My wife pointed out after being told my argument in this post, that I’ve been asking to be paid in equity rather than cash for years. This is true. I’m reminded of the difference between investing and speculating, as explained by a trader friend: if you make money it’s investing, if you lose money it’s […]

Henry Blodget, who is pretty damn smart, thinks that the mortgage mess will impact online ad spend. Worth a read. I believe that the mortgage lenders will advertise less. But I think that means that they put their marketing dollars into buying leads. This means the lead generators advertise more. Since lead generators are too […]

A couple of weeks ago I advised businesspeople to focus on their strengths and not get into their customers’ businesses. I was thinking–because this is the situation that presents itself to me most frequently–of marketers, really good professional services people, deciding that the real money is in owning a piece of the product they are […]

I’ve been viewing from afar the reactions to Mark Cuban’s post about the Internet Being Dead and Boring after reading Fred Wilson’s opinion to the contrary. I didn’t really have much to say about this, and I sort of agreed with Fred and hated saying so because I’m jealous that he got to see Wilco […]

People keep asking me what I think happens to the mortgage lead generation business in the long-anticipated chaos that is the mortgage business today. For those of you living in bubbles (how’s the resale price of those holding up, btw?) the mortgage lead gen business has made plenty of hay in the last few years […]

My friend Greg Yardley asks “What happens … if due to the increased effectiveness of targeted advertising, we all experience a sudden uptick in the things we want?” It’s an interesting question. First, let’s stipulate that no one has any more money to spend than they already do (the Bureau of Economic Analysis shows the […]

I was having lunch yesterday with Candice and Josh G. (I have to mention it’s Josh G, because if it were Josh R the conversation would have been shorter and more definitive.) Candice brought up a company she knew that was building a marketplace for a certain type of information. The plan is to auction […]

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Citigroup, Bank of America Corp. and three other top banks took the rare step of borrowing more than $2 billion total from the U.S. Federal Reserve … in a bid to reassure markets and remove the stigma of getting short-term financing from the central bank… Borrowing money directly from the Fed […]

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article titled “Hot Online Marketing Niche Cools Fast” about the Valueclick earnings miss. Aside from proving my point about the NY Post being the only source of business news (their vastly similar article was published more than two weeks ago), the article tars everyone in the industry with the […]

I know everyone else is pointing to Dan Lyon’s stupid article about bloggers now that he’s been unmasked as Fake Steve Jobs. Personally, I think it’s an unusual coincidence that the Forbes writer I associate most with being a cheerleader for SCO’s ridiculous legal shakedown of Linux vendors has managed to change the subject just […]