Adam McFarland

Last month we struck a deal for Detailed Image to sponsor Autopia.org, definitively the largest online community of auto detailers.  Clearly our target market for DI - a community that can exponentially increase our foothold in the detailing community.  The potential is very large.

Part of the sponsorship agreement included a 120 x 600 banner ad thrown into the rotation on the homepage.   George came up with the idea of having the banner show our automated Daily Special.  Autopia (like most sites) will pull your ad from an image or from Javascript.  So he approached me and asked me if it was possible for me to create said banner that updated daily as our specials updated.  I said yes, but I hadn’t done it before so I’d have to do some research.

In my research I basically found nothing.  No examples of anyone with a similar issue.  I’ve seen the end result before, but couldn’t find a tutorial to help me or even point me in the right direction.  It’s been a few weeks, but I wanted to make sure I came back to this and posted about it because sometime, somewhere, someone will have the exact same problem and hopefully this post will help.  I’m sure there are other (possibly better) ways to do this, but the technique below was what I came up with.  Since it’s gone live we’ve yet to have any issues.

Step 1 - Create the static portion of the banner

I had George and Mike create a PNG graphic of the portion of the banner that would remain unchanged.  You can layer any type of image with PHP, but our product pics are PNGs so I kept uniformity by using only PNGs for this process.

Step 2 - Create a PHP script to overlay Daily Special Image

I take the 500 x 500 image of the Daily Special product, re-size it to 100 x 100 using PHP function imagecreatetruecolor, and then overlay it using the PHP function imagecopymerge.

Step 3 - Create a PHP script to write the HTML and CSS using Javascript

This might be a bit confusing.  I created a PHP script that retrieves the information for the current special.  Once I have that information, I can write the product title and price with Javascript using the document.write function.

Even though this is a PHP page, it needs to be viewed by a browser as a Javascript page so you should to declare the page as a Javascript application using the PHP header function prior to outputting any text:

header(’Content-type: application/javascript’);

Now within the document.write function you can write the HTML/CSS for the banner like you normally would.  I created a div with a size of 120 x 600 and the background image being the image above.  From there I wrote and styled the text using CSS/HTML in the div.  I put a link around the div so the entire thing links back to Detailed Image. The end result is the text overlayed on top of the banner.

Step 4 - URL rewrite Step 3 as a Javascript file

The file above creates the Javascript, but can’t be called remotely as a Javascript file since it has a .php extension.  Thankfully, URL rewriting allows you to “change” a file named autopia_banner_javascript.php to autopia_banner.js.

Step 5 - Set up a Cron Job for the image generation

We’re almost done.  The Javascript file updates the title and the price each time it’s called, but the picture remains the same unless the script from Step 2 is executed.  We have our Daily Special change at midnight EST each night with a cron job.  I set up a cron job to run immediately after, which executes the PHP script from Step 2 and updates the image with the current special.

Step 6 - Include Javascript on a page to display the banner ad

Assuming the location of the javascript is http://www.detailedimage.com/banners/autopia_scripts.js, you can give anyone the following code to include it on their site:

 <script src=”http://www.detailedimage.com/banners/autopia_scripts.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

Which produces:

And finally, the banner on Autopia:

Wohoo - success!

This is driving me nuts.  So I’m on browsing stories on Digg, which I am now officially obsessed with and fascinated by from a user perspective, a community perspective, and a business perspective.  I click on a story in Firefox (3.0, but also happened previously in versions 2.xx) and about 1/10th of the time a page that should have a banner ad that looks like this:

Has a banner ad that looks like this:

With the javascript actually typed out:

Am I the only one that this happens to?  Wtf Digg.  If this happens to anyone other than me, you’re losing impressions/money, as are your advertisers.   I feel like there’s no possible way that this happens to other people.  That it must be some Firefox plugin interfering or something…although maybe I’m wrong and no one else has caught something so obvious and ridiculously costly…

(By the way, check out my Digg profile and add me as a friend if you have an account.)

A few weeks back I read about Microsoft’s new Live.com Cashback program where users actually get “cash back” (catchy huh) if they make purchases on items of participating partners found through Live searches. Intrigued, I looked a bit more into it and realized that advertising partners get charged on a CPA basis, not a CPC basis. Paying by “action” is the holy grail for all advertisers. If I can only pay when someone makes a purchase I take all of the guesswork out of click through rates and conversion rates for ad programs. It’s virtually impossible to lose money as long as your CPA is less than your COGS (and that action of course is a sale).

So of course I added “sign up for Live.com” to my to-do list. When I finally got to it this afternoon and tried to sign up, it unfortunately looked like a closed beta so I had to fill out a long form and wait to hear back from Microsoft. However, in filling out the survey they asked me what other shopping networks we advertised on:

At which point I realized that we only did Y! and Google on that list (and Amazon, which for some reason isn’t on there). I had looked into a few of the other ones in the past but for one reason or another never pulled the trigger. Many of the ones on that list I hadn’t even heard of. I then went to each site and decided that I’ll sign up Tastefully Driven for all of them except the CNET ones (seemed like too much work).

