Saul Hansell’s article in the NYT, Why Are iPhone Users Willing to Pay for Content?, tells the obvious part of the story: Apple has created an environment that makes buying digital goods easy and common. With an infrastructure that supports one-click purchases of songs and videos, it was easy to add applications in the same […]
Posts for February 2009
How to Levitate
I was reading Bill Tancer’s book Click last night. I generally hate this sort of book. So practical. But Tancer’s smart and had access to a ton of data, so whatever. At one point, he lists the top ten “how to” queries in the US for the four weeks ending 12/21/2007: 1. How to tie […]
i2pi
My old friend Josh Reich finally launches out on his own with i2pi, a data consultancy. I’ve worked with Josh for some five years now and he has the most analytical firepower of anyone I’ve ever met. Plus he has some really out there geeky hobbies that never cease to amuse me. If you have […]
When I Was
Listened to the Kevin Kelly econtalk podcast the other day. Eh. One thing he said that struck my fancy was from his Edge.org answer to “What Are You Optimistic About?” Moving back into the past has never been easier. Citizens in developing countries can merely walk back to their villages, where they can live with […]
Google Shuts dMarc
I never understood Google buying dMarc, or the price they paid. $102 million up front, with an earnout estimated at more than another $1 billion. The company was a sort of automated rep firm for radio, with about 700 stations in their network and selling primarily remnant inventory for low prices. The idea was solid. […]
Why You Won’t be Able to Reach Me for the Next 150 Hours
Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias pointed to an interview he did for EconTalk. I love Hanson’s stuff, so I downloaded the podcast and listened to it. It was great. The host kept mentioning other big names he had interviewed, so I went back and looked at the archives. It’s a freakin gold mine, even the […]
Is Advertising Good or Bad?
[Edit: If you’re looking for a less academic and more impassioned view on advertising, check out my more recent post, Advertising, the Fallacy of Perfectibility, and the Best Minds of My Generation.] Josh’s curmudgeonly comment on yesterday’s post reminded me of my grandfather saying that advertising is just “a way to convince people to buy things […]
You Don’t Arb Your Friends
I’ve always believed that you can’t pay people money to watch ads. I also believe you can’t pay them to pitch products to their friends, either directly, by endorsing things on social networks or by creating UGC tied to a product-pitch. (I mean, obviously, you can pay them to do these things, but it’s not […]
Self Limbing
Every couple of months I hear a startup pitch how they are going to put the ad agencies out of business. My usual response is along the lines of “have fun with that.” The agency business is not especially big or profitable, as businesses go. By definition, the business is a small fraction the size […]
And then We Approach the Strategic Buyers…
Fortune updates my graph of stock market cap to GDP (they use GNP, but the two are pretty similar.) (Fortune link via Mankiw.) Warren Buffet said “buy at 75%”, about where we are now. What I’d like to know is, why 75%? Looking at the graph, 75% isn’t a great place to invest, historically, except […]