Got It!

I got one!

You’ve still got 30 minutes to submit a pic!

I waited in line for THREE HOURS (fortunately I was, ahem, working the whole time) at an AT&T store, and when I was just about to get in the store they announced “We only have 4GB ones left!”

AIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEE!

Well, since I promised an 8GB model, I quickly hopped on the subway down to the SOHO Apple store (a guy had come by and said that everybody should go there, they had a TON and the line was SUPER FAST! But at that point I was sooo close..) and whammo, about 5 minutes later I was checking the authenticity of the box they’d given me..

So, let this be a lesson for you, old East-Coast-iPhone-Waiter. Just go to an Apple store around 8pm. They have a TON and it’ll take about five minutes.

I don’t feel bad waiting though. For all the hard work you guys are doing making those photoshopped images, it was the least I could do.

Now I’m in a cab on my way to a dinner BBQ. Hooray for EVDO! There will be one more post with more exciting pictures of the CHAMPTION iPhone later this weekend, I promise.

P.S. Everybody go buy one, I have apple stock.

Sold Out!

No, not the iPhone.

DreamHost!

That’s right, we’ve sold out!

Let me ’splain:

There are only two ways to grow a company’s revenue:

1. Get more customers.
2. Get more money from each customer.

(or 3… both 1. and 2.)

It’s been our feeling at DreamHost that we’d rather go with the former than the latter (or even both).

But why?

Mainly because you don’t have to be so sleazy when dealing with your customers, always trying to upsell them and nickle and dime them to death for extra features. People appreciate no hidden fees and no bait and switch, and by not going for #2 at all, you help #1.

And, you can always save #2 for later, if you ever reach a point where you can’t grow your existing customer base as fast as you’d like (we ain’t there yet!).. which is basically the old “get big fast and worry about monetizing later” philosophy you hear about so much in Internet start-ups.

We’re getting kinda old for a start-up (Almost a decade!), but I guess we’re still happily in that “get big slow” phase!

Let’s check out the sign up process at godaddy:

On the first page you see this at the top (among the dozens of ads for other services):

On the next step you see:

(heh, I just discovered godaddy doesn’t allow you to register domains with the string “godaddy” in them!)

Ignore everything (even MeUnemployment.com, if you can), click continue… and…

Compare that to our signup process. One page for your hosting info, and one page for your payment info.

It’s a little amazing what people will go through to save a couple of bucks a year!

You know what else is amazing? One of our support guys used to work at godaddy and guess how they measure the effectiveness of their phone support team?

I’ll give you a hint.. it’s not based on number of calls. It’s not based on customer feedback. It’s not based on random monitoring of quality. Nope, none of these things.

It’s based on sales! That’s right.. they actually treat their customer service line as a SALES team. Your job as phone support is not to help a caller with their question or issue.. it’s to upsell them on other services!

I can just imagine a typical godaddy support exchange:

godaddy: Welcome to godaddy, can I interest you in an adjustable rate home equity line of credit?
UGC: Um.. hi. Er, no? I just need some help transferring my domain registration away.
godaddy: No problem! However, it’s important when transferring your domain away that you turn on domain privacy. Would you like me to add that to your account now?
UGC: Uh.. really? I need that? I guess so if it’s required. Wait, how much is it?
godaddy: It’s really cheap, less than the cost of a latte a day! And, if you also get it with the new American Airlines Citibank Mastercard we’re offering, you can get it for even less!
UGC: Well, wait. I’m trying to transfer my domain away from you.. it doesn’t seem like I should be adding new servi..
godaddy: Don’t worry, I’ve already added the privacy for you! But with the credit card and heloc I signed you up for, you’ll actually be saving money, long term! If you can’t afford it right now, don’t worry, I ALSO just signed you up for a payday loan, and you should see your shipment of Viagra in 2-3 business days. Thanks for calling godaddy, goodbye!
UGC: Blam! (Shoots self.)

