Maybe it was, but we look to move on and continue to innovate. Lookery is not a company just standing around on one ad network victory, in fact our next exciting thing is right around the corner. You’ll have to keep watching, and visiting our newly re-designed web site.

Technically Speaking, you want game changing, and eye opening, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Even with one arm tied behind my back, I was able to still enter in my MySpace developer platform thoughts last night.

Weird how timing is everything, since I didn’t have the big announcement at all. It’s covered of course better on TechCrunch, but hey, wasn’t my post a bit more interesting?

Technically Speaking, MySpace is huge, don’t let the recent surge of other social networks blind you to the reality – MySpace has the numbers still by a large margin. The surge you read about for Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, etc – is basically what I term “fluff n’ stuff“.

I happened to attend the MySpace Developers launch party back in February at their new San Francisco office. Nice party. Nice dreams.

Overture

People in the ad business were drooling at the possible access to over 60 million users, or whatever number they want us to believe this month, they have on their social network. I’m not here to argue numbers on who has more users in the social net world. We know that even though Facebook was just reported to be surging upwards, MySpace still is the biggest player on the block.

Reality hit quickly when MySpace launched to the world their open developer platform a few months later. Apps didn’t take off as everyone thought. There was no viral way to promote your application. Basically developers were writing MySpace off as a place to only toy with. Every application developer I chatted with said they were waiting.

Reality Check – Your app sucks!

Here is the reality. Most developers need to think closer to the box than so far outside of it that the only people that enjoy their app is the developer team and 5 of their nerd buddies.

That is what I see more times than not. People are out there developing apps just because “they can”. Instead of thinking what would work and what would interest a diverse audience, they end up thinking – “what is the coolest piece of code I could write that would make this float here and there… etc.. etc.. “.

What ends up happening is the app might totally rock, but no one gets it. See above 5 nerd buddies and the coding team. You are not going to be able to utilize any ad network to make you money on an application that no one “gets” or knows what it’s suppose to do.

Think Musician

You have a choice, be the musician that is winning the local awards as the best singer, best songwriter, best local top dog – or be the musician that figures out the business. You can’t play the business of music if you stick too close to your guns. The same thought process should go into the app writing business.

Before you start writing that next great MySpace (bigger audience) or Facebook application, look around you. What is hitting, and why? Is it something that is cross cultural accepted? Is it something enjoyable to visit? Is it basically ripping off the long time favorite “Hot or Not” with a new name and twist?

After you figure that out, you need to answer the next question. If I rip off someone else’s idea that worked once, will it work again? This part is another of the lessons you learn as a musician. Just because you wrote “Livin’ On A Prayer” part II, it doesn’t give you a license to a #1 hit.

The Point

The point is really quite simple. MySpace does work, and now is more viral with built in inviting turned on. It can be some place to really make some serious money. The first thing you need to do is look around to see what is working.

I can tell you what works. I received a free t-shirt at that party above. It says “MySpace – Makes work FUN! (thumbs up)“. Things that are familiar and fun are what works on either social network. I have yet to see a totally confusing, but really well coded app, make it.

How do I know this? Well of course I view statistics everyday. Up until recently, our publishers who had MySpace apps had very little traction. It was like MySpace was a cursed place and their developer platform was a joke.

Technically Speaking, the joke really is the number of talented developers that are not thinking through what they are writing for social networks; Keep It Simple Stupid and FUN! Maybe I should start a conference called “KISS and FUN!“?

So I decided to cut it off (the goatee that had grown down heading for mid-chest).

I went back to the “Duff” (need to be logged into MySpace to see it) look in the picture as MrBusinessGolf put it. Hey – that original “Duff” picture has more comments on my MySpace page than any other picture I have out there. I figure – Go with what works!

Technically Speaking, sorry for wasting your time on my own vain self. hahhaha…

On ReadBurner! Seems like that must be LG’s fulltime job. I mean come on now, close to 4k in burns?

Technically Speaking, if you haven’t checked out ReadBurner yet, you can go there now to see the featured burner section – by the time you get there, I’m sure LG will have burned off another 2k shares.

Do you ever wonder what people would be doing if they weren’t doing what they were currently doing? I think our CTO Dave would have been a National Enquirer writer. Maybe in another lifetime, right now he is doing a funtastic job as our CTO for Lookery.

I still am in awe at the awesome National Enquirer title he came up with for his last blog post.

Lookery – Secrets Exposed - in fact if you haven’t had a second to listen to the podcast interview done with our CEO Scott Rafer, you are missing another great Lookery interview; or as Dave said “Lookery – Secrets Exposed“.

Technically Speaking, yes, I learned the very wise lesson of the power ballad.

The one thing that I still like about Pownce is that you can share files. I just shared a file and seeing if it shows up on my FriendFeed.

Technically Speaking, there are a lot of ignorant people in the area I live; reasons heard to vote for John McCain in November astound me – thought it was 1958 instead of 2008 – I have been pondering that for a the last 24-48 hours now.