I’ve mentioned before that I don’t use any ad blocking software and perhaps hold a refreshing perspective that I don’t begrudge others who do. I want to learn more from people that use ad blockers on site(s) that they enjoy. If a site like this one is ad-supported and you enjoy the content, why would you continue to block our primary source of revenue?

That’s not meant in a critical or confrontational way, but a serious question that confuses me. It doesn’t make sense to block a part of something that produces joy in your life. Maybe it’s only a tiny part of joy in your life, but if there is any value why cut off the source’s oxygen supply?

My polite request for those using ad blockers at MakeYouGoHmm.com is: please don’t. If you ignore this request, that’s fine. I’d still like to have you as a reader and maybe if I do a good job, someday a subscriber.

These advertisements help pay for my ever dwindling time to create content to share freely here. As readers might expect, I make more money doing programming and working in our offline business than writing for this blog. However the joy and excitement I receive from writing and the ensuing conversations is more than our other two businesses put together. Not saying I don’t enjoy programming or our offline business or our many clients (some of which have become good friends) because I do, but those businesses are jobs, this is my lifelong passion. Ever since I’ve been old enough to put pen to paper, I’ve wanted to be a writer.

I have a dream …
My dream is to increase the income from writing-related projects so that I can someday cut back on my other work and focus even more on writing and other creative-related projects. The last few years through this blog I’ve been able to experience some of this dream and I’m very, very thankful, but how can I continue to realize this dream if the primary revenue stream at this site is under assault by ad blocking tools?

I’m certainly not going to resort to extremes like fellow blogger Danny Carlton who is redirecting all Firefox traffic to whyfirefoxisblocked.com. I have little desire or energy to fight against technology and the desires of readers. If they find something distracting to their reading experience who am I to tell them differently?

If we want to grow our readership, especially if readers tend to be more tech-savvy, we shouldn’t beat folks down for doing something they want to do. As publishers we need to better understand those who regularly use ad blocking programs. Who want to use them. And why.

Too many sites have become ad-laden and intrusive to reading and I understand — generally — why people want to use ad blocking tools to visit these type sites. But what about sites like this one where the advertising is not intrusive? We don’t use popups or popunders, flyovers, ads with sound, cut up the articles into multiple pages to pimp page views or any of that other nonsense. Why are some readers of a site like this using ad blocking programs?

The interview
This morning I interviewed a long time Hmm reader and subscriber, darkmoon, who indicated to me he uses a popular ad blocking program. He’s also become a friend through this blog and somebody I would likely never have met if not for this blog. While asking friends to critique what you’re doing is not always the wisest thing, I think the information he shares below is valuable to other publishers who rely primarily on ad revenue to support their sites. Darkmoon gave permission to share our interview conducted in IRC this morning in this blog post.

Darkmoon is a blogger too and can be read and subscribed at life.firelace.com. He’s not a blogger given to a large number of words, but he finds and shares some cool tools and the occasional pensive post. He also is one of the people behind the scenes for the upcoming ConvergeSouth 2007 conference.

What adblocking tool do you use specifically?
Adblocker Plus. I think that’s the one that comes with Firefox. BonEcho.

BonEcho?
Optimized Firefox for Mac.

How often do you use this tool? Is it only for certain sites? Or do you leave it enabled for all sites?
I just leave it enabled all the time, unless it prevents me from viewing things on a site. Then I turn it off for which ever sites that it doesn’t work well on.

What types of sites doesn’t it work well on?
Such as… most video sites… I disable it on Google sites (gmail, finance, etc).. anything else that comes to mind mainly is flash enabled pieces. Basically, at least for Mac… (I don’t think the Windows side does this, but I haven’t messed with it in a bit…)

It makes it so that the refresh on the flash embedded is messed up. So you see partial video, or partial screen… and it’s all white or whatever. If you disable it Adblocker plus on that site… then it works fine

You prefer Firefox over Safari, no good ad blocking tools for Safari?
Used to Firefox. in actuality, I use Safari for a couple of things, but I’m not sure what blockers there are on it. It has automatic pop up blocking.. but not sure what else.