But they’re not the only one! I registered a domain with Aplus.net once just to check em out.. and look at this screen shot I took of their admin panel:

It’s crazy.. more then half their navigation is dedicated to selling you more services!

But, I can’t really blame these guys. People really do fall for these stunts, and you really do earn more money. It doesn’t hurt that when you start to get big enough, you’re approached almost daily with some amazing new opportunity that needs access to your loyal customer base.

After a while it starts to wear on you and you decide to try just one.

And you find out it really does bring in some extra cash. Not much, but hey, every little bit counts, right? And it’s at no expense to you, so it’s all profit! So you try another, and another, and another, and before you know it your business is starting to remind you of a default Dell desktop!

Long term, all this selling out can be damaging to your brand. Godaddy is huge, but (as far as I’m concerned), pretty much universally reviled. When customers start to lose their naivete, they start to realize they’ve been shelling out for a lot of junk they really didn’t need.. or at least didn’t need to pay extra for. They start to realize they’ve been taken advantage of. And that realization hurts!

Alright already… what’s this about DreamHost selling out?

Okay, enough meandering. What I’m trying to say is, we’ve been approached so many times for things we finally decided to go ahead and let some of them get through. However, we’re approaching it in the most straight-forward, un-annoying, not-invading-your-privacy, open, and passive way we could…

There’s now just one place on our panel where all of these offers will be collected. It’s the new Home > Partner Offers area (thanks for the inspiration, aplus!), and if you never visit that tab, we won’t blame you.

Besides keeping it so confined, we’re also only adding “partners” who:

1. We deem as useful to DreamHost customers specifically.
2. Offer our customers something they couldn’t just get by signing up on their own.
3. Seem at least somewhat non-skeezy to us.

We’re also doing something I bet you’ve never seen anywhere else; we’re fully disclosing whatever kickback we’re getting for each of these offers. I’m not sure how that will affect people’s decisions, if at all, but hey, anything to be different, right?

Finally, we’re launching this new area with a “partner” (imagine the double curly air fingers thing) we’re actually somewhat stoked about teaming up with… Bandwagon! It’s Mac software that costs $24 a year (they have to host your meta data or something?) that allows you to back up and sync your iTunes library with an FTP server.. a la your DreamHost account.

So, the deal is, any DreamHost customer can get a free year of Bandwagon and any Bandwagon customer can get a free year of DreamHost! Seems fair (except wait, isn’t a year of DreamHost worth five times a year of Bandwagon? WE’VE BEEN HAD!) If you want to try Bandwagon out for free for a year.. just go to that new Home > Partner Offers area, and click away!

Just what we need, everybody actually using their storage.

D is for DreamHost

Just now we had this little customer exchange:

I can’t get to one of my sites via web browser. My other sites hosted by you are available.
Happy DreamHost Customer

Hello HDC,

Sorry for the inconvenience.

However, I had no problem viewing your site from this side. I’ve
also viewed your server history and saw that no reboots were done. So
all looks well with your site from what I can see.

Please contact us if you’re still not seeing your site from your
side.

Thanks!
Kacy

Alright, we’ll just chalk it up to this guy:

Heh, that sure caught us off-guard! Hee hee… I almost wonder if he just lied about there being a problem so he could send us that!

Nonetheless, it sort of ties in nicely with the fact that we were thinking about giving away an 8GB iPhone, if only we could come up with a good reason to!

You see, ever since I heard about this guy camping out for an iPhone since Monday morning, I thought it’d be fun to camp out for one myself. Not have one, mind you, just camp out.

I’m perfectly happy with my Nokia 6010 on T-Mobile (although this is intriguing) .. mostly because I can drop it out a third story window, watch it explode into a dozen plastic pieces, and then put it back together and make a call. In fact, that’s exactly what I do every day when leaving work, just so I don’t have to lug it down the elevator.