Thanks for the idea Microsoft. Your reward for triggering this thought and introducing me to these shopping networks is that you’ll be getting a much lower cut of our ad spend.

OK, so it’s happening about 2 weeks later than I had hoped, but I’m finally at the point where I can spend an hour or two a day on some pre-launch hype for Tastefully Driven - the goal obviously being to collect as many email addresses as possible on our splash page.  I don’t have a set goal (yet), but having a list of 10,000 to start with can jumpstart a site a lot quicker than a list of  100 so it behooves us to get as many as we freaking can.

Today we did two things to get us off to a good start:  we started a pre-launch blog and we put banners/announcements on the array of Pure Adapt sites.

Both are for fairly obvious reasons:

A pre-launch blog will give us a head start on getting the site indexed, getting some links, and getting people subscribed to the RSS feed (which will be transfered to the “real” blog upon launch).  The blog is located at AreYou.TastefullyDriven.com.  Today I posted our definition of what it means to be “Tastefully Driven”, and we’ll spend the next few weeks profiling people, places, and products that are (and aren’t) “Tastefully Driven”.  Hopefully one of the posts will catch the social bookmarking wave and bring in an influx of traffic and sign-ups.

As far as the ads and announcements on our existing sites - well, it just seems obvious to use our free ad space before purchasing any other ads.  We also have communities built in to each site that trust us, and therefore are somewhat interested in any new site we launch.  Plus TD will include portions of sports, music, business, etc so it’s not like each site doesn’t have some tie in to it.  Each site is different, but for most we just put banners up.  On SportsLizard I made a blog announcement, and on Music-Alerts I put a text-link in the RSS feed:

Should be interesting to see how much all of this helps.  I’ll keep everyone posted on how it goes…and on all of the other semi-creative marketing we have planned

We’ve made the decision to make my Faceup Web Marketing eBook available for free download.  After filling out the form on the eBook page you’ll be emailed a link to download the book directly.

I updated the book last week, and it now includes updated information on keyword research tools, link building, Google AdWords, and more…in addition to all of the topics outlined on the eBook page.

I’m hoping this:

1. Helps spread what I’ve learned in SEO/web marketing in the past few years to all web entrepreneurs.  Now that it’s free, everyone can afford it
2. Creates new business for Faceup Sites and some of the other services I reference in the book

Anyone who purchased the book prior will be compensated with some free products/services from us, although I haven’t decided exactly what yet.  If you read it, let me know what you think.  Feedback from customers who purchased the book and received advanced copies last time was very good so I’m hoping people get a lot of good info out of it.

I think in previous posts I’ve proven my point that advertising should never be the sole source of revenue for an online business.  In addition to all of the reasons I mentioned previously, there’s another one that’s often overlooked:  bartering advertising.  If your only source of income is ad revenue, you guard each impression as if your life depends on it…you won’t dare trade it because you need to get top dollar for it.

However, if you’ve got another source of revenue (or two or three other sources of revenue) you can barter said advertising to drive more qualified traffic to your site.  Since you’ll likely get only a few dollars for each thousand impressions, a lot of the time advertising is more profitable being bartered with a site that can drive targeted customers looking to buy whatever else you’re offering.

Example:  the large 336×280 that we have on SportsLizard’s home page is shown between 5,000 and 10,000 times each month (the majority of traffic enters the site from pages other than the home page, like the customs section or the price guide).   We used to show AdSense there and get at best $2 CPM.  So on the best of months we’d make $20 from that slot.  Now that slot is occupied by SportsCardFreaks, a sports card forum that we partnered with.  I put their ad on our home page and made an announcement that they are the “official forum” of SportsLizard, and in return they put up an ad for SportsLizard’s Price Guide in their forum.

After about a month, we’re getting just over 1 Premium Account signed up per day from the ads on SportsCardFreaks.  Those users are the *perfect* user for our Price Guide because they’re the “hardcore” collectors. We end up getting a new $5/month sign up EACH DAY by giving up that $20/month spot on our home page.

Just one example, but I bet most sites could benefit from similar thinking.

I got quite a response from my previous post about my issues with online advertising. I was actually quite surprised at people rushing to the defense of using advertising as a primary revenue source. Personally, I think it goes to show just how much “brainwashing” web entrepreneurs of the web2.0/Google AdSense generation have been subjected to. I will never ever say that advertising is a bad way to monetize a site, but I will also never ever say that it’s a good business model to solely rely on advertising revenue for your business (unless you’re a traditional business like magazine, newspaper, and tv…although they even have other revenue models like subscriptions).

ANYWAY, I wanted to bring the Elevator Pitch column from the October 2007 issue of Inc. Magazine to everyone’s attention. Elevator Pitch is one of the many columns that makes Inc. (in my opinion) the best business magazine out there. They give you pertinent info for a company - year founded, employees, 2006 revenue, 2007 projected revenue, location, ownership, how much money they need to grow, etc - and then the founders give a one paragraph “elevator pitch” to three venture capitalists. The venture capitalists then react and give their opinions about the company and the money they are trying to raise.

