Finally - we’ve expanded iBegin Source into Canada.

The iBegin Blog covers the details of the update.

We are likely going to settle on US & Canada for now, though we are definitely still gathering information on other English-speaking countries (UK, Australia, NZ). While I wouldn’t expect anything for a while - don’t think we’re happy to rest on our laurels with just US and Canada.

So - one of the sites we run is CSS Top Sites. Sort of a side-thing (consider it an experiment), we have an automated checker that makes sure that sites are using our HTML code properly - 1. That it includes the link back (isn’t just an image) and 2. That it isn’t using CSS to hide it.

So lo and behold the latest example was GeniuneStyle.net. In the footer was only the image, encapsulated in a div that made it invisible. People are so wonderful. So the system sent him an automated-strongly worded email about how if he wants to use our service, he better include the link back and make it visible.

As most do he removed the HTML without a single peep. Some apologize, but most (being the self-entitled people they are) simply remove the HTML, shamed at being caught.

But today I Just got an email from him. Not any regular email - a mass mail. A mass mail littered with typos (eg ‘If your message was sent’ - missing letter bolded). And not only that - he had the temerity to include everyone’s email in the To field. Now I have a list of people to spam - excellent!

And so our good friend Chris Vincent provides us a nice laundry list of things not to do:

• Use another site’s services but modify the HTML for your own needs.
• When busted - man-up and admit you screwed up.
• Sending a mass email to someone that you were basically bilking for traffic.
• Have typos littering your mass mail.
• Having everyone’s email in the To field for easy email-list generation.

I have of course emailed him this post and look forward to his thoughts.

So I read that Snap is going to be monetizing their (annoying) website preview pop-up.

What caught me eye was the following (emphasis added):

Snap.com has over 2,000,000 Web site operators, bloggers and individual Web surfers currently using Snap Shots served via a webpage or browser. The Snap Shots service is used approximately 15 million times daily

That makes no sense. You have 2 million websites and people who have installed Snap Shots. Yet they generate a total of 15 million hits a day? So in 24 hours, each user and/or website generates a total of 7.5 pageviews? How the hell does that work!

To clarify - if I was a user, I would expect to visit at least 50 pages a day. That means I would use it 50 times in one day. If I was operating a website and people could use it on that, I would expect at least … 50 pageviews per day (on my site). How can a base of 2 million generate only 15 million views?

To give a sense of ration between sites and pageviews - Blog Flux Topsites has 18,284 active sites using the list. Yesterday, they generated 4.78 million pageviews.

So either the 15 million should be 15 billion - or something is way off.

Interesting - just read about this in the Wall Street Journal - IAC (owners of Citysearch are looking to split the company into 5 separate parts. For those that don’t have a subscription, the five parts will be:

• IAC - Ask.com, Citysearch, IAC Advertising Solutions, Evite, iWon, My Way, Match.com; CollegeHumor, GarageGames, Gifts.com
• HSN - HSN TV, hsn.com, Cornerstone Brands
• Ticketmaster
• Interval International
• LendingTree

“We’ve been a complex enterprise almost from the very beginning 12 years ago, with hundreds of transactions over those years. And while we’ve created a lot of value, I’ve always believed our complexity and many mouthfuls of sentences to explain who we are and what our strategy is have hampered clarity and understanding with all our constituencies, particularly investors,” Mr. Diller said in a statement.

The spin off would happen in Q3 3008.

This is an interesting move to me - by a lot of accounts, Ask.com, even with its $100 million campaign, wasn’t making much of a difference in the only category that matters - generating money. I wonder how this will affect Citysearch.

We’ve been slaving over this for months - but we finally finished the category work on iBegin Source.

I’ll admit (for current and future clients) - we screwed up a bit. While the ‘business listing’ <---> ‘category’ relationship was accurate, the actual category names were slightly off. A common issue was sometimes we had a category end with ‘(Manufacturers)’ and other times ‘ - Manufacturers’ and other times ‘ - Manufacturing’. All three were the same, but the lack of normalization was an issue we made a mistake on.

It has taken a while, but it is finally ready for consumption. I’ll be sending out a mass-email tomorrow, but for current (and future) clients, the important links:

Category updates: Old » New
Raw list of category updates
New master list of categories

We started off with 11,094 categories, and ended up with 10,432. 662 categories merged into existing categories - a 6% reduction. A total of 5177 categories were affected (though this does include minor tweaks like the above mentioned ‘(Manufacturers)’ vs ‘ - Manufacturers’.