(Aside: when I heard that somebody was already camping out on Monday, I thought to myself: “That’s insane! They estimate there will be 3 million iPhones available at launch. And anyway, isn’t the point of camping out to minimize your time in line while still guaranteeing you get one of the items? In fact, wouldn’t you have to be a little insane to be the first person in any camp-out line? If nobody else is waiting yet, why would you need to?” Honestly, I really did think that whole thing.

Well, this answers my question! There is a benefit to being the insane first person in line.. you get interviewed by the local news!)

Anyway, I was inspired. I promise I’ll be getting one of them thar 8GB iPhone’s tomorrow.. as soon as I see somebody else camped out in front of my local AT&T store, I’ll line up right behind them, with my laptop, EVDO, extra battery, and faithful hound in tow.

And then, after taking it out of the box and ogling it for a couple hours, I’m going to just give it away!

But to whom?!

Hmm. How about… to whoever posts in the comments of this post a link to the (photoshopped?) image that best illustrates (in my sole opinion) the cause for mysterious DreamHost downtime! The cuter the better, the cleverer the better, the cornier the better, the DreamHost logo-ier the better.

So far, that Cookie Monster one above is winning!

The deadline for the comment post is 6pm PDT, tomorrow, Friday June 29th, 2007; west-coast iPhone launch moment!

…

GO!

(P.S. The winner will have to activate the iPhone themselves with one of AT&T’s plans. Or re-sell it on ebay or craigslist.)

Hooray for Internet

Here I am, after 3 hours on the runway of Air France flight #011, and I’m the only passenger on the plane that know that we’ll still be here another 30 minutes to an hour.

Not to mention, only I know that firstborns have higher IQs.

And that the ability to create new email addresses in our web panel was broken but then fixed.

So, thanks to EVDO, we are SAVED from a full week a full week and two hours without even a really short and crappy DreamHost blog post!

Why Web Hosting is a Gamble

Last night I saw Ocean’s Thirteen.

First off, I can’t believe this franchise has gone on as long as it has. It’s been nothing but downhill since Ocean’s Seven.

Apparently, like some kind of strange film industry bloatware, in every new Ocean’s movie they add another big mega super star feature to the cast. People like Eddie Jemison, Shaobo Qin, and of course, Ben Affleck. I really loved him in the Bourne Againity series. Ask about him at work.

Anyway, and maybe I need to get out a little more, there were several parts in the movie that happened to steer my mind towards this blog’s favorite topic, me web hosting. It’s sad, I know; I wish I worked in a cooler industry like liability insurance. But I’m resigned to accept my lot, per my therapist’s advice.

There was a scene where the “good” guys are discussing how they’re going to take down “Greco”, the casino’s slightly erotic security and fraud-monitoring system. It’s got exabytes of storage, and is housed in some kind of state-of-the-art data center, and the conversation goes something like this:

Billy Ocean: “Can’t we just, like, unplug it or something?”
Celebrity #13: “HA! They’ve got redundant power feeds!”

Audience Josh: HA Ha HA!! Hee Hee! Hoo oooo boy! HA! Heh. Hah. Aahhhhh… oh… man.

It sure would be delightful if all you needed were some good old-fashioned redundant power feeds to stop even a rag-tag gang of Hollywood’s most lovable scoff-laws from taking out your data center! I’m afraid bitter experience has taught me otherwise.

In the end, our heroes decide to take the most realistic tack.. causing an earthquake via the two $36 million borers that dug the chunnel as well as gettin a cell phone-shaped MAGNETRON in there to, I guess, microwave the servers?

But what struck me in all this is that in real life, data centers CAN handle earthquakes and they usually have pretty tight human security. In fact, data centers are prepared to the hilt for all sorts of real-world catastrophes that never happen in the real-world.

It’s almost make me wonder if after a hard day on the set, there’s nothing Steven Soderbergh likes better than to unwind by designing data centers.

I don’t know how many data centers we’ve seen (and, er, used) that have freaking biometric hand scanners but lose power the first time the temperature hits 80. Why, oh why, is that? It’s sort of a strange, sad, mystery actually.

