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    7月28日

    Do Contributors Want To Turn Their Hobbies Into Jobs?

    I haven't been blogging or reading blogs a lot lately but I did take particular note of a series of posts discussing whether top contributors on social networking, bookmarking or user-generated content sites like Digg, Flickr, etc. should be paid for their efforts. Dare's post nicely summarizes the debate between Caterina, Anil and others.
     
    Here's what I believe on this subject:
    • Users should receive value for their contributions
    • Successful sites like Flickr and Digg shouldn't pay users
    • Flickr and Digg are successful because users do get value for their contributions, the value is just not in the form of currency
    • If Flickr and Digg started paying top users money it would lessen or eliminate the value they are already getting
    • I put more trust in content created for reasons other than money. If you met someone who recommended a product to you would you trust their recommendation more or less if you knew they got paid to do so?
    • Regarding as yet unsuccessful sites (too many to name), all bets are off. They need to do whatever is necessary to get over the cold start but if they don't provide some value other than money then I don't believe their model will be successful or sustainable.

    I won't try to describe what I mean by "value" above because it is different for every contributor but, in the absence of monetary compensation on those sites, we can assume they are getting some value out of contributing. Use terms like "desire to connect with others" or "reputation" if you like but they are over-simplifications.

     

     
    10:53 | 阅读评论 (1) | 固定链接 | 查看引用通告 (2) | 写入日志 | Tech
    7月9日

    How Google Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Click-Fraud

    Everyone knows that click-fraud will push down advertiser ROI and put downward pressure on keyword prices. You could call this "self-correcting" and indeed Eric Schmidt of Google does in this ZDNet article. Perhaps he's likening click-fraud to currency markets where international currency rates correct thanks to the selfless efforts of arbitrageurs who take quick note of imbalances of currency rates between countries and make trades that have the effect of quickly correcting those imbalances.
     
    Click-fraud is different in a few notable ways:
    • Click-fraud is not a systemic imbalance, it is human made
    • Click-fraud doesn't create a fluid market. Each instance of fraud has perhaps 3 (AdWords) or 4 (parties), each with different information and motivations. In currency arbitrage, many parties have access to the same information.
    • The arms race nature of click-fraud execution and detection means there won't likely be a stable equilibrium. At best we might see some stairstep equilibria, that's assuming Google and other ad networks make enough progress on detection to actually leapfrog the click-frauders once in a while, which seems unlikely based on recent experience. They're always trailing.

    I don't believe ad networks with click-fraud can be truly self-correcting if individual parties have the ability to create imbalances and if there is not free access to the data by numerous parties who have the ability to take action to erase those imbalances. If click-fraud were just systemic rather than human made then there might be an opportunity to create a market and allow click-fraud arbitrageurs to correct it but as of now, Google and the other ad networks are in the lucrative position of being able to passively pocket the imbalances without actually correcting the problem.

     

    9:45 | 阅读评论 (7) | 固定链接 | 写入日志 | Tech