Archive for November 18, 2002

From the 'don't trip over the nickels' dept.

So CNET decided that it is not making enough money off of its venerable download.com. Given that massive download sites like the one we run also have successful developer marketing programs, this move may have made some sense to the suits that need to show bottom line dollars for CNET's investors. However, the CNET approach makes it difficult for the thousands of software developers that count on websites like download.com to reach a broad segment of potential software buyers.

While we sympathize with the need to generate a little more revenue from any content site, we wanted to try and do it in a way that was more win-win by taking a page out of the play books of Overture and Google and only charging software developers for marketing programs on a results driven basis.

So we did.

The $99 (or more) that CNET charges comes out of a developers pocket regardless of whether or not the marketing is actually working. (I'm so proud of us! ;) Isn't competition great?

obDisclaimer:

I got paid for the next post to the blog. Its a Tucows-thing. Elliot calls it "BlogPR" which makes this particular post sound more insidious than it actually is. It ultimately got blogged because I wanted it to, but I also want to make sure that you aren't sleeping and forgot where I worked (or that Tucows first love was software ;)

Regardless, it will be extremely interesting to see how this pans out (using push in a pull-type medium). And PS - don't forget that 'next' in blogspeak means 'previous' when you read top to bottom ;)

'Riverdancing' or 'Nick, Nack, Not-a-whack'?

neat. I guess the google-dance must be on, because in the last twenty-four hours, a search for "Somebody Riverboard" has gone from being a whack, to 45 minutes ago when there were just two results (and I was thinking that I now had a nice keyword for my website) to now when the same search shows three results. And it appears that the nice people over at Somebody's Riverboard Company do have a website. Now they just need a domain name and someone that can optimize that java banner they're running ;)

Mon, 18 Nov 2002 19:12:11 GMT

Boy - that was quick. Now its definitely not a whack.

obRant:

<rant>I really need to get my name removed from the InterNIC whois database. Anybody that thinks being the primary contact for a registrar sounds easy or fun needs to have their head examined. I'm still amazed at the number of people that have no clue that there are multiple registrars and that http://whois.opensrs.net isn't prepended with a "www" and doesn't end with a ".com" - I kid you not. I swear, if this is any indication as to how people in the real world view domain names, we should just collapse everything into .com and put a universal wildcard in the zone that prepends www. to everything. </rant>

!Censored?

This is an interesting link. As I mentioned in my Shanghai notes, byte.org is inaccessible from within PCR - but given that CN-NIC isn't likely to post a broken link, byte.org *is* accessible from within CN-NIC's LAN. Odd.