Mystery Solved!

And all I had to do was think about it for a second! The reason real-world data centers are earthquake and MAGNETRON proof is exactly the same reason Ocean’s Baker’s Dozen decided to generate an earthquake and sneak in a bleeding MAGNETRON in the movie… it’s more exciting!

Movie producers know nobody wants to see Lindsey Lohan disrupt a data center by simply cutting a power line, just like data center marketing departments know nobody would lease a data center with rock-solid power and cooling that didn’t have wicked retina scanners and halon gas fire supression!

I, for one, am glad we live in a world run by such people. Where’s the fun in realism, the entertainment in reliability? If you’re like me, you’ve clearly found the right host!

Two of a Kind

Besides a twizzler, another thing that struck me during the movie is how similar the business models are of casinos and web hosts.

We both offer crazy deals (5TB a month for $7.95 / just pull this lever and get $1,000,000!) that seemingly should put us out of business in an instant.. and yet, thanks again to that Law of Large Numbers we both are perfectly safe from that ever happening.

And yet, nobody gets their Internets all in a bunch, posting “Ha, The Venetian is such a scam… no way can they offer double your money just because the ball lands on BLACK!” all over the coolest industry’s forums.

Somehow, people can easily grok that not everybody wins in a casino; and yet they can’t seem to grasp that not everybody uses 5TB a month. Even though there are a lot more of the former than the latter, this fact seems to elude the general populace. And it kind of sucks for PR!

Dealing with the Sharks

Every once in a while, some crafty people figure out a way to always win. Casinos are always on the lookout for anomalies that point to people like that; when they find them they put them in two categories: those that are breaking the law and those that aren’t.

For the lawbreakers, it’s a simple matter of arresting them and/or breaking their knee caps.

Alas, the card counters and their ilk are not technically doing anything illegal. Alas, casinos don’t technically have to allow you into their establishment. Nor do they technically have to not share your photograph with literally every other gambling establishment in the world.

Then, with the abberations expunged from the system, the house of Gamblors can happily return to its raison d’être: extracting profit from probability while providing entertainment to addicts. Which is exactly our raison d’être too… (oh please, as if we’ve ever represented anything else)!

Which is why we do exactly the same thing. Not a week that goes by that I’m not down by the tracks in Vernon with my sledgehammer, breaking some phools knee caps while busting a cap in his cracker friend. You see (fortunately for us), it’s very hard to be an aberration in our system without breaking the law.

It’s just serendipity, baby, that the biggest bandwidth and disk sucks on this wide world of webs are pretty much all copyrighted material and illegal porn. We also have a much easier time than casinos in spotting the offenders (we use “computers”) … which means we have the luxury of only cracking down on the illegals.

So I guess, in the end, it’s just like they always say…

The host always wins.

Shameful Plug

I am so ashamed.

And yet flattered.

I SWEAR I didn’t nominate us myself. The blogger’s choice awards ain’t no digg!

And they ain’t no Golden Globes either. These are the top-notch, no-hold-barred, keeps-the-homeless-away, freeekin’ OSCARS of the blog award industry, no doubt! Who cares if they’re run by blogosphere pariahs pay-per-post: working hard to commercialize what used to be all about the art of what I ate today, man.

And with the type of high-class, bourgeoisie, bathtub-filled-with-perrier web hosting and blog-writing establishment we run here, we wouldn’t accept a nomination for anything less.

So please, click both of those beautiful icons above and go through all the registration mambo-jambo (you could use spam.la to fake your email address) to vote for us.

It’d be so great to win because:

1. My ego is almost as low as my blood sugar after being on South Beach for a week. If we win, I will eat a spaghetti.
2. If we win, YOU will be the kind of person who signed up with a web host and even read their blog before they were famous and sucky.
3. The awards (solid diamond) will be given out in Las Vegas on my mom’s (Joan Jones) birthday, and my mom loves her some Cheetahs. I mean Spamalot.

