Interesting findings from Dolores Labs about altruism on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. They found that workers on the platform show surprisingly altruistic behavior, often doing more work than required. This challenges the assumption that microtask workers are purely motivated by money. It’s a fascinating look at human behavior in digital labor markets.
I’ve been looking at the relationship between page views per user and user value (revenue) for my sites. What I found is a clear pattern of diminishing returns. The first few page views per user generate the most revenue, but each additional page view generates less and less incremental revenue. This has implications for how you think about user engagement and monetization strategy.
I attended Affiliate Summit 2010 and there was a lot of buzz about Facebook Ads. The platform is really maturing as an advertising channel and the targeting capabilities are impressive. Marketers are finding new ways to reach audiences that weren’t possible before. The combination of demographic targeting and social graph data makes for some really powerful advertising opportunities.
The Haiti earthquake generated an incredible response on Facebook. People were sharing information, organizing relief efforts, and donating money at an unprecedented scale. It was one of the first major natural disasters where social media played such a central role in the response. The speed at which information and aid coordination happened through Facebook was remarkable.
I came across this fantastic infographic showing how browser market share has changed over time. The rise and fall of Internet Explorer is really dramatic when you see it visualized this way. Chrome’s growth trajectory is particularly impressive. It’s a great reminder of how quickly technology landscapes can shift.
Looking at the Japanese search market is always interesting. In Japan, Google’s search results pages are notably more ad-heavy than in other markets, while Yahoo Japan takes a more minimalist approach. This is the opposite of what you might expect given the global perception of these brands. It’s a great example of how local market dynamics can create very different user experiences.
With Google’s upcoming site speed ranking factor, I’ve been looking at every way to make my sites faster. One of the biggest wins has been enabling gzip compression. This compresses your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript before sending it to the browser, reducing file sizes by 60-80%. The implementation is straightforward if you have access to your server configuration. I’ll walk through how I did it and the impact it had.
Google recently announced that site speed would become a factor in their search ranking algorithm. This is a big deal for webmasters and I wanted to get ahead of it. I’ve been working on optimizing my sites to load faster, including compression, caching, and reducing the number of HTTP requests. The results have been promising – my page load times have dropped significantly and I’m hoping this will translate into better search rankings when the change rolls out.
Here are two ads served consecutively on my site by Google adsense both are graphical ads. Google branding is very clear on the second ad but not the first.
Well the results are in from blocking weight loss ads from adsense and it’s pretty brutal. I’ve lost approximately 50% of my adsense revenue. That’s a significant hit but I still think it was the right thing to do. Those ads were misleading and I don’t want to make money from deceiving my users. I’ll need to find other ways to make up the revenue shortfall.
