28032008277, originally uploaded by Captain Blue.
Archive for the 'Syndicated' Category
My bike is safely tucked up for winter (apart from the odd bit of fettling). So being a dutiful citizen, I declared SORN online when the tax disc expired in the Autumn.
So far, so good.
I have a couple of ride-outs coming up in a few weeks, so it’s time for me to apply for a tax disc to run from 1 April - I’ll do 6 months which will take me through my riding season from Kawasaki Day at the Ace Café London through to the ZRXOC Medbourne Meet in September.
Bearing in mind, you have to allow sufficient time for postage, etc. I thought I’d tax it today to run from 1 April.
No. You can’t do that. The stupid system will only accept my taxing the bike from 1 March, so the Government is insisting I pay tax for the last 24 days, plus however long it would take for the tax disc to arrive after they process the application tomorrow. Let’s see … yes, it would probably arrive around the 1 April and I’d have been unable to use the bike for the first month of the six I’d have paid for, plus I wouldn’t be legal if I wanted to do the September meet.
Absolutely useless!
Of course this is operated by the same people who tried to claim that the latest Budget was all for environmentally friendly vehicles … whilst upping the tax for bikes. Bikes that are perfect for single ‘occupancy’ commutes. And those that do not cause congestion…
Looks like KickApps want to see some return after they’ve been sold a pup.
The Yuku Support Forum [sic] is now displaying ads. like there’s no tomorrow. And they’re not just coming from one source either. Adding into the mix all the tracking services they’re using to Yuku code and the up-and-down-more-than-a-whore’s-drawers Yuku servers, is it any wonder their whole system is slow and timing out regularly?
Let’s have a look at a sample thread on their support forum [sic]. In addition to all the scripts necessary for the software to actually run, it loaded content/tracking from:
- partner.googleadservices.com (x5)
- pagead2.googlesyndication.com (x3)
- optimizedby.rmxads.com
- ad.yieldmanager.com
- google-analytics.com
- edge.quantserve.com
Wow!
I suppose that all those keyword-generated ads. are why they are running around hiding/closing/deleting threads that are in any way critical of the dog’s dinner that is Yuku: you wouldn’t want disaster recovery ads. or personal accident/negligence lawyer ads. turning up all over the place, now would you?
Almost two years ago, I posted about the big push by Yuku staff to get users to switch browsers to Firefox so they could enjoy the best Yuku “experience”, i.e. fewer crashes and failures, because they didn’t appear to be testing on the most popular browser out there. They also wrote a Firefox extension to encourage people (though guess what - they’ve forgotten to make the latest version widely available…)
The problem is that Firefox can run a number of extensions including those that block the precious advertising they rely on so much… Oops!
Of course, the fact that it still isn’t cross-browser and cross-platform compatible even after all this time doesn’t help their cause - see this recent thread on issues with Safari on the Mac.
Le plus ça change…
According to the Office for National Statistics, inflation is running at 2.2%. Clearly no-one told South Norfolk District Council about this as our new council tax demand is up 4.0% on last year.
Talking of last year, do you remember how last year Norfolk Police Authority couldn’t keep to any sort of budgeting and raised their bill by 6.9%?
Well this year, they’ve surpassed themselves and increased it by 8.3%! Clearly proper business governance is anathema to Norfolk Police Authority/Norfolk Constabulary. They say:
“Budget Issues
Norfolk Constabulary has suffered from successive years of under-funding by Government to the point where we regularly had to dip into our reserves. We can no longer afford to keep doing that.”
Erm, isn’t that what reserves are for? And yes, we know you claim to have suffered in previous years: you’ve been more than happy to share your pain with us by never living within inflation-matching rises and instead passing it on to us.
Oh and they also say that they are “Performing Well”:
“…our detection rate rose to 32% - the highest we have ever achieved…”
Which means they didn’t detect 68% of reported crime. Still, as long as they detect those heinous speeding motorists on the main trunk roads, eh… Yes, they’ve decided to increase transport costs from £3.33M to £4.03M this year, that’s a 21% increase!
Then when you look at South Norfolk Council’s budget, it’s good to see that they intend spending over £28M (out of £50M) on “Finance, Staffing and Property, including Revenues & Benefits, Human Resources, IT Services”. That’s not housing by the way. Nice little earner and a cushy job if you can get it.
Yes, this self-proclaimed “World’s No.1 Webhost” are showing that they are in fact the world’s no. 1 useless bunch of tossers.
All the websites we host with them that rely on databases to function are down. Their new premium rate customer services number allows you to call them, start racking up the charges and then after being put on hold they tell you that all their advisers are busy, goodbye and insist you hang up.