Then, in September I really hope somebody nominates us for The Weblog Awards and then in January somebody else nominates us for a Bloggie.

Don’t worry, I already submitted us for a BloggY.

A Long History of Advertising

I Am Born

Being that I am 30 years old, I thought it was about time I impart some of the invaluable wisdom I’ve obtained in over 3 decades darkening the surface of this planet. Invaluable wisdom about advertising.

Ever since there’s been advertising, there’s been an annoying disconnect between what an advertiser wants to buy and what an advertising venue can sell.

You see, advertisers don’t want to buy ads, they just want to buy customers.

Unfortunately, that’s not something that’s for sale, directly. Nope.. all there is for poor advertisers to spend their money on is dumb stuff like billboards, time slots, magazine pages, or maybe a line of text next to a search result.

But, thanks to the law of large numbers, it still all works out. When you advertise enough, you quickly get a sense of the relationship between billboards/time slots/magazine pages/searches and actual results.

For the rest of this post, I’m going to call that relationship (ad views divided by actual conversions) the “magic ratio”! I’m allowed to do things like that because I’m your elder. I call it the magic ratio because if you know the magic ratio along with how much you want to spend on an actual conversion, you magically know how much a given ad is worth to you!

Of course, the magic ratio is different for every single ad, in every single venue, for every single product, at every single time, forever. Therefore, the only way you can discover the current magic ratio is through a process of trial and error, over and over and over.

There are some problems with determining the magic ratio:

1. You must first test ads to find the magic ratio.. which means wasting money while you figure it out.
2. If you buy lots of ads at once, you can easily figure out your overall magic ratio, but it’s hard to track the magic ratio for each individual ad.
3. You have to take some dude’s word on how many views you’re actually getting. Which means the numerator for the magic ratio is not 100% trust-worthy!

Before about the mid-90s these three bullet items conspired to make it a big hairy pain in the butt to determine any given magic ratio. (At least, it sure sounds like a big hairy pain in the butt to me… I’ve never calculated a magic ratio in my life!)

My Voice Changed

And then in 1995, around the time my voice was cracking, online advertising changed everything.

Although it was still impossible to know the magic ratio before you started, and difficult to 100% verify your number of ad views, at least it was finally possible to track exactly which ads were resulting in which conversions. It was one major tiny step forward!

Yet this tiny step forward was not without a tiny step back. As inaccurate as counting views was before 1995, at least there was no incentive for publishers to cheat. Back then, a magazine would claim a distribution of 150,000. Somebody would buy an ad for a few months. They’d see how many customers it earned them. They’d calculate their magic ratio and decide whether it was worth it to buy again.

But then online, websites would charge a rate per thousand page views. Again, somebody would buy an ad. But now, the publisher could actually directly earn more money by just “showing more ads.” The fact that it was also a lot easier to show another banner ad than to print another magazine did nothing to hurt the temptation. Inevitably, unscrupulous publishers cheated to make more money in the near term. Of course, all this did was slowly shrink the magic ratio… and the lower the magic ratio, the less advertisers will pay.

So, in the end, the market corrected itself automatically.

But then, to compete as a content provider, you were essentially forced to stoop to scuzbucket tactics of inflating your ad counts with pop-ups, spyware, typo-squatted domains, and ad-”viewing” robots. Good luck selling your advertising network at $1 when the other guys are charging $.10! Sure, your views are “better” than theirs.. but how does a potential advertiser know that?

Nevertheless, it was one major tiny step forward!

I Grow Hair On My Chest

Then, just about the time I was growing hair on my chest, in 2000 or so, Google came along with Adsense, their pay-per-click system. (Okay, okay, they stole the idea from goto.com Overture Yahoo!)