In fact… let me boot it up real quick to see if there is a blocker on it (darkmoon boot Safari). Nope… nothing on the Safari.

The million dollar question: are you blocking ads at MakeYouGoHmm? And if so, why? Or why not? (be honest now!)
Let me look at makeyougohmm. I don’t even know. Oh… nope. not blocking. I believe I turned it off due to the hmmcasts.

Ahh, so just show video and you have to see ads, interesting. Another benefit of the Hmmcasts! It doesn’t sound like you’ve ever visited any of the advertisers here? Have you?
I don’t click on ads. never have really. If I need something, I go and buy it. or find it online.

You’ve been a reader of Hmm for quite some time now. How long, do you know? We’ve become friends as a result of the blog, wouldn’t you say?
Yeah… friends from the blog, definitely… and I don’t remember. lol. have to search your archives to see when my first comment was about. Looks like at least April of 2005. I was reading it earlier than that though.

Now it would be a violation of Google Adsense for me to ask you to click any of the ads, so I’m naturally NOT going to ask you or any other person reading to do that. But you do realize these ads help finance the site and help pay for my time, of course?
Well that explains it… I was just wondering where exactly your ads were. cuz I don’t remember seeing them. and the reason for that is…. I usually just go to the main page. I don’t see ads if any there.. they’re on the individual page, thus…. I read everything I need to read… and never actually see an ad. If I comment though, I would… but then I’m focused on commenting, and not reading.

There used to be ads in the header at the top of the main, category and archive pages. Those were taken down recently. You never saw those ads? What do you think should be put there instead?
I never paid attention to the headers… heck… I didn’t even know you had the 9/11 names there until JohnnyRS [a fellow author in a group blog we contribute to] mentioned that he didn’t see it until he read the post. So I don’t even remember if they were flashy and rotating or not.

I doubt it. personally, I hate rotating banner ads. I’d probably much more be likely to click text links than rotating banner ads or flashing things.

Do you think that’s a good or bad thing that you don’t remember these ads?
Good on the design. Bad for advertising. I think that it might be better if it was integrated into the posts… or between the posts or what not. But really depends on the goal of it. I probably wouldn’t be your typical surfer either. Been around the block and know all the tricks of trying to get out of seeing an ad.

You don’t have a problem with ads integrated within the editorial section? As long as they are clearly marked? Or does it matter?
I don’t even care if it’s integrated direct between posts. as long as it’s clean.

Clean?
If it catches my attention, I might click it. Reason I don’t usually click stuff? Malware. viruses. etc. Habit. Flows together. So…. like those that design their websites with content in middle.. and banners down the sides? Not clean. it’s really messy, and easy to do. doesn’t look good at all.

Yet, if people had text ads, with text links… or had permanent picture placements, and when they didn’t have pictures in the layout, they put an ad there… From my perspective, that’s clean. You’re used to looking towards one particular area for a picture, there’s an ad. Basically like magazine style layouts. It’s non-intrusive, looks good on the whole, but if you want to look for an ad, you would see it

What about these PayPerPost and ReviewMe type paid posts, how do your feel about them? Would you rather see those than banner ads and text link ads outside the editorial?
Paid posts are fine, as long as it’s clearly marked as a “paid post”. Most people don’t mark them… and it’s tough to be objective when you’re getting paid to write it.

I personally think that most readers don’t mind reading it if it’s marked. They know that you might be leaning one way or the other… but they’re warned right off the bat.

I’ve passed on PayPerPost to date because it seems kind of cheap, especially with blogs with those gigantic buttons in the sidebar. I haven’t really tried donations either, what do you think of donations?
I think donations depend a lot on the content. If it’s controversial topics that you hit on all the time, like…. religion and politics ….the chance of donation is a lot greater.

However, the blogs that you and I write? I don’t think they’d do as well. Just a personal opinion. You have a lot more experience in advertising online than I do. Heck, I learned most of my blog advertising from you.

You could always put a little gold chest in at the top of makeyougohmm and see. I suppose it might work for you. wouldn’t for me. Just like in SL, some people get tips, some don’t. Same industry too.

