Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

Two years ago as I was promoting my free listings sites I received an interesting e-mail which demanded to know how I could possibly run the sites without charging for them.

In fact, it turned out to be from someone who was running a similar site which charged around £50/year for very similar listings to my own sites. That site happened to be up for sale and for a time I was quite interested in aquiring it but for various reasons that never came to pass.

One interesting point from that was that the profitability of his site was quite comparable to my own once you adjusted for the different number of entries on our respective sites. In fact, it appeared that the “free” model that I was using would actually be much more profitable than the charging model that he was using had simply taken over his database of expired subscriptions and put them on my own site as live “free” entries.

How can that be? Simply because I place adverts on my site whereas he didn’t and, of course, since my listings are “free” people go onto the site and never leave whereas he was in a treadmill each year to attract new entries to replace those that had decided not to renew. In fact, that lack of turnover means that my own sites will overtake the size of any comparable subscription based site sooner or later.

So are my sites free? I certainly don’t charge people for listings (though, for psychological reasons I quote a notional price). Yet I obviously get income from them so somebody is clearly paying.

In the real world there are usually limits to “free” services like this. The UK National Health Service has all kinds of problems in running “free” as people have a tendency to expect there to be no limits to what they should do, ignoring the fact that clearly the service isn’t free as it’s paid for in taxes. Yet, on the Internet, these limits don’t seem to apply: if I ever get to the point of having, say, 50000 entries on the sites it would cost little more to run than if I had 5000 entries.

Free, or rather ad-supported, seems to be the future for services on the Internet but I’m sure that many old-school types will continue to regard these with suspicion when compared to equivalent services which charge.

As always, the answer is “it depends”.

If your website is one of the majors, the answer is “probably not”. Would it really make any difference if Amazon decided to spend another million dollars promoting their site? I think not. After all, there can’t be many people around who haven’t heard of them these days and realistically nobody is going to buy twice the number of books through them no matter how much they’ve promoted the site.

On the other hand, if you’re like most organisations, essentially average then it probably does make a difference. Unless your name is very well known then you do need to invest some money in getting your site into search engines and perhaps also through PPC programmes such as adwords. If you don’t do that you run the risk of becoming an also ran in your business niche which was the fate of many small bookshops having an online offering at the time Amazon was launched.

Finally, there’s the special case of start-up websites. If you don’t promote them, nobody will know about your super-duper new site. For these, what you need to to usually is to spend a little at the start to get your site into the search engines to begin with (usually under $50 is enough) and start higher level SEO investment three to six months later.

What you’ll find after a while though is that, regardless of your level of investment in promotion, the traffic on your sites will grow over time. In my own case this growth is roughly 3x year on year which keeps things at a manageable level for me: the growth rate that suits you may well be different of course.

As you know, we’ve been tootling along with over two hundred thousand readers per week, mostly via Reuters.

I’m sure that’s an incredibly misleading statistic but it certainly sounds good. What I didn’t know until now was quite how good it was in comparison to the competition as everyone seems rather cagey with their statistics.

Anyway, I’m dead chuffed to see this morning that I have both this blog and An Age of Magic in the top 100 of the Blogburst network. In fact Magic is doing rather better than this one thanks to an experiment that I tried a few weeks back which I’ll be building on here over the coming months.

Definitely a great start to the year for the blogs!

We’ve recently had the opportunity to try out the latest versions of both these satnav systems over the last couple of weeks ie the sensibly priced Tomtom One v3 and the Garmin Nuvi 250W.

On a first comparison, the Tomtom seems the better of the two in that the menus offer a lot more options compared to the Garmin model. However, the majority of those extra options are to do with things like changing the voice and various non-navigation related features. There’s also a range of display related options letting you add the current speed, max speed, time remaining and so on where the Garmin just shows your speed and projected arrival time and next turn. OK, so you’ll play around with all those extra options but realistically the arrival time (or the time remaining) plus your next turn is all you actually need and, in general, that’s the theme for the Garmin: it gives you the information that you need without all the extraneous information that the Tomtom provides.

One key difference though is that the Tomtoms don’t have a memory card slot whereas the Garmin do. With the increasing range of maps available these days and all the extra detail that comes out with each new version that’s a builtin obselence on the part of the Tomtom which is going to cost you dear sooner or later. For example, if you get the Tomtom One single-country version you’ll find that you’re stuck with the map that’s preloaded because the machine hasn’t got enough memory to load any other countries. In the equivalently priced Garmin you have an SD slot which would let you load maps of a continent if you wanted to. If you buy Tomtom UK and would like to add the European maps for the holidays, you can’t.

Incidently, on the map pricing front, it’s probably better to spend the extra £30 upfront to get the European maps rather than run with the UK only ones. The European maps, of course, include the UK. If you’re going for the Tomtom, you have to make this decision at the outset but you could add a memory card for the extra maps in the Garmin.

Overall, I prefer the current Tomtom software but that lack of a memory card means that you’ll be throwing it away in a few years when the maps grow too large when paying £5 or so will get you a very large memory card these days and upgrade your Garmin to hold much larger maps.

Last year we had quite a noticeable dip in traffic on the sites from November onwards but this year we’d simply a small dip over part of the Christmas period.

In fact, it would seem that people have been booking much, much earlier for 2008 than they did the previous year. We’ve had pretty much level traffic on the sites from August right through to now with, as I say, a small dip over part of Christmas.

Part of that is probably due to us starting our marketing programme for the sites in November but even so we still had pretty much summer level traffic on the sites before we started which is pretty unusual as the B&B site traffic usually drops like a stone after August and the self-catering traffic drops up to a month earlier than that.

In fact, the traffic is up so much that I suspect that I’m going to have to upgrade the hosting package for the sites as soon as Easter when ordinarily the upgrade that I did in December would have seen me through at least a year.