Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains – June 1, 2007

Business 2.0 magazine has a great feature on Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains. Ham has parlayed users’ foul-ups and ignorance about how to use the Internet into a fortune. Try this: type “www.newyorktimes.cm” (not .com) into your browser. You’ll come to a website that has lots of come-ons for publications. That’s the work of Kevin Ham, who has not only snapped up thousands of erroneous URLs typed by fumble-fingered users but who has cut an ingenious deal with the poor African country of Cameroon – which owns the “.cm” domain – to intercept traffic intended for the big-brand websites.

I had lost track of the value of domains after “business.com” sold for $1 million in the late 90s. This article shows that the domain trade is alive and well and becoming very sophisticated. No one is more sophisticated about it than Kevin Ham. This is an excellent profile of someone who’s making money by working under the Internet covers. You can argue about whether his work is contributing in any meaningful way to the economy or furthering the advance of human knowledge, but what you can’t argue about is whether Kevin Ham is succeeding. He’s filthy rich.

More evidence of a newspaper death spiral

Alan Mutter writes perceptively on the recent plunge in newspaper revenues on his outstanding Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.

“Print advertising sales for newspapers appear to be on track to plunge by $2 billion this year, which would make for the worst performance in a decade other than the disastrous period following 9/11,” he writes, noting that this will be the first time newspaper revenues have ever declined in a time of economic prosperity.

First quarter revenues for classified advertising – the most profitable part of the newspaper business – were off a staggering 13.2% in the first quarter, Mutter notes. Automotive advertising, which is newspapers’ Rock of Gibraltar, was off nearly 13% last year. Nearly all of this business is going online and it’s not coming back.

I’ve characterized the scenario facing major metro dailies as a “death spiral” in my own writing on this topic. Alan Mutter’s statistics and analysis bear this out. In a spiral, the speed of descent increases as the object hurtles toward the ground. The numbers indicate that a spiral could be developing. According to Mutter, print advertising revenues were off .5% in 2005, 4.6% in 2006 and are on track to decline 6.4% in 2007. It’s too early to call this a pattern, but in an industry that Mutter notes “has been masterful at increasing its revenues in good times and bad,” this twist of fortune is unprecedented and alarming.

Desperate acts like the San Francisco Chronicle’s recent decision to eviscerate its newroom staff indicate that the industry is in panic mode. The Chron is basically committing hara-kiri rather than continuing the fight. I suspect it’s only the first of many to do so.

Mutter, a newspaper-editor-turned-entrepreneur, offers some historical context:

“In retrospect, it is clear that newspaper publishers were lulled into complacence in the early years of the Internet by their prior skill in achieving consistent sales growth in even negative economic conditions. But the growth was not achieved as much by recruiting new customers – or even selling more advertising to existing ones – as by using their monopoly-like positions to force hefty annual rate increases on advertisers who essentially had nowhere else to go.”

Monopolies thrive in the absence of competition, but they tend to let atrophy the skills needed to compete. Newspapers have almost no weapons with which to fight the online hordes that are devastating their business.

Front page of the Merc

In The New Influencers, I wrote about the TechCrunch blog and suggested that it may have more influence in Silicon Valley than the San Jose Mercury News. Fortunately, the editors at the business section of the Merc overlooked that aside when they chose to feature Dean Takahashi’s column about the book on the front page of the May 17 business section. I’m grateful to Dean and to the newspaper, which is THE paper of record in Silicon Valley.

The day this feature appeared, New Influencers jumped into the top 1,200 titles on Amazon. It’s slipped since then, but the sales rating stayed within the top 10,000 for 10 days. Hopefully, this will get some other people reading and talking about the book.

Interestingly, this is the first time I’ve had a photo published in a major newspaper (the shot of Peter Rojas is mine). Unfortunately, the photo ran with a credit to the book publisher, not the photographer. Ah, well. Such is life.

(Click on the photo to get a larger image)

Tool Talk: saving and finding stuff made easier

Having worked independently for 18 months now, I thought I’d write about some of the technology tools I’ve discovered to make my life easier and my work more efficient. In this installment, I’ll tell how I manage my reading.

Like a lot of people, I need to do a lot of reading to keep current. Nearly all of my reading is online these days, and I tend to get to it in snatches of a half hour or so, usually early in the morning or late at night.

The constant stream of newsletters and RSS updates that cross my desktop don’t live by my schedule, though, so I rely on three tools to help me organize content and find it when I need it. They are Google Desktop, del.icio.us and Firefox, and I wouldn’t want to be without them.

Google Desktop is an incredibly powerful product that indexes nearly every word on your computer. With it, I can find files by keyword with almost instantaneous speed. The shortcut to bring up the search box is hitting the Control key twice. That brings up a small Ajax applet that delivers results as you type, which is much faster than using the full-page Web interface.

But I find the hidden value of Google Desktop is the information it indexes in hidden and cached files that would never be visible otherwise. This is an invaluable tool when you’ve discarded something you never thought you’d need and then suddenly find yourself wishing you had that information back.

For example, last week I was listing some rental property on Craigslist.org. I wanted to find the original listing that I had used last August when the apartment was last rented. I never bothered to commit that information to a document, but Google Desktop was able to pull it out of cache memory: it literally found the page I had viewed on Craigslist when I posted the ad nine months ago.

This feature is also useful when traveling because it essentially gives you access to web pages when disconnected. Many times I’ve been able to fish information out of my computer that was on a website I visited weeks or months ago but which was still available to me because it was cached.