I’ve been considering offering an optional paid subscriber side to MakeYouGoHmm, but paid subscriber areas with blogs haven’t really been a proven model yet. This possible future subscriber area might include things like a 100% complete ad-free site experience, access to the 200+ posts that haven’t been published (yet), access to content I plan to charge separately for in the future (think tangible material), seeing more of the editorial side of what gets to the site, getting to read and comment and perhaps even help shape posts before non-subscribers get to see them (a la slashdot), etc. Do you think if the price for something like this was nominal (say $5-25/year or something) you’d possibly be interested (not intended as a pitch, just curious) Or would you rather see better placement of ads to support these features with no subscription?
With your current type of content? Or more focused?

Reason I ask is because… more focused on particular topics.. I could see the paid scenario. Much like.. hmm.. I think Kos does that now, don’t read him anymore.

Of course… for $5/yr… that’s not terrible on the pocket, If you start breaking double digits though, I’ll come looking for ya. haha.

I think you’d actually be better off in writing the paid model for a multitude of blogs. So if you had say… 10 or so blogs together…. and paid could get you all of them. it might work out. depends on what type of content they are.

In getting me to shell out money, it really just depends. like I watched a whole bunch of short films by Wong Fu Productions just recently…. and I went and bought their first feature film for like $20.

I’d much rather pay for something tangible though, than donate. just me.

I just signed up for Consumer Reports online. $25 a year. The only thing that really gives you access to is their reports. Subscriber sites still work but the challenge is figuring out what people will be willing to pay for versus what they can get anywhere else. With a zillion blogs out there, it has to be more than just blog content, I think. I’m still working out the specifics, but it sounds like you’d be open to the concept. The possibility anyway.
Yup, depends on how it’s flushed out, Also realize that I’m not your everyday surfer though. that needs consideration.

Let’s finish by revisiting your comment about how you “never” click on ads. It isn’t really never, is it? It seems from some of your comments here that you do, in fact, sometimes click on ads and don’t have a huge problem with it assuming it’s tastefully done and not intrusive. You said you would be “much more likely to click text links than rotating banner ads.” You don’t have a problem with ads inside editorial or in clearly marked spaces.
Right… okay… it’s not “never”… that’s more like a… very seldom if at all. :p It depends on if it’s something I need or want.. and the advertiser is someone reputable.

That makes a huge difference. just like if I don’t know your company… first thing I do is look up the website. If it doesn’t look good, forget doing business. it’s a calling card these days. Same thing with ads.

Well hopefully if you trust the publisher, you trust that they are choosing trustworthy advertising. I mean, you seem to indicate you didn’t even really “feel” the ads around Hmm.
I know better. lol. If you had to clean certain computers from certain members of your family every time cuz it has like 200-500+ malware… you’d be hesistant too.

Yeah.. don’t really pay attention to it. But like I said… been around the web for a long long time. My eyes tend to track just content as it is. Ignores a lot of other stuff. That’s why I can skim fast. lol

Thanks for your time and feedback, darkmoon, it’s been enlightening on the subject of why you are blocking ads.
yw.

Hmm, a lot to think about
As I read back through this interview a number of things occured to me, but I’d rather read more about what you think on the subject and add to what I’m learning about this subject. Those of you that read and enjoy MakeYouGoHmm.com or perhaps are just passing through for this one post — especially those who regularly use ad blocking tool(s) — what advice can you offer me going forward? What do you recommend I do? Just don’t worry about ad blocking? Business as usual?

It must suck for Jerry Yang at Yahoo desiring the fruits of Google’s labor, eternally sucking on G-exhaust, only to settle for what Kara Swisher describes as (emphasis mine):

Using its own technology, BuzzTracker creates “custom content feeds” automatically that aggregate news, blogs, reviews, discussions, video and audio. But to add a level of quality, it handpicks the 90,000 online content sources it uses.

Sound strikingly similar to Google News, only with a lot more hand-picked sources? That was my first take. Google News claims to: “search and browse 4,500 news sources updated continuously” and is it possible that a smaller number of sources when covering news could be better than a larger set?

This morning I decided to test how good BuzzTracker news results were with a music group I’ve been following lately with interest compared against Google News for the same query. Buzztracker has a beta label in their logo, so that should be taken into consideration. Perhaps some or all of the things pointed out below will be changed or improved upon in the coming days.

