Monthly Archive for January, 2008

Ryanair in Schoolie Shocker

Published
by
RHM
on 30 January 2008
in Adverts, News, Ryanair, Stupidity and WTF
. 0 Comments

Ryanair Schoolie AdSo Ryanair have been criticised by the ASA for their amazingly tacky advert featuring a model dressed as a schoolgirl: the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the “irresponsible” image appeared to link teenage girls with sexually provocative behaviour.

Now personally, I have reservations about people who find images of women dressed as schoolgirls sexy, but that’s probably because I have a daughter of school age.

Needless to say Ryanair knew exactly what they were doing as they obviously think there’s no such thing as bad publicity:

“The ASA becomes more Monty Pythonesque by the day.  This latest ruling shows how absurd and out of touch this quango really is.  It is remarkable that a picture of a fully clothed model is now claimed to cause “serious or widespread offence”, when many of the UK’s leading daily newspaper regularly run pictures of topless or partially dressed females without causing any serious or widespread offence…”

Maybe because they’re not regularly dressed as schoolgirls to broaden Ryanair’s appeal to the frequent paedo flyer…

Taking Over

Published
by
RHM
on 30 January 2008
in Syndicated
. Closed
Taking Over, originally uploaded by Captain Blue. Bailey’s taken over my desk.

F1 Numberplate Sold for a Record Price

Published
by
RHM
on 30 January 2008
in News
. 0 Comments

There was news earlier this week that Essex County Council had sold the numberplate F1 to a businessman for £360,000 and would be using the proceeds to assist with road safety initiatives. Here’s the video link for the story »

That’s a fairly obscene price to pay for a numberplate but the new owner reckons he’s bought himself a good investment. Of coure, he could have bought it for around £150,000 when it was up for sale 3½ years ago…

RIP Jeremy Beadle

Published
by
RHM
on 30 January 2008
in TV
. 0 Comments

So Jeremy Beadle has died aged 59. No, it’s not a prank or hidden camera thing, he’s died from pneumonia.

Liking Jeremy Beadle was always a dirty little secret, but who could really not enjoy the schadenfreude you got from watching his shows?

And who knew that he is thought to have raised £100M for charities? RIP charitable prankster dude.

More on Yuku Pricing

Published
by
RHM
on 30 January 2008
in Syndicated
. Closed

Or should that read “Moron Yuku Pricing”? I wonder…

Since my recent posting about the pricing for an ad-free Yuku message board, there have been some updates to the pricing pages because their customers and indeed their own staff don’t really understand the pricing model for Yuku or how it will be calculated(and understandably so).

The latest version of the Yuku pricing is set out here: http://www.yuku.com/home/goldpricing/

“Large Yuku communities that generate over 50,000 page views a month can participate in the Gold Ad-Free Community offering using easy credit card or PayPal payments. Advertising can be removed from community pages that serve Yuku ads at a rate of $0.20 per 1,000 pages served. Yuku serves ads on only half of all the pages in a community, and the Gold Ad-Free Community contributions are applied only to those pages. Pages that do not carry Yuku ads do not count against the contributions. The minimum contribution is US $1.00.”

So for your dollar, you’d get something between 5,000 and 10,000 page views per month, depending upon how exactly ezboard/Yuku are going to deliver those
ads to which visitors at which frequency. And if I understand the pricing correctly - though even Yuku staff don’t understand it - that would be over and above your $6 a month.

So how much would a board cost? Well we abandoned our ezboard after they lost a year’s messages but still have it on ezboard because they refused to refund our community chest. We now have a self-hosted vBulletin board. It’s not a huge board by any means, but the stats. are useful: in December 2007, we saw successful requests for pages at 541,147.

So on Yuku’s pricing formula - if I understand it correctly - the equivalent Yuku board would cost us:

Basic monthly cost: $6
Ads. served: (541,147-50,000)/2/1,000x$0.20=$49.12

Total monthly cost= $55.12

Total annual cost = $661.44

How much do we pay? $120…

Now like I said, our message board is not a heavy traffic board - it caters for a one make motorcycle model that’s been discontinued and which wasn’t a massive seller when it was being built. And yet the equivalent board on Yuku would cost us five times as much! And still no sign of the promised $3-$5,000 in revenue sharing for board owners - I wonder where that’s gone?

Leaving Yuku really is the only sensible option.

Cherished Number Plates

Published
by
RHM
on 24 January 2008
in Bikes and Vehicles
. 0 Comments

As chance would have it, on The Rev Counter today there was a thread about personalised/cherished/vanity numberplates.

