The power of compelling
Wired column on World of Warcraft’s diabolical new affiliate marketing scheme:
So, to sum up: If you get one of your friends to shell out for two months of Warcraft, your character will get to ride a completely cosmetic zebra with a horn instead of whatever it’s riding now. It’s a sign of Warcraft’s unrelenting brain-grip that this is incredibly compelling.
World of Warcraft’s developers have mastered the unholy art of in-game bribery. They have discovered that players will do any number of stupid, tedious things in order to earn perks that have no effect on the game.
Just this week I’ve been fighting in battlegrounds — special areas where armies clash and 12-year-olds question each other’s sexuality — over and over just for a chance to win a tiny little flying dragon. This dragon doesn’t fight on my behalf or give me powers or anything. He just follows me around. In real life I try to avoid being tailed by parasitic flying creatures, but in the game I seek it out, even though I hate battlegrounds.
Who reads news online?
Wired has a great article that reveals who exactly gets their news online. To sum it up:
The group that relies most on the Internet for news is the youngest at a median age of 35. It is also the smallest, at 13 percent of those polled. Fewer than half of them watch television news on a regular basis. Eighty percent of this group has a college education and they are twice as likely to read an online newspaper than a printed version.
The results show an increasing shift toward online news consumption, but that there is now a sizable group (23%) of a more engaged, sophisticated and well-off people that use both traditional and online sources to get their news…The Pew researchers referred to these people as “integrators”.
Evaluating Clickpass
Today I’ve been researching heavily for my next project. I need to find or create a multi-network sign-in system. By that I mean I want my users to be able to login through a site they already use and love: yahoo, aim, google, facebook, and open id to start. I want something like the login system for popurls.com. Before I jumped into rolling my own solution, I took a seriously hard look at using Clickpass.com. I really have to hand it to the guys behind Clickpass. They’ve made open id easy and mass consumable. Seriously, after trying to use my yahoo open id to login to popurls (and never being able to figure out the right syntax), the thought of not having to know my open id url is a very attractive one. Imagine being able to click the little Clickpass button on a site and being instantly logged in. It’s a beautiful thing. (read on…)
Tips on how to demo your startup
Techcrunch just republished a great article Jason Calacanis wrote on how to demo your startup. Jason’s advice comes from his own experience and from having just sat through 200 company demos for the recent TechCrunch50 conference. Besides the advice for arriving exactly 15 minutes ahead of your meeting (I’m always late, so this means a lot to me), I love his advice on getting to your product demo early:
The longer it takes for you to show your product, the worse your product is. Folks who have a kick-ass product don’t spend five or ten minutes “setting the stage” or “giving the background.” Folks with killer products CAN’T WAIT to show you their product. Their demos start with their homepage and quickly jump into the users experience. If a picture tells a thousand stories, then a product demo tells a million. Show your product immediately, and if you don’t have a product to show don’t take the meeting.
OpenDNS turns crumbs into gold
Recently, Techcrunch did a writeup on the innovative free service offered by OpenDNS. OpenDNS provides a great service to internet surfers, with features like slightly faster surfing and added safety since malware sites are actively filtered. What surprised me is how they make their money. Techcrunch says they currently make about $20,000/day from the 2 million search queries they serve each day. I was curious if that means they rewrite the referral string, stealing search engine referrals from other legitimate referrers like Firefox. In fact, they don’t do that at all. Instead, whenever a user mistypes a domain, or when the legitimate site they’re after is down or not resolving, OpenDNS shows them a “guide page” of helpful related content instead of a browser error screen. What a fantastically brilliant idea, especially since their referral revenue works out to roughly $10cpm. Conclusion: OpenDNS will be huge. Mark my words, they are just getting started.
Tao of Meebo
Scoble has a great article and video on the rise of Meebo, the online chat service aggregator. There are several great tidibits in the video (like what form of advertising works in online chat rooms), but perhaps one of the biggest lessons comes from a commenter named Luc. The lesson? Don’t underestimate the power of being fun and attentive to your community:
I’ve been using meebo from the very beginning, when ICQ was still popular, as an easy way to contact with friends and family from Internet cafes while traveling. I don’t know any of their employees, but I was impressed how friendly they seem, posting little stickies on the meebo desktop, trying to build a community.