The band: Van Halen has been gearing up for their tour with Diamond Dave and pictures of a recent rehearsal posted to photobucket by some fan in attendance along with a setlist of possible songs they might be playing on the upcoming tour surfaced. Before the photobucket pictures were taken down, I saw a group who looked to be having a good time playing some classic tunes. I’m psyched for the tour.

Buzztracker too fat, less filling
A search for van halen on BuzzTracker (BT) this morning returned the #1 story about Prince! (In case you haven’t heard yet, Prince has called in the lawyers to sue over copyright infringement on YouTube and other places). Buzztracker’s algos picked up the story based on a single sentence in a slew of news stories about musical artists. Perhaps they should weight the title better, because all the sentence in the pointed story about Prince does is point to another post at roadrunner. Not a good, relevant result for a ‘Van Halen’ news query.

Also, there is no timestamp so we don’t know how stale the story is and the source isn’t listed. Instead we’ve got the date 9/14 and the title. We can hover over the link to figure out the source, but it would have been nice to see the source listed somewhere next to the empty white space of the date.

The second story is a first hand account from Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian who went to see a Van Halen rehearsal “last night” (9/13?) and had a good time. It’s a very brief paragraph description where he compliments David Lee Roth’s vocals, something that that has remained in question by many fans and critics.

The third BT post is a book review on Van Halen from antiMusic.com. Sounds like an interesting book. Not a bad result.

The fourth is about Tommy Lee having a legal spat and some drama over whether he is in or out of Motley Crue. Two out of the four stories for the Van Halen query aren’t even central to Van Halen. Value to reader? Not very much. Onto the BuzzTracker interface:

There are two different spots echoing back what we just searched for? Why? The keyword “van halen” being echoed back in the search form is good enough. No need to waste valuable vertical space repeating what we just searched for. Also there is too much white space on the left and the BT logo itself is a hog. And what about the white space beneath their trademarked phrase? Looks like a placeholder for a 468×60 banner. We’ll compare this design to Google News shortly.

Google News, leaner, meaner, fresher
But first let’s check out the Van Halen Google News search.

Firstly, we see the freshest update from 27 minutes ago. The top story via Billboard.com covers how Ky-Mani Marley, son of Reggae legend Bob Marley feels about opening for Van Halen on a couple dates of their upcoming tour:

“I’m not nervous because I’m not going there to play reggae,” he says.” I have music for everybody. There’s definitely going to be some people surprised, I promise you. Of course, everybody’s not going to like it, but everybody can’t hate it. So my thing is, if I can capture one fan, then I’ve done my job.”

The second story is a thorough piece from Rolling Stone covering a recent Van Halen’s rehearsal, including the entire set. Much better than a paragraph from Anthrax’s guitarist, but look at what’s third? Scott Ian’s firsthand opinion of the Van Halen rehearsal at Blabbermouth.

The fourth story from Google News is the weakest from FMQB, it’s a paragraph sandwiched in with other news. It’s too bad both Google and BuzzTracker can’t figure out (?) how to separate a full news story from a snippet mixed with other news for relevancy, but that’s what you get with machine algorithms.

As for the Google News interface? No wasted white space, some of the links shown in the screenshot (like the alternate search result links) are a from the Firefox plugin Customize Google and otherwise wouldn’t be showing. You can sort by date or image, an option BT doesn’t offer. No competition.

Picking other queries to compare
Basing the value of any search service on one search result is bound to be fallible but I’m not going to take the space here to compare more than one search result in detail. I did other searches and was equally unimpressed. Instead I’m going to suggest readers compare their own queries of news results and share their own results either at their own blogs and trackback in or in the comments below. Am I wrong about BuzzTracker? Do you think it is serious competition to Google News?

A few quick disclaimers: I own both Yahoo and Google stock and MakeYouGoHmm isn’t listed in either news service as far as I can tell. I know we’re not in Google News and I’ve never seen any traffic from BuzzTracker. From my perspective this puts me in the camp of: should be excited about both instead of underwhelmed by yet another Yahoo move.