Pay-per-click was soooo much better than pay-per-view not just because pay-per-view is all WCW and porn, but because it all but eliminated that numerator uncertainty we talked about before. You may not have been able to really track ad views that well, but you can definitely track visitors to your site, and what link they clicked to get there. Also, once somebody’s atually on your site they generally have a magic ratio that’s independent of how they got there… (Not 100%… but generally!)

This meant it was now a lot easier for advertisers to do their job. They just had to figure out the magic ratio of their own site’s visitors to final conversions, and ta-da, they knew what their max bid per click should be!

Of course, you also had to pick search terms to try and get your clicks to a level that you wanted to spend on advertising, but Google was happy to make that nice and easy.

The Other Side

To recap.. for all these years, advertisers were buying things (billboards, time slots, magazine pages, or maybe a line of text next to a search result..) they didn’t really want. By doing so, they were assuming all the risk in the never-ending hunt to find a medium with a cost and magic ratio they could live with.

Never in the history of advertising did a publisher offer any sort of pricing that had anything to do with results. And how could there be? If Martha Stewart’s Living charged per conversion instead of per ad, only the advertisers who made the most profit off each customer could be in there. It’d be filled with ads for mortgages, Viagra, penny stocks, and web hosting!

If advertisers only charged you per conversion, all magic ratios would be ONE… and there’d be no incentive for advertisers to try and find venues with better magic ratios for their particular product!

Strangely enough, that, right there, is why Google is currently worth $155 Billion and Yahoo only a quarter that. You see, Google realized that if they were going to make things easier on the advertiser by letting them pay per-click, they’d better work on their OWN magic ratio.. the ratio of search result views to advertising clicks! Otherwise, if it is mostly true that any site visit is as valuable as any other, there’d be no reason for advertisers to not plaster their ad over every single possible search result. After all, they’re only paying if somebody actually clicks!

Dumb Yahoo!, when they finally started doing pay-per-click at all, showed text ads based ENTIRELY on their bid per click. Google, on the other hand, showed ads based on their max bid per click times the number of clicks per view.. which maximized Google’s revenue per search result… the thing they had the most of.

This seemingly minor change meant ads less popular with searchers were automatically lowered in prominence; while Yahoo was stuck with web hosting ads all over the searches for “prison terms insider trading”, Google was electronically forcing more and more relevant ads for each search.

I Lose My Baby Teeth

It’s now 2007 and, just like me, it’s time for advertising to finally grow up, lose its baby teeth, and realize its ultimate potential!

Allow me to explain.

Advertising only sucks when it doesn’t interest you. The funny thing is, every time you see an ad you didn’t want to see, the advertiser would have prefered you not see it either. Ideally, for both advertisers and consumers, every ad ever shown would result in a conversion: there’d be a global magic ratio of ONE.

In that world, consumers only see ads they are 100% excited by, and advertisers don’t waste a single penny on people who don’t convert.

While Google took us one step closer to that utopia, DreamHost is already half-way there.

You see, “not wasting a single penny on people who don’t convert” can be achieved rather simply by just having an affiliate program!

Affiliate programs pay only for conversions! They’re an advertisers best friend.. they push all the risk, work, and magic ratio calculations onto publishers!

But.. all that awesomeness comes at a cost. You see, affiliate programs must pay extremely well.

For it to be worth it for an affiliate to go through all the work of figuring out where, how, when, and how much to advertise, they’ve got to have a pretty big pay off for every conversion. No holding out, advertisers! You’ve either got to spend time researching your own magic ratios or you’ve got to spend money to make your magic ratio one. You can spend both, but you can’t spend neither.

Unfortunately, affiliate programs are only half-way to utopia; they don’t do a thing to help consumers see more relevant ads. Not in the least. Because affiliates have no idea what sort of magic ratio they’re in for, they like to play it very safe and go for very cheap forms of advertising. You know, things like word-of-mouth, posters-stapled-to-traffic-lights, and unsolicited-email-and-forum-posts. I wouldn’t be going out on a very long limb to say 95% of the bad stuff on the Internet can be traced back to an afiliate program.