Nice little earner for them, eh?
If ever there was a company whose senior management’s witterings were to be treated with a pinch of salt, it was Yuku under the leadership of Robert Labatt.
When he made the famous “better than free” launch video at DEMOfall 2005, he claimed that Yuku was better than free because they shared advertising revenue with the community leaders - watch from around 3 minutes 40 seconds in. At 4 minutes 20 seconds, Labatt says:
“…we’ve done modelling on the hundreds of thousands of communities that we have on ezboard and we believe that an average large community should be able to receive somewhere in the neighbourhood of three to five thousand dollars a month if their site is working well and they’ve got lots of people on it.”
So then. Lots of modelling done and a statement that they expect “average large” communities to be making $3-$5,000 a month in shared advertising revenues. Now Yuku was not and is not a charity or not-for-profit organisation, so I would have expected them to take by far the lion’s share of advertising revenues those communities were generating. After all, Yuku would have the infrastructure and bandwidth provision to think of as well as the support and development costs. But even if we suggest that no, they’ll actually do a 50/50 split, that would suggest they were expecting ad. revenues for “average large” communities of $10,000 a month or $120,000 a year.
Wow! That’s a lot of revenue. And that’s just the “average large” boards.
But wait a minute. One of the board owners of one of Yuku’s headline boards, Survivor Sucks, recently posted in the support forum with a pricing query as he was struggling to understand the costings. Yuku Gold pricing is explained here. It says:
“To work out in advance what 1 year of ad-free page views could cost you, use the No Ads/Opted total for 1 month, and apply it to this equation:
(ad-free page views/1000) * .2 * 12 (ad-free page views divided by 1000, then multiplied by .2, then multiplied by 12)”
Right. The board owner’s post quotes a load of stats. but not a whole month’s worth. So I’ll take the middle seven days from his quote (19/2 to 25/2):
02-25 123644 18115 59942
02-24 91601 16377 62084
02-23 91765 14114 57279
02-22 116085 16880 70602
02-21 128017 18510 67227
02-20 129372 17541 67069
02-19 116161 19595 68929
Tally up the last column and the total “No Ads/Opted” is 453,132.
So (453,132/1000) *.2 *52 (for weeks instead of months) = $4,712. In other words, Yuku would be willing to forgo any advertising revenue income from Survivor Sucks in return for receiving $4,712 a year.
Now don’t forget that Survivor Sucks is a favoured/featured board at Yuku: it even appears as one of the three shown on this page and has a special mention on KickApps’ Cameron Shaw’s Yuku profile page. So how is it that Yuku will apparently accept less than $5,000 to refrain from adding adverts on Survivor Sucks when Labatt was saying that they should easily have expected to be sharing revenues 20 to 30 times that large at the very least?
Or maybe all that supposed cost/data modelling and all that bluster at DEMOfall was just to try to get someone to buy Yuku/ezboard for as much as possible?
KickApps must really be kicking themselves…
I had a journey to go on recently: Google Maps reckoned the outward leg should have taken 3 hours. The Garmin i3 (aka Psycho SatNav Bitch as ’she’ tends to taunt me with unrealistic targets, even the way I drive) reckoned around 2¼ hours. My Nokia N95-8GB with Nokia Maps, on the other hand, reckoned 4 hours. Something of a disagreement.
In the end, the combination of the time of day, the occasional spray and muck left over from gritting (even though it hadn’t been icy) and the way I drive meant it took 2½ hours.
The routes themselves were almost identical, the only difference being the route in or around Grantham.
And the other differences were:
- the Garmin had the speed camera database to warn me of “accident blackspots”;
- as the Nokia was on the cradle and connected to the car kit, every spoken direction muted the radio which is a tad annoying when the voice prompts get a little frantic; and
- the Nokia’s display also shows the current speed (good) and the time left rather than the ETA (bad).
…in terms of page views and Yuku pricing.
Our self-hosted vBulletin board’s stats. for February 2008 saw successful requests for pages at 675,353.
According to Yuku’s pricing formula, ads. are shown on topic pages and not the summary pages, so it’s difficult to estimate completely accurately what a like-for-like cost would be - I wonder if that’s a conscious decision by KickApps to avoid direct comparisons? - but the equivalent Yuku board would cost us something like the following:
Ads. served: 675,573/1,000x$0.20=$135.08
Ouch!
Our monthly cost? Less than $10…
Total annual cost = $1,620
How much do we pay? $120
Now like I said, our message board is not a heavy traffic board but I wouldn’t want to be throwing away $1,500 every year…
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