This seems like another attempt by Yahoo to buy something cool that isn’t. The only difference is this comes under Jerry Yang’s “new” leadership and 100 day window to make positive changes. The rumors say the purchase of BuzzTracker will be for around $5 million. Based on what I’ve seen, they would have been better building something in house by hiring somebody like Gabe from TechMeme. Pay him a decent fraction of the $5 million a year and I bet he’d take his TechMeme model over to Yahoo and deliver a more worthy Google News competitor.

Seeing several different reports that Apple has made a statement saying they’ve reached the one million iPhones sold mark after 74 days on the market. Apple stock (disclaimer: I own Apple stock) has been lagging since the announcement they slashed the price of the iPhone, but is getting a slight bump today.

I don’t recall if reports estimating the opening weekend selling 500,000 iPhones were ever validated by Apple (link anyone?), but 65% of stores had iPhones in stock on July 2. Macworld pointed out that 270,000 were sold the first 30 hours according to the fiscal third quarter.

Let’s assume only 300,000 iPhones were sold the first weekend instead of half a million predicted. Now, let’s do the math on the remaining 700,000 iPhones sold since then:

700,000 / 71 days
= 58,333 9,858 iPhones sold per day

compared to opening weekend (estimate):

300,000 / 3 days
= 100,000 iPhones sold per day

Overall numbers:

1,000,000 / 74 days
= 13,513 iPhones sold per day

I’d be curious to know how many iPhones had been sold at the higher price and see what the jump has been the last week at the lower price. I’m guessing there was a resurgence similar to the launch numbers. Will be interesting seeing how long it takes Apple to get to two million iPhones sold so we can do the math again. This gives us some mathematical benchmark to determine whether or not the iPhones are selling like iPods or declining in numbers.

With the holiday season approaching in the fourth quarter, it wouldn’t be surprising to see them rack up another million iPhone sales before year end. Will they reach three million? Four million?

We split most grocery shopping in our household between Fred Meyer and Costco (bulk items).

A few times we’ve patronized Wal-mart grocery, particularly when they have the good deals on specific produce like tomatoes. The Wal-mart located near the South Hill mall in Puyallup was the busiest Wal-marts in the state according to one of our clients who works as a manager there. It seems with this success Wal-mart got a bit greedy and decided to build a store within 10 miles of that location — silly for a store as large as Wal-mart — further south on Meridian a few blocks from the Fred Meyer where we shop and a mile or so from a dying Albertson’s. My favorite bakery french bread is Albertson’s, it’s kind of sad to see their fall.

Two Wal-mart stores could be worse than one — for Wal-mart
The new Wal-mart store which is almost the same distance as the other store from our home is nice, but now we notice neither Wal-mart in Puyallup is as busy as the one was before. I wonder how many of the South Hill Wal-Mart customers are now dividing their time between the two stores. With two stores are they doing twice the amount of shopping? Unlikely. I’ve heard from some other Wal-mart employees — again pure speculation and not checked — who work at the new store that Wal-mart wishes they wouldn’t have built the new store. I wonder if unwise expansion like this will become Wal-mart’s achille’s heel.

What Wal-Mart didn’t seem to count on — at least grocery-wise — is pictured in this post: Winco is the new super savings game in our area. Winco [note: their domain is wincofoods.com not their name] has very competitive grocery prices, just like Wal-mart’s claim to fame, based on our first trip there and unlike Fred Meyer and Costco, Winco Foods is 24 hours like Wal-mart.

Winco beats Fred Meyer on a lot of things and clearly challenges Wal-Mart grocery. We didn’t see any of those self-service checkout lines where you scan and bag your own groceries. Instead, Winco has checkers and they make you bag all your own groceries.

We don’t mind bagging our own groceries although it still seems like double work. When is a major grocery chain going to use technology to allows us to bag our groceries as we shop and then avoid the whole: take them out, scan them, put them on the conveyor, then put them in bags? I was hoping RFID would help but for whatever reason, that’s not here yet.