And therein lies the crux of the problem.

All these small-fry affiliates have no time, no money, and no ideas to maximize the effectiveness of their message. They’re the equivalent of a magazine that was 100% ads, and so had no readers… so the publisher just mailed it to every single mailbox in California every day, just hoping for some random hits. How stupid is that?

What advertisers really need is some sort of killer affiliate. Some magic hombre you could sign up for your affiliate program and they just KNEW the perfect place, time, and way to advertise your product.

It’d be awesome.

Advertisers would just set their price per customer and the killer affiliate would bring them the customers. Consumers would go to the killer affiliate and be shown the one true ad they most needed to see. And the killer affiliate would make a killing. And, you might see where I’m going with this…

Google IS the Killer Affiliate!

Recently, Google announced a beta test of their new pay-per-action advertising model. This is exactly an affiliate program.. but managed by Google. Google will just start including pay-per-action ads in their search results, and using the same method as before (but now it’s cost per action times actions per search) these “affiliate links” will quickly show up in the most relevant results possible.

I Get Laid

Before 2008, when Google hits $3000 a share and I get laid, both based on this post, let me explain some more stuff.

Why does Google even have to bother with this new pay-per-action system? Why don’t they go out and just sign up for existing affiliate programs such as ours?

For one, that’d obviously be a lot of management trouble for Google. Why deal with a zillion different affiliate programs when you’ve got the clout to make everybody just use yours?

For two, that’s already happening.. via affiliates who advertise on Google with pay-per-click. When you search for DreamHost on Google, you’ll see plenty of text ads.. but they weren’t put there by us! Nope, not a one.. and with pay-per-action Google will essentially be competing with existing advertisers to see who’s a more efficient converter of search results to paying actions. Who will prevail?!

My money’s on GOOG.

Google’s got a lot of advantages in the fight.

Traditionally, it’s been pretty hard for an advertiser to track their success in an affiliate program. They essentially have to believe the advertiser, just like old-school advertisers had to believe figures on ad views. For Google though, if any advertisers cheat by not giving credit for an action that occured, their magic ratio will automatically drop (less actions per search result) and they’ll be quickly pushed lower and lower in the search results!

In fact, I’m convinced that Google Checkout was 100% an attempt to get Google more intimately involved in the entire “action” process so that it’d be easier and more accurate for them to get their “pay-per-action” system integrated across their advertiser base.

(Oh, and another interesting aside.. for every $1.00 you spend on advertising with Google, you get $.10 of free processing with Google checkout. This is so good for them. Here’s what happens:

1. Advertiser A decides to integrate Google Checkout to save some processing fees. What the heck, they already advertise on Google.. might as well save some money. Not to mention they also get a nifty shopping cart logo next to their ads.
2. Advertiser A realizes that with the money they’re now saving, they can afford to bid a little higher on their ads.. putting them above Advertiser B and therefore pulling in more customers, making them even MORE money!
3. Advertiser B sees this happening, so quickly integrates Google Checkout and then takes THEIR savings to re-bid themselves back up higher than Advertiser A.

The end result? Everybody’s using Google Checkout, everybody’s ready to integrate pay-per-action, everybody’s ads are in the same relative placement as before , and all the “savings” they’ve been earning on processing fees are still going to Google, as higher ad bids! But now, all new advertisers MUST integrate Google Checkout to be competitve. So good.)

Oh, and another side benefit of pay-per-action.. no more click fraud!

Finally

Finally, I wildly predicted a few weeks ago that Google would buy Commission Junction (on a Tuesday in July). For those of you that don’t know, CJ is a site that runs affiliate programs for people, and they’ve got thousands of advertisers and millions of affiliates. They themselves are not a killer affiliate though… just a middle man who takes a transaction fee for managing everything. But after Google purchases them and integrates their whole system with pay-per-action.. watch out!

It’ll be 2009, and I’ll finally be potty trained.