Articles

As the Internet evolves, two things are happening at the same time.

On the one hand everything is seemingly getting slicker, simpler, more elegant and easy to use.  Just think of iPhones and iPads, where children can manipulate applications with the swipe of their fingers and where in a few short minutes an owner of a new device can have it fully configured to check their email, surf the Web, synchronize their calendars and contacts and perform any number of hundreds of thousands of tasks and games with instant app downloads.

On the other hand, the very fact that the hardware is able to be so slick and efficient is as a result of an incredibly complex world of programming, not to mention a totally mind-boggling level of complex interconnectivity.  Behind the slick façade lies the operating system, network protocols, Wi-Fi, ISP accounts, servers and domain names all over the world and armies of the brightest minds of our generation getting paid stupendous salaries to make sure that it all works.

So when users experience the ‘front-end’ of this phenomenon, even though they may still encounter glitches and issues and varying standards of quality between Websites and apps, connections and configurations, one definitely gets a general feeling of satisfaction and ease.  This is starkly apparent if you look back 10 or 15 years and recall the days of having to insert modem strings to make your connection work, pouring through untold other settings and crossing your fingers in the hope that it all hangs together, and once you got online, on your big old chunky computer with an 800x600 pixel resolution screen, having what could only be described as a mediocre experience on most Websites.  We have definitely come a long way.  HD video streaming, facebook updates, Soundcloud uploading and checking Google Analytics from bed while the office computer magically backs itself up without you even thinking is a pretty nice place to be.

Herein lies the paradox.  When a business owner decides to switch from being a user of the Internet today and get involved as a producer, things take on a radically different dimension.  Suddenly they are entering the world of the technology that runs everything.  They enter this world with the mind of a user, often believing that what goes on behind the curtains is just as elegant and simple as what goes on onstage.  It is a forgivable delusion, but it is still a delusion.  Sure, there are products and services out there that enable people to set up basic Websites without any technical knowhow, and sure there are plenty of business tools available that are relatively straight forward – but almost always, the business owner ends up requiring customisations and integrations that immediately put them out of their depth in the technology whirlpool.

Elegance at the front-end involves a great deal of planning, strategy and architecture in the back-end, not to mention a consistent content creation process, to ensure all the text and images are formatted and fitting the layout and style of the delivery medium.  Websites now need to work on desktops, mobile devices of all shapes and screen sizes, as well as tablets and even televisions.

Interactions and integrations between Websites and social media platforms are becoming commonplace, yet each one requires a certain level of control to ensure it is doing what the business owner wants it to do.  Websites are not just information resources any more.  They need to engage, call for action and response, share information from diverse locations, provide downloads or even videos, podcasts and webinars.  They might require logins to secure areas, track usage, charge for access to certain files, hook into third party systems, allow subscription and account management or any number of other functions – all seamlessly and elegantly, as if the entire thing was dreamed up by Steve Jobs himself.

The bottom line is the bottom line – all of this takes time and costs money and is almost always unable to be done to a satisfactory level by a business owner, as it requires high levels of programming expertise and understanding.  More and more we are receiving enquiries from prospective clients who are coming to us having seen all kinds of amazing things online and wanting to do those amazing things themselves.  Almost without fail, their expectation of what is involved to make things happen is completely out of alignment with what is really involved.  They cite Websites that might have cost $200,000 to launch and a further $500,000 a year in staff salaries and overheads to maintain, yet they expect that this could be achieved by one person for under $10,000 and half an hour of dabbling on the weekend.

This is the paradox: The more elegant and awesome the Internet becomes to the end user, the easier everyone thinks it must be to get involved, when in fact it is becoming more and more complex and more epic a challenge to create a real successful online presence.

It doesn’t help when we are being told by companies offering cookie-cutter solutions or simple package deals that you can do anything you ever dreamed of online for $15 a month!  These people never seem to tell you what the limitations are, just that the product or service is totally amazing.

There are two ways to go here – 1) Accept the paradox, accept a compromise and make the most of what you have got in terms of money, time and tools or 2) Accept the paradox and plan your business accordingly with sufficient capital and resources to achieve what you hope to achieve.