I have a couple of them: one for the car and one for the bike. I was lucky enough to get them directly from the DVLA a few years back. It’s interesting to see what similar plates are worth and one way to do this is to visit one of the website runs by sellers/brokers of numberplates.

I have found in the past that the amount some brokers will offer you for your numberplate is way below what they will seek to sell it for, pocketing the difference for themselves rather than taking a flat fee or a percentage of the sale value. One leading company did just that when I approached them: the difference was many thousands of pounds…

Anyway, I’ve since found out about Cape Plates who offer a free valuation service as well as offering to sell your plate for you;  they’ve also got a nice selection of Irish number plates for sale if your budget doesn’t stretch to a full-on cherished number. And yes, I will be paid a nominal amount to mention them and no, it doesn’t mean I’m writing this with a positive spin.

I wonder what their valuation would be of my two plates; 2000 RM and 3 RHM?

favicon

Published
by
RHM
on 24 January 2008
in Internet and Vehicles
. 0 Comments

I’m a tad miffed: a favicon I prepared for The Revcounter han’t been used there. Oh the humanity!

PayPerPost

Published
by
RHM
on 22 January 2008
in Adverts, Internet and PayPerPost
. 0 Comments

As readers of my blogs should by now be aware, I have been running Google AdWords on them for a while now; they generate a small amount of revenue every time a visitor to the site clicks on one of them.

Always keen to ‘monetise’ my blogs, I came across payperpost by following a link from another blogger’s website (I forget who now).

PayPerPost basically act as the middle man between potential blog advertisers and bloggers: we are given the choice of “opportunities” whereby an advertiser wants bloggers to either review a product, website or service or to simply help create a ‘buzz’ about something such as the launch of a new website, artiste or whatever.

The potential advertisers then make an offer to pay x number of dollars for a blog entry that matches their criteria: as a blogger I can see what they want and if I am prepared to review or mention the product or service or to help create that buzz then I can.

Some advertisers will want only a positive flavour to the potential blog post in which case as a blogger you can choose whether to write it that way, or - as is the case on this blog - choose not to write the review at all.

Advertisers can choose either to invite the whole blogging world to write a blog entry or they can approach individual bloggers to write a review for them. There’s a button over there in the sidebar to allow potential advertisers to contact me directly to negotiate a blog entry here.

So it’s early days yet for me: I’ve only just received approval for this blog from PayPerPost. We’ll see how they do … and yes, they are paying me for this entry!


Credit Card Balance Transfers

Published
by
RHM
on 21 January 2008
in Finance
. 0 Comments

Funny how things change.

Once upon a time, you could transfer balances from one credit card to another and you’d receive a combination of either a low interest rate or a 5% reduction or a combination of the two.

A post will shortly be syndicated here from Crass Stupidity railing at Barclaycard.  Barclaycard pay for Google AdWords so an advert appeared in that post for Barclaycard! Anyone clicking that link - thereby making me a few cents - would be taken to a marketing sub-site of Barclaycard’s where they set out some of the bewildering number of cards they offer, many with offers of low interest rates on balance transfers but surprisingly (to me at least) there’s a 2½% transfer fee.

How things change!

Oh! Suit you, Sir!

Published
by
RHM
on 19 January 2008
in Clothing and Fashion
. 0 Comments

Really quite chuffed today. I’ve been meaning to buy a new suit for absolutely ages now and the opportunity presented itself today.

I was dragged in to Norwich to help choose between a couple of different pairs of glasses for Mrs. RHM. As we walked past Moss (the shop formerly known as Moss Bros), I noticed they had a sale on, so I popped in to look at what they had.

I had been hoping to pick up a lightweight wool suit from around £250 from M&S so I had a quick poke and was very pleased to find a Cerruti 1881 fine lambswool two piece suit. In 42R, that comes with 36R trousers that I thought might be a problem: my jeans choice is always Levi 501 34L. The assistant, James - who it must be said was a digustingly stylish bloke - said that the trousers were probably akin to a 35″ due to their cut and flat front. Hmm…

So I tried the suit on and it fit really well (I reckon). The best bit was the price: marked down from £299 to £199 to £149!

It’s last season’s style with a three button jacket, but I’m fine with that: part of James’s sales patter was that they’d no doubt be featuring exactly the same suit in this year’s collection at £300 next week, though having looked at the Moss web site, it’s likely they’ll be two button jackets.

I tried it on again when I got home with a decent shirt from Charles Tyrwhitt and my business shoes and I have to say it looks superb.

overtone