We like Fred Meyer because it seems more warm than the warehouse feel of Wal-mart. As for groceries, the deli, produce and butcher section is higher quality than Wal-mart. Winco was bright and everything was new and it didn’t feel as warehouse-like as Wal-mart although the store didn’t have the warmth as Fred Meyer. If we want bulk and good prices, we go to Costco, not Fred Meyer. We might be splitting more of our dry storage and staple purchases between Winco and Fred Meyer, though. Wal-mart? They should have stayed with one busy store versus two semi-busy stores.

The closest grocery store to us is Safeway (less than 1 mile from home) and the most expensive of the stores mentioned and don’t offer a rewards program with money back like Fred Meyer or Costco. They will bag everything for you and even take it out to your car if you like, but the money saved on the grocery bill is worth the gas to drive up on the hill. Also, I don’t think their meat is as good as Fred Meyer. Finally, the rewards check you receive periodically is nice.

How do you split up your grocery shopping?
Do you do your grocery shoppinp primarily at one store? Split it between stores like us based on what you’re buying? Do you prefer a single one stop shop like Wal-Mart and Fred Meyers or would you rather do your shopping at stores based on what yuo’re buying (groceries at one store, electronics at another, clothes at another)?

Ever buy something only to stop back a week or two later and see the price has dropped or the store across the street is running out the same thing cheaper? Good way to invoke instant buyer’s remorse.

Fortunately many retailers offer refunds for sale pricing, subject to a few rules like it can’t be a close-out price, internet-only deal, etc.

PriceProtectr.com is one of the more potentially useful sites/services I’ve looked at in awhile. Machines were made for work like Price Protectr (PP) is doing. Their service, free as of this writing and zero third party ads spotted (just how are they making money anyway?), will keep checking to see if the price for something you just bought went down and then email you when a lower price is detected so you can take action and manually request a refund.

For example, two of our recent bigger purchases are the Samsung HDTV 1080p which we paid $1,799 and the Sony Handycam for $999. After registering for PP, I went to Best Buy’s website and copied the sales URL page into Price Protectr.

PP showed me that our TV was on sale for $1,699 and the Handycam for $899. We printed the sales offer out and will be heading back to Best Buy later tonight to get our $200 refund. I’ll update this post if they give us any problems when we try to get the money back.

Those thinking about buying the new line of iPods announced today might want to bookmark Price Protectr now. Check out that iPod Touch model which seems typically Apple expensive at $399 for 16GB when you can now get the classic iPod with 160GB drive for $50 less ($349). 16GB might seem like a lot, but isn’t the minute you start building a good-sized music collection. A smaller 8GB iPod Touch is available for $299.

Apple slashed the price of its 4GB iPhone, which seemed to negatively impact stock price today (disclaimer: I own Apple stock) so if you just bought one of those, PP should be lighting up with good news soon (unless this is considered a close-out deal). If you’re buying any consumer electronics or TVs, this site could definitely help make sure you get the best deal.

Want to make sure that only websites you authorize can use your Google Adsense code? The Adsense team has added a new feature (thanks Anuj Seth) that can be accessed as follows:

STEP 1. login to your Google Adsense account
STEP 2. click on the “Adsense Setup” tab
STEP 3. click on the “Allowed Sites” link
STEP 4. make sure the radio button for “Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account” is checked. A form will open up below that looks like the screenshot below.

STEP 5. Fill out the list of domains where the Google Ads code will be authorized. Note: if you add a new site that will use Google Adsense do not forget to add to this list or you won’t get paid. Ouch, definitely don’t forget this step. One way to remember might be to make sure you always target every ad spot (you do mark every ad spot for performance reasons already, right?) and then when you do that, hop on over and add to the Allowed Sites list.

Subdomains ok, but can’t limit to blogs located in subdirectory
Currently you can’t add sites inside a directory. For example, we have a blog still located at blogcharm.com (for archives only, it’s not being updated any longer) still running Google Adsense. Since Blogcharm doesn’t use subdomains (name.blogcharm.com) Google throws the following error when trying to add the correct subcategory blogcharm.com/vtor: “”blogcharm.com/vtor/” at line 6 invalid: URL must not end with a path”

Why is this a problem? Because any blogger at Blogcharm could run your ads if you authorized the entire domain. Even a site that violated the Adsense TOS which could put your — or in this case our — Adsense account in jeopardy. I removed the Google adsense from our Blogcharm site. It would be nice to see the Adsense team realize there are situations that go beyond subdomain support and into subdirectory support that would be nice to have as an option.