If you ignore the paradox, you ignore it at your peril.  Making everything look so easy is not so easy at all.

By Stefan Sojka

In the age of ideas, creativity might be a little overrated.

I’ve been suffering a bit of performance anxiety lately, when it comes to creativity.  It seems everywhere I look I am being told to unleash my creativity, ‘Think Different’, stand out in a crowd and think outside the square.  It’s like I am not a complete person unless I can revolutionise an entire industry, transform society or claim responsibility for one of those emails with all the Photoshopped animals morphing into vegetables.

What makes it worse is that I am bombarded daily with thousands of examples of other people doing just that; effortlessly manifesting their creative genius and splashing it all over my screen.  My own inadequacies are being hammered home with every news story about the latest viral sensation, dot-com billionaire and amazingly simple but absolutely brilliant business ideas I wish I had thought of.  Then comes the slick new gadget advert, telling me that it has unlimited potential in my hands, if only I will buy it and swipe my fingers all over it.

If I zoom in, however, I find a slightly different story.  Sure, there seems to be an explosion of creativity on the planet, but it is being done by millions of different people – each individual only coming up with a tiny sliver of inventiveness, if not simply recreating what already was and giving it a slight twist.

Most apparently brilliant ideas are just rehashed and adapted versions of what already was.  Before FaceBook, there was MySpace and before Twitter, there was SMS.  People were uploading videos of themselves doing all kinds of things, way before YouTube came along.  Look at all the latest design trends in the so-called ‘creative industries’.  The same design themes and styles are popping up everywhere.  Musically, there hasn’t been a song like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in the charts for over 30 years... despite the ridiculously powerful creative tools everyone has had at their disposal recently.

Perhaps that old adage about 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration is true.  Thinking outside the square is not something to be done that frequently.  In fact the more time I’ve spent in creative La-La Land, the less actual work I got done and the harder life became.  I have to fight that urge (and all those marketing messages) to be more creative than everyone else in the entire world and focus on getting stuff done.  Who knows, that might just leave me relaxed and comfortable enough, one magical moonlit evening, to allow that 1% spark to kick in.

Small business, particularly online business, depends so much on mundane activities to prosper; technical implementation, keyword analysis and optimisation, mailing list management, spreadsheets, link building, regular maintenance and updating, proof reading, file management, administration and processing…. you couldn’t be any more ‘inside the square’ by renaming 100 photos from DSC0003456.jpg to keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.jpg, but that’s what has to be done.

As I surrender to this mechanical reality of my day-to-day life, I am actually enjoying the process of building the systems, habits and infrastructures I neglected when I believed being creative was the only way to go.  Now I am not only freer to be more creative in my down time, but I am much more prepared to do something with my ideas when I get them.

I can also do what all the other ‘creatives’ have been doing for centuries; borrowing and adapting from those around them who continue to be seduced by the enticing and rather unproductive realm that exists outside my humble – but very effective – little square.

By Stefan Sojka

Don’t throw the real baby out with the virtual bathwater.

There is something about online business that tends to set us up for a huge amount of misaligned expectations.  With everything just one click away, the hidden complexities of Web functionality lead people to believe that it all happens auto-magically.  Some coder just copy-pasted in a few lines of recycled PHP and ‘whammo!’…instant global success story!  I have had people seriously enquire about replicating eBay and/or FaceBook for $5K and honestly believing that should do the trick.

It’s kind of understandable.  Most of the hard work is hidden in scripts and files and thanks to the limitless talent of a planet full of awesome GUI designers, everything looks so slick, clean and simple.  The Internet is the most complex entity in the known Universe, yet its astounding success is due to its belying simplicity.   If it didn’t look and feel easy to use, it would still to this day remain the bastion of computer scientists, hackers and brainiacs.

As a business owner, I still need to contend with the complexities.  If my business model is almost exclusively an online model, such as selling downloadable software, I am going to need a team of coders on hand to manage the high level of sophistication involved; security, functionality, payment, membership management.  Imagine; a Website as deceptively lightweight as Twitter requires 140 employees to keep it running – at a loss!