This is of course the start. While the databases are primed to support both the old and new category format simultaneously, we will have to modify the system to properly accomodate and generate files for each. And then we have to start selling the Canadian data. And work on super-categories. And sell super-categories. And re-design iBegin Source homepage. And move the listings to www.ibegin.com [so that source.ibegin.com = info on business data, and www.ibegin.com = actual listings]. All while continually improving our data (normalizations, franchise-lists, franchise info, listings from professional organizations and associations, etc).

Fun

I thought I would mention it because I’ve mentioned it before (in regards to targeting). Plus it fits in with my latest post.

The one thing that burns super-bright in my head - liquidity. Having cash on hand is just plain useful. You could have a deal with massive company X and giant company Y, but without the liquidity to make it happen, what is the use?

The other thing that I think a lot about is opportunity cost. If I have a site that makes me $100 a month - and I sell it for $3000 - which is the better deal? Having a steady (yet extremely unspectacular) source of money, or having the cash today (which could, over those 30 months, make you a lot more).

The past month was the best month for this site. It did 1399 pageviews, it generated $205.41 dollars (yep a CPM of $146.82), and I sold it for a nice 31x monthly at $6500.

Both of us are happy. The buyer is building up a collection of content-websites (he has bought about two-dozen from us already). I’m pushing that money back into our other larger projects (which should generate a lot more money within those 31 months).

The site has been steady from day one - Google sends it a nice chunk of traffic. But there is no way to guarantee that traffic won’t go down (or in last month’s case - go up). So it still is a calculated risk on behalf of my buyer - and I decided I would rather have the liquidity today and ‘invest’ in it than waiting for its slow return.

So something to think about - you may have sites generating revenue, but you might be better off selling them and creating something else. The other lesson of course is don’t get hung up on traffic too much - $200 dollars from <1500 pageviews is nothing to sneeze at.

b Feed Me, Celebrific, Blogging Pro, Forever Geek, and Filmsy are no longer owned by Bloggy Network LLC - they are now part of Splashpress. Check out the press release.

I’ve talked about one of our strengths being our diversity - so why sell the blogs?

Quite a few reasons:

1. Blog Flux. It “holy shit this could be huge” excites me. 95,000 [approved] blogs. Alexa in the top 5k. Over 145,000 registered users. Yahoo says 4.4+ million backlinks, Google [sitemaps] says 4.8+ million backlinks. Blog Top Sites has tracked over 1.25 billion pageviews - in under a year!

   This site oozes potential. It has traffic. It has a base. It makes money. What it doesn’t have is a coherent plan to take it to the next level (10+ million backlinks, 500k+ registered users, sub-1000 Alexa). Part of the problem has been time. Our biggest blogs (being the biggest) required considerable effort and time on our end to maintain. Selling them frees us from that. At the same time, the sale provided us with …

2. Liquidity. Cash is the life blood of any business. We are self-funded. Yes Enthropia Inc itself is strongly in the black. Yes we have money that could continue to fund Bloggy Network’s growth. But I already helped fund the creation of BN. Two years in, it’s time for the company to start standing on its own. There is a reason it is its own LLC and not a subsidiary of Enthropia Inc. So the sale provides us with a good liquidity boost as we re-focus on Blog Flux.

3. Resources. Related to liquidity - Gawker and Weblogs Inc got in early, so they got all the press. Since then there have been only two blog networks really worth noting - b5 Media, and Splashpress (who bought the blogs). b5 is VC funded, and Splashpress has its own pool of money. Competing versus that is hard. You have to be realistic. We have our strengths - our fantastic web design department and Blog Flux. Few others can claim such a combo (I can’t think of a single site that competes directly with Blog Flux). So we put our full effort into our unique offerings. Best bang for the buck.

4. Personnel. No doubt about it, the people you have determine how well you do. We had a project recently fall into our lap that was just too good to pass on (it is related to local - and no detail is public yet). So one of our programmers is moving to that. Another blogger (who was the primary writer on b Feed Me, Celebrific, and Filmsy) was promoted. Michael (who wrote primarily on Apple Gazette and Forever Geek was promoted to run our city-blog network: is My Home. And since his passion was Apple, Forever Geek was the odd man out. And they wanted David [to deal with the technical issues - their weak point]. A good fit for David too - he was close to their Performancing team, and the blog he ran was Blogging Pro. All this movement created a huge headache for us - finding good capable bloggers. The simple solution was to move on.

It’s a win-win for both. Splashpress gets some high quality blogs with real loyal followings. We get to stay small and focus on what we think will yield the biggest bang for the buck.

It’s Halloween today, which means I’m busy gorging on the chocolate we are suppoused to be giving out [those Twix are so delicious].

With user accounts as hundreds of sites (I’m sure we can all attest to that) - ‘forgot password’ is a process I go through again. So - pick on Compete again - email addresses are easy to get to. If I put in my email address - you shouldn’t reset the password immediately. You should make sure it is the right user by sending a ‘click this link’ request to that email.