All in all, a handy feature to help better control your account. At least you won’t have some nemesis online throwing up a bunch of crap sites that violate the Adsense TOS attempting to get your account banned.

Ok, well maybe it’s not swag per se as the title suggests, but it’s among the nicer shareholder snail mail packages I’ve ever received.

Click To Play

Hmmcast #170 downloads
PSP .mp4 (480×272) iPod .mp4 (640×480) Windows .wmv (1480×1080 HD)

If you ever said there was no business model for MySpace, time to start chomping on those words right about now. Ashley Qualls, age 17, the founder of the site Whateverlife.com (pictured) has a free MySpace layouts website that has seven million monthly visitors and does 60 million page views. Where does all that traffic lead in the current web world where eyeballs attract sponsor dollars?

DoshDosh (hat tip to Mom Gadget) writes:

Her first Adsense paycheck was $2,790 and she has already rejected a $1.5 million buyout offer.

DoshDosh picked up on the Fastcompany article that shares more details of young Ms. Qualls like she hails from Detroit, doesn’t have a driver’s license yet, the probate courts have ruled that neither her parents or her can manage her finances, dropped out of high school, has a lawyer and wants to become emancipated.

And she’s only 17?! Yikes, our oldest teen is her age and he still hasn’t gotten his first job (he’s looking). Hopefully somebody in Ms. Qualls’ financial camp is telling her to invest wisely. Sounds like a lot to juggle at her age.

Kudos to her entrepreneurial spirit.

Hmmcast #166 mp4

Maybe you already have a million or more dollars, maybe not, but the question is what would you do if someone gave you a million bones? Would you save it? Invest it? Spend it? Squander it? I doubt many people would admit to the latter.

I find the answer people give to this question intriguing. These days a million dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to, unfortunately, but you can still do a lot. I read an article from one of the finance sites awhile back (sorry, didn’t bookmark the link, but would be happy to put in place if anybody else locates) that suggested a good target retirement principal sum these days is 5-10 million dollars. Naturally, that number depends on your family’s standard of living and what you feel like you’ll need, keeping inflation in mind, when you reach retirement age.

Though the video is a joke, the topic isn’t.

Bunch of stories hitting the news reader this morning about a service coming from PayPal called PayPal Pay Later. Reportedly it’s going to offer merchants the ability to give customers using PayPal the ability to finance $50-1,500+ with deals like 90 days same as cash.

I searched PayPal’s site both outside and inside (we’ve been PayPal business members since 2002) and couldn’t find anything to confirm and the few sources that did link something chose to link to the paypal.com homepage. Maybe I need my glasses checked, do you see anything on their homepage about this? Don’t you love it when you can’t confirm news from the horse’s mouth?

Piecing it together from e-commerce-guide (emphasis mine):

The PayPal Pay Later service is issued by GE Money Bank, one of the world’s leading providers of consumer credit. PayPal’s new deferred payment option is currently available to consumers and select merchants in the U.S.

The GE Money Bank website is no more helpful with the news about where you can see/use this in action and when it will be available to small businesses. Heck, I can’t even locate a list of select merchants that are using the service to point readers to. Striking out big time on this one, sorry. I’ll defer this one to updates in the comments.

I’m a fan of using these same as cash offers provided you pay them off before the due date and don’t incur any accrued interest charges. The new bedroom furniture we bought recently was with a one year same as cash deal. We’re going to let our money work for us and then pay off before the year is up. I wish the new car we’ve been shopping for would be offered like this, but you never (?) see vehicles offered that way.

In the long run, this could hurt established Bill Me Later, especially if the credit is handed out more liberally at PayPal Pay Later. They best be careful though, I remember a few places like Smith’s Home Furnishings that have gone under due to giving credit to credit unworthy applicants. However in the short term I don’t think Bill Me Later (Hmm Review grade: A) needs to worry much about PayPal Later until, well, later.