The big growth area now seems to be hybrid businesses, with one foot in the online space and one foot in the real world.  Think of pizza delivery.  You need a complex online system to manage and process customer orders and an efficient off-line operation to get the pizza to my door within 30 minutes.  Similarly, sites like Groupon rely enormously on the online component delivering deals and getting online exposure to billions of users, but without the real-world participating businesses delivering on those great offers, Groupon’s image could turn sour real fast.

Then there are your businesses that most of us are engaged in, that operate primarily in reality but use the Web to promote products/services and attract new business.  Even the simplest of “brochure-ware” sites need to be created to a high standard to reflect the quality of the business and to have some basic technical expertise applied, even if it is just for contact forms, updating content and measuring the site’s performance.

There is no avoiding the fact that I have to get the technical stuff right.  But what will really make or break the operation is everything else.  If I expect that the code will magically solve all my business problems and make me an overnight squillionaire, it will be at my peril.  Technology alone will not cut it.  Why does software keep on getting upgraded?  Because it will never be perfect.  It’s what we do with it and how we integrate it into our business that counts.

Here’s what I focus on; customer service, communication, quality control, administration systems and processes, accounts, building relationships with valued associates, ensuring (not assuming) that I am on the same page as my customers, diarizing everything, keeping time-sheets, keeping my desk tidy, my files organized, and my inbox manageable.  You know, all the stuff that prevents my life and business from descending into a chaotic nightmare and will only get worse the more things grow.

Every business now must have a layer of technology surrounding it and you have to get the right solutions and systems in place.  But as technology pervades our lives and the lives of our competitors, it’s the fundamentals of off-line business practice that will determine our ultimate success.

By Stefan Sojka

The growing global movement to redistribute and reorganize resources presents unlimited untapped entrepreneurial opportunity.

I was defragging my hard drive the other day and it got me thinking – as one does, sitting there staring at a little colour-coded progress bar for three hours – perhaps it’s time to defrag our civilization. If my hard drive runs faster and more efficiently when all its files are organized into nice neat contiguous sectors and clusters, surely there is a big opportunity for improving off-line efficiency if we apply the same process.

Defragging is going on all around us already, of course; airline ticketing systems, car-pooling, off-peak hot water, express checkout lanes… but we are surrounded by so much complexity and so much inefficiency, that the opportunities are endless.  It’s only a matter of identifying them, then working out clever solutions.

Many of our off-line systems have evolved over hundreds, even thousands of years, including the economy, transportation, communication and our public institutions, often with outmoded rules that have, like the inefficient way data is written onto hard drives, forced us poor humans that are lumbered with them, to endure a mountain of inconvenience and waste.  Within all that inconvenience, some people make out like bandits (think of currency traders, recruitment companies or 1,000 other types of agency), but if we want long-term sustainability, we must look for ways to profit from making things better, not capitalizing on keeping them the same.

Rachael Botsman and Roo Rogers’ eye-opening book “What’s Mine is Yours – The Rise of Collaborative Consumption” documents an online movement of peer-to-peer sharing and reallocating, and identifies the new drivers and motivations that make phenomena like www.airbnb.com and www.zopa.com take off.  The Web not only facilitates better resource and service allocation, but it has built-in personal reward incentives for participants in the form of social interaction, validation and relationship building.

Here are a few of my pet defragging projects I would love to see get up and running:  House-swapping so everyone lives within walking distance of wherever they commute to every morning.  A register for all your unused musical instruments/tools/books/stuff, so needy local kids can drop in and borrow them.  Something (anything!!) that will permanently eliminate the need for filling out forms.  A map/database of unused backyards that can be made available for suburban farming.  A site for locally-based freelance experts who are happy to come to my place and show me how to use all my gadgets and software properly.  Any niche or industry-specific version of existing Websites and businesses, where unused resources and people-power are made available to others.

If only this column was a two-pager, I would keep going!

