Category Archives: Business & Marketing

Fixing Flickr

Posted on by

Flickr, the photo sharing site, launched in February, 2004. I created my account in May, 2005, and have been a user ever since. I have more than 1,800 photos in my account which isn’t a large number. That’s because I don’t upload every photo I take. I’ve never used Flickr as a “warehouse” for storing photos. I put stuff on Flickr that I want to share, although I tend to use my blog for that these days. My photos have been viewed more than a million times (collectively) but I doubt that’s a big number, comparatively speaking.

For most of its existence, Flickr has been owned by Yahoo! who fucked it up in ways too numerous to mention. Earlier this year Flickr was sold to SmugMug, a paid image sharing, image hosting service, and online video platform. The new owners are making changes and a bunch of the 800,000 Flickr users are freaking out. They’ve been getting unlimited storage for free and in a couple of months that ends. The new limit is 1,000 photos or upgrade to a Pro account for $50 a year. (Which I did back in 2005)

The vast majority of Flickr users are not using the service as a “photo sharing” platform. They’re taking advantage of the free terabyte of storage to warehouse and back-up all of their photos. Fun while it lasted but guess what? Internet companies make changes like this all the time. I think this is a logical move will keep Flickr financially healthy. Others think it will kill the service. Time will tell.

What my Pro account give me under this new plan?

  • One of the many dumb things Yahoo! did was make Flickr subscribers get a Yahoo! account and use that to log into their Flicker account. Cluster. Fuck. That ends soon and we can use any email account to log in.
  • Unlimited storage
  • Ad-free browsing. I would HATE having ads on my Flickr pages
  • Better stats to see which of photos are most viewed. Admittedly not a big deal to me.
  • Better support when I need it.
  • Longer (10 min) videos. Up from 3 minutes.

Free is not a business model. And if a dollar a week is too pricey for you… sorry, Charlie. I’m happy to pay for services I like. For those who aren’t, there are free services like Google Photos.

Thermometer tells company were to advertise

Posted on by
Reply

“This flu season, Clorox paid to license information from Kinsa, a tech start-up that sells internet-connected thermometers that are a far cry from the kind once made with mercury and glass. The thermometers sync up with a smartphone app that allows consumers to track their fevers and symptoms, making it especially attractive to parents of young children. The data showed Clorox which ZIP codes around the country had increases in fevers. The company then directed more ads to those areas, assuming that households there may be in the market for products like its disinfecting wipes.” (New York Times)

What Apple knows about its customers

Posted on by
Reply

A week ago Apple started allowing U.S. users to download all of their data from the company, following a GDPR-mandated feature for EU citizens that launched in May. A friend and long-time Apple user took them up on the offer and after almost a week he got it.

They have a lot of info on me.  Every item I purchased from Apple since 2003.  Every time I called Support.  Every time I had something repaired.  Every survey I replied to and how I answered.  Every app or song I downloaded and the IP address I downloaded it from.  Every time they sent me marketing email and if I opened it and what device I looked at it on.

Honestly, I’m not sure I want to know. Same for Amazon.

25 Dying Professions

Posted on by
Reply

The most satisfying and fulfilling job I ever had was that of small town radio announcer. About a dozen years from the early 70s to the early 80s. We still played vinyl 45s and LPs on turntables. We recorded on magnetic tape. Nobody much cared (within limits) what we said. Looking back, I can see that I was fortunate to catch the tail end of radio’s best years. From Work+Money:

One in 10 of the nation’s 33,202 radio and television announcers are expected to see their jobs disappear by 2026. Consolidation in the industry, as well as increased use of syndicated content, is fueling the decline. There’s also the explosion of streaming music services. More and more listeners prefer that over their local, drive-time disc jockey.

Party DJs however, are seeing an uptick in business with demand for their services projected to grow about six percent by 2026. And they earn about the same – $32,000 – as their on-air counterparts.

I thought radio was a dying profession twenty years ago. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has some interesting data on the profession but, like the article above, they combine radio and TV announcers. I’d like to know how many of each.

GM secretly gathered data on radio listening habits

Posted on by
Reply

Every minute for three months, GM secretly gathered data on 90,000 drivers’ radio-listening habits and locations. (BoingBoing)

On September 12th, GM’s director of global digital transformation Saejin Park gave a presentation to the Association of National Advertisers in which he described how the company had secretly gathered data on the radio-listening habits of 90,000 GM owners in LA and Chicago for three months in 2017, tracking what stations they listened to and for how long, and where they were at the time; this data was covertly exfiltrated from the cars by means of their built-in wifi.