Simple usability stuff like this boggles my mind. I know Aaron likes Compete - time to reset his password ceaselessly

[I’m kidding, don’t actually screw with other people’s passwords. Just a dumb move by Compete]

I had also promised some stats on releasing freebie themes - that is delayed until next week (we have a decent-sized announcement tomorrow).

One of the first things I was taught in Discrete Math in university was that just because b happens after a does not mean a caused b.

So when I saw Matt trumpeting that by removing sponsored themes, he had saved newbie bloggers - I shook my head.

Countless blogs could have been penalized just for the theme they were using, not related to anything they did or did not do on their blog. It was a tough decision at the time, it probably drew more criticism and personal attacks against me than anything we’ve done before, but time has proved us right.

1. Beyond the smug factor, the FUD being spread is insane. There is absolutely no proof that having a sponsored theme would make you rank lower (and point #4 proves the opposite). Or de-ranked. Or anything of that sort. The usage of ‘could‘ is a nice touch - reminds me of Fox News with their ‘?’ after every preposterous idea. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt - you hit all three letters of FUD here Matt.

2. From anecdotal evidence from sites my friends operate that did get dinged (not a single one of our sites got dinged), the only thing that got ‘hurt’ was PageRank. The actual amount of traffic going to these sites has remained the same. It is obvious that lowering the PageRank was to simply hurt text sales. So - if a blogger downloaded a sponsored them, liked it, used it, and lost no traffic (other than the public value of PR) - what is the problem again? The perceived ‘penalized’ problem that has no basis in reality?

3. Sites like Engadget got hit. That is a heavyweight site that pushes a ton of traffic (we get comscore numbers). Even niche but high-pagerank sites like Daring Fireball got hit. So where do Engadget and DF fit into the schema of ‘paid links’? Obviously they don’t - this update was more than just ‘having a link in the footer’

4. No better data to look at than blogs using our themes we’ve released for free. We have released five wordpress themes for free, with every single one getting a ton of accolades (all of them have been converted to other blogging platforms by end-users). Each of our themes has a link to Design Disease (our webdesign arm) + another site. Our license requires you keep the link to Design Disease, but you may remove the secondary link. About 95% of people keep the secondary link. Looking over stats on blogs using our themes (over 1000), less than 1% had a PageRank drop (of which a few of them I am sure had a PR drop coming regardless of ’sponsored links’). I guess the ‘less than 1% of blogs affected’ needed Matt’s help there.

I would hope someone like Matt in his position would be a bit more responsible with his comments. I thought he was above FUD.

Update: My favorite two quotes in the comments:

IMO it best if theme designer used microid,rdf or cc-publisher etc .. as signature for their work.

-chaoskaizer

This coming from someone using our Illacrimo theme and not linking back (as required).

And again:

Well, i’m against sponsored themes but not so with paid links. Paid links can be a good side income for web publishers, why penalize that?

-Young Engineer

And this guy is ripping off our Blogging Pro theme.

Two people whining about sponsored themes (in just one blog post), and both of them stealing our themes. I like how moral-superiority can be so hypocritical.

Update 2: My post tomorrow should be on our own results on giving away quality free themes. Mind you - quality is the key word here.

For those that read TechCrunch, you are obviously aware of the ugly infestation that is Crunch Base.

The idea is simple - while TechCrunch covers the news, Crunch Base is where they keep persistent profiles on each company. This profile includes investors, revenue, press releases, etc. A decent idea. But what TechCrunch decided to do was every time a company name was mentioned, it linked to the Crunch Base site (instead of directly to the company).

Now there would be a simple solution to this - every time a company was mentioned, link to it directly, and then have a ‘(profile)’ link after it. But the dirty little secret was that it was a no-go due to search engines. Most of Crunch Base’s traffic is from people searching for company names. Linking using ‘(profile)’ wouldn’t give it the linkjuice it needed. I just bought a search analysis for Crunch Base on Compete.com - and other than their own brand being #1, all of the other traffic-generating keywords were company names. Point proven.

But there was a lot of angry feedback. People were not happy. So they created a widget. While you read the blog post, you would also see information on each company. You can also minimize it so that you never have to see it again. Good idea.

The problem of course is that the underlying HTML still contains links (for search engine purposes) to Crunch Base. Not that I find anything wrong with. Except that it absolutely uglifies the RSS feed.

Thankfully, there is a simple solution. Add tags around the widget HTML. Then create a WP hack that makes sure none of the HTML in between appears in the RSS feed.

Voila! This way TechCrunch gives its (well-deserved) SEO juice to Crunch Base, all while sparing their RSS readers the HTML eye sore.