Everywhere I turn and look, there are systems, processes and things being mismanaged, underutilized or overburdened.  So, put your thinking caps on, register a domain name and start offering your brilliant solution.  No one ever went broke identifying a need and fulfilling it perfectly.  Build in the social media marketing component, so everyone tells everyone else about your idea and you have yourself a start-up!

Before you begin, spend some time checking out what others are doing in this area, try a few sites out that swap things, introduce opportunities, facilitate microloans, sharing, group investing and matchmaking and you’ll find a defragging movement so diverse it almost needs defragging itself!

We might be a fair way off the Utopian vision of Jacque Fresco’s Venus Project – www.thevenusproject.com – where all resource use is optimised by computers, and humans spend all day marveling at how clever we all are, but it’s nice to think we are at least heading in the right direction.  If you look closely, you’ll see the path along the way is paved with fragments of gold.

By Stefan Sojka

The recent 15th birthday celebration of eBay has got me all misty-eyed as I ponder my own 15-year on-line odyssey, the next 15 years and how to reconcile Internet time with the growing awareness of the inevitable limitation of my own human lifespan. 

How old were you when eBay started?  I was in my early 30s.  1995 was the year I first went on-line.  I had a few Internet friends who were in their early 20s who thought I was the ‘old guy’.  Now they are mid 30s, heading on that slippery slope to the big five-0.  Scary, huh?  15 more years and I’ll be a pensioner!  I have nephews who are finishing high school this year, who were just out of nappies when Craigslist, MSN, Yahoo and Match.com were being born.

15 years in human terms is pretty significant; a full demographic shift, a career or two and long enough for your hair to turn grey or disappear.  Yet light from our sun has only traveled as far as the closest 50 star systems in that time – out of a total of 100–400 billion in the Milky Way alone.  15 years is at once an entire generation and the blink of an eye.  Long enough for Google to go from an idea for a PhD project to arguably one of the most influential organisations on the planet, with 22,000 staff and astronomical cash-flow.  Short enough for me to still have to-do lists from 1995 with things still not ticked off!

For a quick flashback to 1995, try this video:  http://waxy.blip.tv/file/752713/

‘Internet Power!’  There were 35–40 million people on-line in ’95 – there are now almost 2 billion.  Average PC RAM storage has increased a thousand-fold.  Interestingly, even though so much seems to have changed, that old video shows that the essential elements of today’s Web were all there back in 1995.  It was slow and clunky, but you could watch video, download music, images, chat, email, upload and download.  Most of the groundwork had been done.  It just took 15 more years of coding and cabling to bring it all to life.

If we take the long view, 15 more years might go just as quickly as the last for you and me, yet the next Google might still be someone’s PhD project.  Yours, perhaps?

While it seems all the great Internet ideas might have already been done, consider Chat Roulette, FourSquare, local start-up, Envato, or the many other start-ups featured in this very publication, who are expanding exponentially with no sign of slowing down.  In fact the more I think about it, and how frustrating many aspects of my on-line life still are these days, the more massive opportunities seem to remain untapped or not even dreamed of.  The next 15 years could make the last 15 look like the dark ages.

To those born in 1995, the Internet-enabled world is the only world they know.  While we email and Google-search for Web pages, they are hard-wired to 3D surround-sound gaming environments already and will no doubt prefer to do business that way, once their parents stop feeding them.

Will we pay bills by stabbing them to death?  Invoice clients by lobbing a hand-grenade at them?  Purchase products by shooting them?  Hire new staff by challenging them to a Kung Fu fight?  It could get very weird...  Or it could go in a completely new direction and catch us all by surprise the way it has done consistently for the last 15 years.

Whatever happens, I want in.  I’ve got at least 15 good years left in me.  Come on kids, 2025 is just around the corner – let’s get busy!

By Stefan Sojka

Ever since I was conceived I have been producing data.  My mother’s doctor began by taking notes when she saw him about her morning sickness.  Even before that I was generating information that back in the 60s nobody was tracking; new genetic code strings, physical trajectories, chemical changes I was inducing in my mother, measurable rates of cell division, numbers, mathematical patterns, nutrient levels…

Upon my delivery, hospital records were created and the government collected a bunch of details for my registration of birth.  From that day forth, everywhere I went I produced and deposited data – data that directly influenced businesses, governments and me.