This month the company way 55-Alive, a social network for baby boomers. By most measures, the new company has been a success: they have been featured on CNBC and other television stations, and in July had 600,000 page views. That is NOT easy to do. However, they rely on advertising for revenue. Despite all of their success, they made $4,000 in 2006 and are only projecting $30,000 in 2007. Nice cash, but for a web success that’s not even enough for one person to live off of. And you’ve got to figure they have at least $10k in expenses (pr, advertising, servers, programmers)…maybe more depending on their marketing.

How hard will it be for them to scale to make money on advertising? Listen to what Jeff Bussgang from IDG Ventures in Boston says:

The Lantzes need about $20 million to get 55-Alive! to the point where it can make real money through advertising. Major advertisers want scale. Anything under a million unique visitors per month doesn’t attract them.

It’s like saying you’re going to start playing basketball and you’re banking on making it to the NBA. The numbers are not in your favor. The sooner young business owners realize this, the faster they’ll build sustainable businesses that have a legitimate chance for success. Now, if 55-Alive ALSO sold products for baby boomers, or offered premium services (maybe align themselves with financial planners specializing in retirement), then an extra $30k from advertising would be fantastic.

There’s no one out there that loves the recent advances on the web more than I do. From a user standpoint, “Web 2.0″ is all about innovative technologies that push the boundaries of the web without costing a cent. From Flickr to MySpace/Facebook, Google Apps, and YouTube, one common denominator is that they are all free. And that’s awesome - if you are a user. But what about if you are a development company? Those rare successes have baited us into thinking that online advertising is a really viable business option. From my experiences, it’s as much fools gold as relying on someone to buy your business out to make a profit.

Our SportsLizard Price Guide is just about to pass the 20,000 registered user mark. For those who don’t know, a free account gives users 3 price searches per day, and for $5/month you can perform unlimited searches and access a few other premium services. 3 searches per day isn’t much - more of a trial than anything you could routinely use if you’re a collector. Truth be told, we only want people using the site that are willing to pay the $5/month.

To date (since May) there have been ~200,000 price searches performed, mostly by Premium Account holders. So why wouldn’t we open the whole thing up and make it free for everyone? We might be approaching 2 million price searches right now, and with that we could sell a lot of advertising. A lot of people think that way (at times I have), but there are a few fundamental flaws with that thinking:

1. It’s not that easy to sell the advertising. Ad networks are OK, but if you want to make more than a few dollars CPM (cost per thousand impressions) you’ll need to sell ads directly. I’ve negotiated quite a bit for SportsLizard with the “best” companies in our industry - many of which have contacted us - and it’s REALLY hard to get that from them. They want cheap ads ($1-$2 CPM) because some other stupid site owner will offer it to them. Never mind that the other site is plastered with ads and the quality of visitor is low and won’t convert to sales for them - they don’t care/aren’t smart enough to draw that conclusion. They just want to buy cheap ads. Which leaves you with two options: cover your site with a crazy amount of ads or stick with ad networks (AdSense, YPN, Value Click, Commission Junction) and earn a few bucks CPM. Think about that - for every THOUSAND impressions of your ads you’re only making $1-$3. That takes a crapload of scaling to become profitable.
2. If you DO scale that to profitability you’ll be massive enough to start dictating higher rates from people - maybe as much as $10 CPM. But scaling to that size means you’ll need millions and millions of visitors each month. And that means you’ll need multiple servers and a larger customer service staff and more programmers…all so you can make money selling ads. That probably requires venture capital or angel investing to scale the company, and you still aren’t guaranteed anything. Getting that kind of traffic is tough.
3. The goal of your site becomes to get people to click away to another site! To keep your advertisers happy, you’ll need to show a high CTR (click through rate) and, if they have a good analytics program, show them that those customers are profitable for them. I don’t ever want to run a site where I encourage people to leave. This is where online ads differ from newspapers and magazines. If you go to your computer and type in the URL you see in a magazine ad, you still have the physical copy in your hand. You’ll probably keep reading at some point. The content still matters. On a website that baits people into clicking, good content can be a hindrance.

Or we could just charge $5/month/user It doesn’t drain our single server. It doesn’t overwhelm us with customer service issues. At 1,000 paying users, which we should reach by the end of the year, we’ll be making $5k/month in recurring revenue. To make that in ad revenue - assuming you get $5 CPM…which is tough - you’d need to generate 1 MILLION ad impressions each month, not to mention handle all sorts of scaling issues.

Something to consider when you decide to start the next big thing. At Pure Adapt, we’ll certainly take our “home run swings” with cool projects that *could* make a lot of money if they blew up, but our core projects are always going to be focused around things that can generate money immediately without extreme scaling and dependence on advertising revenue.