April 29th, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
This month I finally had a chance to really put my Verizon Air Card and Wireless plan to the test. I uploaded a great deal of video resulting from some of my travels and ended up pushing about 200 megabytes of data in a 5 day period.
Now Verizon only offers two cookie cutter plans.
One is for a measly 50 megabytes of data (or about 10 viral emails with video attached from someone that proves to be a little embarrassing to know). That costs $39.99. At that price you are basically paying for the air card you purchased on an installment plan with interest.
The other offers 5 Gigabytes of data at $59.99 per month. That is the plan that I am on and that could be a good thing. If I had been on the lower plan I would have paid $39.99 for the first 50 megabytes and then $150 for the next 150 that I have used!
The overage rates on both of these plans is really ridiculous, but when you start pushing video around the internet (upload or download or streamed from youtube) you better know what you are paying for and when you are paying for it. You Air card and Verizon plan is probably not a good choice for downloading porn or even viewing sexy costumes from Victoria Secret or something. That is probably obvious, but paying for flash pages at the beginning of a website could surprise you as well.
If you see a flash page pop up at the beginning of a website, skip the intro immediately or else you might pay for it. Its the voice equivalent of calling an 800 number and sitting on hold for an hour!
April 29th, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
This week I had an eye opening experience. I met a very successful website owner and internet personality that is not being compensated well for their work or content. I won’t name names or provide URLs for this example as I myself am still trying to understand what has gone wrong with this specific business model.
I can take a look at consumer products, site unseen sometimes and spot the flaw. Such as in a wireless home security product from ademco. Having worked in intelligence, I can tell you that the easy way to defeat the system is by jamming the signal. However, with the internet, things are not always as obvious.
The thing about this broken business is that the site has very very high numbers in terms of visitors and subscribers. The problem is that the owner of the site does not own their revenue stream. They own the site, but they work through a network that sells ads for them along with other site owners. That network then pays the website owner a monthly contract amount for being part of the network.
Fixed pay for adjustable revenue
That may sound like security to web owners that do not want to ride an advertising and revenue roller coaster, but consider what happens when you start off small and your site gets big. When the site blows up with fame, you do not receive the rewards. You are still locked down at the fixed contract rate from the days when you were a small nobody.
So the problem becomes what to do when you are a content producer that is being underpaid?
The obvious answer is to renegotiate or jump ship.
That’s not an easy decision to make under the best circumstances and in this case even tougher. The company managing the ads and the revenue also manage and hold the metrics of the site performance. They essentially are holding the purse strings and the scale measuring the gold dust. To jump ship or renegotiate, or just keep your accountants honest, website owners and content producers have to have access to and control over their metrics.
Anything less than that and you are hamstrung when it comes time to make a decision. In this case the situation is one where the content producer, relies on them for salary, for promotion of their site, for ad sales, and metrics. When things need to be promoted more heavily, support is not there. When earnings are higher, bigger compensation is not there. When ad sales slip, the sales team is not responsible, and in many cases other content producers and their needs dictate and drive when things happen at a network level, leaving the content producer of my case out of the loop.
It goes to show that when you trade security for control, you may benefit in the short term but in the long term its very difficult to get the control back and that in turn makes security a bit of a myth. If a network leverages your site to push other sites, that does not help you. In fact, if the network can not maximize results on your site, they are probably failing to do so on other sites in the network and that is bad for business and will probably be the unraveling of the network ultimately and the end of nice safe checks.
My advice, keep your own controls, keep your metrics, know your risk in reality for what it is and manage it. Don’t hide behind the skirts of a network that doesn’t really protect you at all.