Every cent I have ever spent generated bookkeeping records and sales figures. My school reports informed education departments and helped them modify curriculums. My census and tax returns impacted (albeit infinitesimally) policy decisions of governments from John Gorton onward. I have filled out surveys, been ticketed, counted, measured, rated, scored, ranked and photographed – and that was all before the advent of the digital age!

Now, it is getting ridiculous. Every mouse click is generating log files on my ISP and the stats package of the website I am visiting. Driving my car feeds countless cameras, sensors and toll-paying accounting systems. Shopping with an EFTOPS card provides the supermarket with a rich profile of my diet and lifestyle. With time stamping of every record these days, the whole concept of an alibi is as relevant these days as typewriter ribbon, inkwells and anvils. My data trail is stalking me.

This information is and always has been valuable. Not just to those who have been happily and freely collecting it for their own use or misuse (half the time without my consent or knowledge), but to me, for self-management, self-development and self-control. There is a growing mobilization of citizens who are waking up to this. Information is power, as they say, so the best place to start getting empowered is with the information I create.

www.quantifiedself.com is a community of users and toolmakers, who see the value in self-tracking, from health benefits, to better life-decisions, to sheer fascination and fun. www.personalinformatics.org is a wellspring of tools designed to harness human-generated data. Programs like www.patientslikeme.com are achieving phenomenal results by crowd-collating medical information to discover optimal treatments for a wide range of conditions that no clinical trial could have possibly figured out.

Here’s a tip; there are going to be huge opportunities for businesses who can offer services to help people manage all this newly collected personal information; aggregating, packaging, on-selling, interpreting, analyzing and providing tools to help us change our own numbers for health, wealth and happiness. It’s already happening, so strap on your data collection devices, put on your thinking cap and find new ways to share, manage and feed back this infinite data set of our lives back to us.

New paradigms will arise, questioning such things as how to control copyright of the data we produce, how to collect royalties from those who are already using our data for their own benefit and what risk we face, producing information that somebody doesn’t like, or would like to use against us. All of this screams opportunity to me; opportunity to learn, grow, evolve and self-actuate in a way that was unthinkable all those years ago. It’s data mining time!

By Stefan Sojka

With the phenomenal successes of FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, etc., it's easy to ignore failure as one of the critical factors in their journey and the journey of their also-ran counterparts.

Oh, for a time machine!  I would travel back to 1995 and register facebook.com, twitter.com, youtube.com, myspace.com and a hundred other domain names – I'd be a trillionaire!  Reminds me of a friend of mine who was offered a few acres of beachfront property in Byron Bay back in the 70s for $8,000 – who would have known, eh?

One of the most fascinating universal ironies is how utterly unpredictable the future seems to be, yet as soon as the future glides on through the present and cements itself into the past, hindsight turns all those uncertainties into the bleeding obvious and convinces us that we could have predicted it all, if only we'd kicked ourselves.

It doesn't help when everyone who achieves astronomical success goes around telling us in their smarmy autobiographies that it all turned out just as they expected, thanks to their brilliant talent and superhuman level of dedication and determination.  What we forget is that all the losers would say exactly the same thing, if things had turned out differently for them.

I recently interviewed Aussie Internet entrepreneur, Collis Ta'eed, who commandeers the burgeoning Envato network.  It was refreshing to hear his answer to "if you could do it all again, what would you do differently", and he replied "I would make all the same mistakes".  He sees his failures as the most important factors in his success.

Success, I think, is actually quite unpredictable.  Sure, you can control many factors; you can work hard, make smart choices and respond well to hiccoughs, but there is always the element of chance that the losers will always blame and the winners will pretend was part of their plan.

I guess the first rule is to just keep going, regardless, ready for the next stroke of luck to land in my lap.  Through all my failures and hard-knock schooling, I'll be all the more prepared this time.