The company says it never sold this data, but the presentation to the advertising execs was clearly designed to elicit bids for it. Toyota has promised not to gather and sell telematics data, but GM seems poised to create a market in data gathered by your car, which can listen to you, follow you, take pictures of you and your surroundings, and even gather data on which passengers are in the car at different times by tracking Bluetooth beacons from mobile devices.

GM looked at station selection, volume and ZIP codes of vehicle owners. No radio in The Truck. Too noisy to listen if there were.

Yellow Pages

Posted on by
Reply

A friend of mine — a local small businessman — called me yesterday saying he was “taking a poll.”

FRIEND: When was the last time you looked up a phone number in the Yellow Pages?
ME: Uh, at least ten years ago. Everybody uses Google, don’t they? Why are you asking?
FRIEND: I got a call from a sales rep for the Yellow Pages asking me to renew my ad. I told him I didn’t advertise in the Yellow Pages. I was wrong. I’ve been paying a thousand bucks a year for the last ten years. When I asked my wife she said, “We’d always had an ad so…”

A few years ago I was in the front yard when a guy pulled up and tossed a plastic bag on my lawn. It contained copy of the Yellow Pages. I picked it up and took it over to the guy saying I didn’t want it and always just throw them in the trash.

“Yeah, that’s what everybody tells me but I get paid to toss ’em. I can’t take it back so just pitch it,” he explained. I’d love to know how many people with ads in the YP are like my friend.

During my radio days (1970’s) I noticed one of our advertisers had been running the same ad for over a year. I started nagging our sales rep to go see the client and get some fresh copy. We’d produce a new spot, no charge.

“I think we just just let well enough alone. He’d tell us if he wanted to change copy,” whined the sales rep.

I kept after him and one day he stormed into my office. “I hope you’re happy! He cancelled his advertising!” And stormed out. I called the client to ask why.

“We had no idea we were still running that spot — and paying for it. My bookkeeper just wrote the check every month. It slipped through the cracks.”

I’ll bet the Yellow Pages folks have reams of data “proving” who uses the book and how often.

The Amazon Brand

Posted on by
Reply

Overheard a woman talking to a friend this morning say something like “I bought it from Amazon.” I’m pretty sure whatever she purchased wasn’t manufactured by Amazon. But the Amazon brand has pretty much gobbled up the branding value from all the stuff they sell. I get as much value from Amazon as from the company that made the whatever. More? Has any company ever owned so much mind-space? Maybe Sears back in the mail order catalog days?

Chaos Monkeys

Posted on by
Reply

In a recent Rolling Stone piece Matt Taibbi described Antonio Garcia Martinez as “the most interesting and damaging defector to have ever left the ranks of Facebook. An iconoclastic combination of Travis McGee and Michael Lewis, he is a former physics Ph.D. candidate from Berkeley who worked at Goldman Sachs before his two years at Facebook.”

The Travis McGee reference intrigued me so I bought Martinez’ book (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley). Only halfway through but can safely say it is one of the best books I’ve read about Silicon Valley. Martinez’s writing style reminds me of Taibbi and he makes the world of tech start-ups read like a thriller. I’m at the part of the book where he’s just gone to work for Facebook:

“Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo. Which, if you think about it, is much scarier than simple greed. The greedy man can always be bought at some price or another, and his behavior is predictable. But the true zealot? He can’t be had at any price, and there’s no telling what his mad visions will have him and his followers do. That’s what we’re talking about with Mark Elliot Zuckerberg and the company he created.”

If The Social Network is how Facebook started, Chaos Monkeys is what it became. Nobody knows what it will become.

Car dealerships are doomed

Posted on by
Reply

Long-time auto exec Bob Lutz thinks car dealerships are doomed. They have 20 to 25 years left. Autonomous vehicles will completely disrupt the industry.

”Are they going to be fun? Absolutely not,” he said. “There will be no joy in sitting in an autonomous vehicle …. But it’s going to be enormously efficient.”

He suggested that parents will be willing to place their children in autonomous cars to take them to day care, soccer practice or school. He said they would be able to give their children limited access to a vehicle subscription service that would let them call cars to take them to preapproved locations, and that access could be expanded as they get older.

”When you send them off to college, you won’t send them with a car, you’ll send them with a subscription to a driverless vehicle service that they can use at their leisure,” he said.

I think it’s been a long time since cars were cool (not that I was ever a car guy). They’re all look like gray blobs of molded plastic. Lutz says the car of the future will just be a “module.”

He likened the modules to subway cars: Passengers don’t know who makes them, only that they get the riders to their destinations.

If I can drive my (mythical) Land Rover for five or ten years — and it’s as much fun as I hope it is — I’ll count myself lucky.