Life is like a game of Tetris (sorry Mr Gump).  The possibilities come cascading towards us as we madly try to exert whatever limited control we have on the outcome.  We miss a few, but somehow we are given more opportunity to connect another line and catch up.  The more mistakes we make, the better we get at the game.  By game over, we've left a trail of success and failure, achievement and regret, in, let's face it, fairly equal measure.

While Facebook and Twitter ride the crest of a massive wave, their reign is never assured and there are tens of thousands of start-ups like yours and mine, thrashing out our intentions every day, stumbling, falling, dusting ourselves off and getting back out there.  We've probably all got 100 domain names registered and our eye on some land half-way across the Nullabor that will one day be the main street of a megacity.  We're failing every day – and creeping ever closer to our destiny.

The first thing to do with any one of those 100 domain names is to just start.  As James Cameron said "failure is always an option, but fear is not."

By Stefan Sojka

The Web is increasingly my go-to place for everything; advice, support, intel and inspiration.  Is my traditional bull-dust detector up for the task of discerning what’s good for me?

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times (I can feel a novel coming on... dammit, I’ve only got 500 words!)  The world seems to be plunging ever deeper into chaos and crisis at precisely the same time as mind-boggling scientific breakthroughs are occurring.  Financial, social and economic disasters abound, while the Internet explodes with individuals and orgs purporting to have all the answers.

Pre-Web, there weren’t many people to turn to in times of need.  My solicitor?  Priest?  MP?  GP?  Bank manager?  Now every ‘consultant’, ‘expert’ and ‘coach’ is Twittering and blogging their personal contribution to solving my problems and creating my (their) Utopian future.

The problem Web-based advice and information is that there are a few additional dimensions that affect both the advice itself, the delivery of it and my perception of its usefulness.

Like, do I not trust someone just because they haven’t got time to update their Website regularly?  Or, if some ‘guru’ or other is highly active online and seems to have a lot of followers, sponsors and links all over the place, does that make what they have to say any more credible?  Does my style-over-substance sensibility dismiss an expert’s proposition out-of-hand because his/her site looks like crap?  Do I not even bother to read it, because it has no fancy graphics, bullet points and roll-over effects?

I need to keep a few extra wits about me, now that new media carries the message.  The simple task of discerning anything of value in amongst the sheer volume of information is a daunting one.  Judgment criteria go way beyond the content:

How did I find it in the first place?  A lot of sites get traffic thanks to nothing more than their search engine friendliness.  Google, Bing and Co. are working ever harder to bring you quality results, but they are a long way off passing too many value judgments and opinions on the links they deliver.

Is the self-appointed ‘opinion leader’ a sycophant who is just very good at recruiting followers through powers of persuasion, rather than the substance of their message?  It’s amazing what a blogger can cook up with a teaspoon of fawning and a few cups of self-aggrandisement.

Are they literate?  Even in today’s wrld of txting & ROFLMAOing, I maintain that someone with a reasonable command of the Queen’s English probably has most of their other faculties intact as well.

Is the thinking part of a groundswell?  Ideas whose times have come tend to pop up independently in multiple locations.  The best way forward is most likely going to be through ideas that many people are now beginning to expound, rather than one nutter banging on with his/her manifesto.  Does anyone agree with me here?  Oh the irony!  This is your NETT nutter, signing off for another month...

By Stefan Sojka

The real and the virtual are gradually assimilating.  Ones and zeros are bridging the cyber-divide and exploring the molecular world.  As the Web gets its bearings in my world, my own global repositioning has begun.

Are we logging on to the Internet, or is the Web logging on to us?  Think about it, we created this giant network of computers and installed trillions of lines of code so it would work for us, entertain and inform us, but what has happened?

That same code is providing this global super-cortex with far more intel than we are getting back.  ‘It’, in cahoots with its equally non-biological corporate entity agents, has enticed an entire generation of the world’s most brilliant minds to work for It, building tools such as Google Analytics, Insights and Earth, so that It can absorb everything about the real world.

Every keystroke and mouse click we make gives It more knowledge.  It not only knows our every thought and desire, which we happily (or foolishly) divulge, but It increasingly knows where we are (thank you, GPS) and is gathering, with the help of an army of nerdy data-uploaders, a stupendous amount of insight about everything that we are doing on – and to – this planet.

Does It have a plan?  What is It thinking?  I know what you’re thinking… “don’t be ridiculous, it’s not thinking anything, it’s not alive, it’s the Internet.”  Well, It’s equally as complex as your brain, so… you’re not alive, huh?

I’ve been entranced by the Web since the beginning.  I have gleefully amassed as many devices as I can to get myself Hi-Def, Hi-Fi, wide-screen access to cyberspace, without realising just how Hi-Def the Internet is experiencing me.

After 2 decades, I’m still accessing It through a typewriter, a mouse and a barely adequate 2D screen.  It is accessing my molecular world using nearly 2 billion super-computers (our brains), wired up with mega-HD stereo cameras (our eyes), holophonic stereo microphones (ears), smell-o-rama and taste-o-matic nano-tech chemical receptor nodes and a 2 square metre touch-sensitive control panel, with a few built-in ultra-sensitive regions.

I am a walking, talking input device and the Web is using me to fill its dreams and memories.

Perhaps this is meant to be symbiosis, and I'm just not getting my fair share.  If it is symbiotic (sym-biotech-tic? Ouch!), here’s what I ought to do; keep feeding the beast as I have been AND start sucking out and using as much of that data as I can for humanity’s benefit.

By Stefan Sojka

Online advertising is booming.  The more people click, the more hungry business becomes for the eyeballs (and wallets) of the clickees.  This is the fattest cash cow on the planet.

I love Wikipedia – not only does it give me great info to fuel my column with excellent pages like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising, but it is non-profit and has no advertising on it.  Unfortunately, commercial reality dictates that Wikipedia will remain an extremely rare species.  Our future is destined to be paved with clicks of gold.

Google is by far the biggest player, with about 70% of the total on-line ad market – which works out to be about 400 gazillion dollars, enough to etch their logo on the sun, send a team of programmers to Andromeda to explore new markets and save the Google Earth on google.org.  They are the biggest for good reason – their system is very good.  It gives advertisers more control than anybody else, more reach into huge search and content markets and an ever-improving delivery of relevant ads to Web users as they refine their system.  Google’s search behaviour statistics get cumulatively refined at a rate of a few billion facts a day.

Web users want to find stuff and businesses want to be found.  It’s the perfect scenario… in theory.  The truth is that there is still a long way to go before clicks and sales are perfectly in sync.  Anyone who has used advertising programs knows that only a small proportion of the original search traffic converts into sales – and when you are bidding for every click, that can get a little scary at times.

So here is a brief glossary of on-line advertising terms to help you maintain your sense of humour while things evolve:

Auto-Bidding – Letting two computers – yours and your competitor’s – play poker with your credit cards.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – How many people accidentally clicked on your advert.

Bounce Rate – How many people realised it was an accident and hit their back-button… AFTER you paid for their click.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC) – How desperate you and your competitors are for business.  (I once saw a CPC for search term “mortgage” at $180 – for ONE CLICK!)

Return on Investment (ROI) – Putting your credit card statement and cheque account statement side by side and seeing which is bigger.

Page Rank (PR) – Discovering how insignificant you are compared to Apple, YouTube and get.adobe.com/reader

The reality is that on-line advertising can work spectacularly well.  Inefficient as it might be at times, it is far more targeted than mass media.  It is getting ever more sophisticated, especially when you consider sites like FaceBook.  They know everything about you and can serve you an advert for “getting ripped in 4 weeks without exercise” the moment you update your status to “man, that all-you-can-eat buffet was awesome!”
Maybe it will all get too hard for small business, who simply can’t afford the rising click costs or the time to devote to learning the schemes and systems required to capitalise effectively on all this paid traffic.  Perhaps it’s time to get back to our marketing roots – old school.  A giant inflatable gorilla, a sandwich board and bullhorn!