Which brings me to how I use these tools to manage my reading. Much of my news comes in the form of links in e-mails and RSS feeds. I use Firefox’s tabbed browsing feature to open these links in tabs (Control-click on a link does this automatically), which I can look at later. At some point during the day, I’ll go through these tabs and tag them to my del.icio.us account using the bookmark extension, a plug-in that basically replaces Firefox bookmarks with a del.icio.us back-end.

Saving a page on del.icio.us is as easy as striking Control-D and typing a tag. For articles I want to read later, I the tagl “readit.” Later, when I have time, I’ll select the “readit” tag from the del.icio.us browser plug-in and choose the “Open in Tabs” option. This automatically opens every item with the readit tag in its own tab. If I’m about to hit the road, I can shut the lid on my laptop at this point. When I open it on the plane, all the pages are still there. What’s also cool is that with Google Desktop, these pages are automatically cached for retrieval offline, so I can actually read web pages on the plane, even if I haven’t read them previously.

Be there for Thursday’s webcast!

Be sure to register for the BtoB Magazine webcast on the subject of “Reaching IT Pros through Social Media” on Thursday, May 24. I’ll be in the company of Robert Scoble and and Mike Moran, IBM Distinguished Engineer and author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc.

I am seriously not worthy of being in the presence of such remarkable people, so sign up, show up and help me sound good!

Who’s got time to read fiction?

The always provocative Michael Fitzgerald (he writes the Prototype column for The New York Times and is a friend and colleague from way back) blogged recently about declining reader interest in fiction and suggests that perhaps nonfiction is becoming a more appealing alternative to fiction because it’s so real.

It’s a good point, but I’d suggest that there’s another factor at play. People simply don’t have time to curl up with a good book any more. We’re so assaulted by the demand to keep up with what all the new voices are saying that we no longer have the leisure to kick back and read for pleasure like we used to. I see this in my own experience: right now I have a backlog of 80 or 90 articles in mainstream and social media that I believe I need to read to keep up with my area of expertise. I don’t see any air in my schedule for a good Stephen King novel any more. There are 15 million new voices in the blogosphere writing daily and I’m concerned that if I don’t keep up with them I’ll fall behind.

I suspect that a lot of people are feeling the same pressure and that reading for pleasure – a pursuit that I value and still hope to embrace – may suffer as a result.

More nice words in the blogosphere

Thanks to Renee Blodgett for her kind words about New Influencers. She admits she hasn’t read it yet, but expects it to be great. Now those are the kinds of critics I like!

The prolific Rob Enderle also said some very nice things about the book in his TechNews World column, which is widely syndicated. My thanks to him, also.

I have to admit to having developed a fascination with the Amazon sales ranking over the last couple of weeks particularly as New Influencers has moved into the top 10,000. I tend to check it every few hours and my mood can vary according to whether it’s up or down.

I guess my mood varies a lot, because the book has run the gamut from 1,500 to 70,000 in just the last week. Its rank can easily move 30,000 places in a day. I looked around for an explanation of how the ranking works and found an interesting one on Web Pro News, but the bottom line is that it’s Amazon’s little secret and no one outside of that company really has a clue.

Perhaps more importantly, no one has figured out a direct correlation between the sales ranking and actual book sales. Perhaps this is why my publisher refuses to pay any attention to it. And I try to ignore it. I can quit whenever I want. Really.

Events that CIOs actually love

For the past few months, I’ve been working with a company that has quietly pulled off a major coup in the corporate events business. You’ve probably never heard of Evanta, and that’s just fine with them. What you will be hearing more about – particularly in you’re in tech marketing – is the CIO Executive Summits.

The Summits are a series of regional, one-day events that attract the top chief information officers (CIOs) in the country for a day of speeches, networking and camaraderie. They are without a doubt the best IT events I have ever attended (and I’ve attended hundreds). Marketers and publishers could learn a lot from what Evanta is doing.

Tech publishers have been trying to create successful, sustainable conferences for CIOs for two decades. Their efforts have mostly failed. Believe me; I’ve been involved in several of those failures.

Evanta, in contrast, is not only attracting the right people, but it’s got them actively involved with and enthusiastic about the events. Case in point: last week in New York, more than 300 CIOs showed up for the tri-state event and only 275 were pre-registered. Think about that, event marketers: in a business in which 50% attrition is considered normal, this company is getting negative attrition.

I just got back from Washington, where more than 150 CIOs packed the conference held in the Georgetown University Conference Center. I was privileged to moderate a panel that included the CIOs from the FBI and CIA. The CIO of the Department of Justice had gone on just before us. The CIOs of the State Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (the most important national security body in the U.S.) were in the audience. The CIO of the American Red Cross gave the closing keynote. It goes on an on. Look at the agenda. And there will be 18 events just like the two I mentioned in 2007.

The proceedings are off the record, so I can’t talk about what was said at either event. However, I will point out a few reasons why I believe Evanta is experiencing this phenomenal success:

• They focus on the audience, not the sponsors. The slogan of the event series is “By CIOs, For CIOs,” and they really mean it. Each event has a governing body of CIOs who conference regularly and tell Evanta what they want: topics to cover, speakers to recruit, even the vendors to exhibit. Then the Evanta team goes and does what the board wants. Hundreds of hours of background work go into each event, but the CIOs never see that. What they see is that they describe their perfect conference and then the facilitators make it so. No questions asked.

• It’s off the record. No press is invited except in a speaking or moderating role and proceedings are strictly off the record. No ambiguity about that. The CIOs can talk with each other without worrying about something they say showing up in the press. This is important to them.

• They keep a tight leash on exhibitors. This is where most other efforts crash and burn. Publishers give the bill-paying sponsors too much say in the program, to the point that the stage becomes a soapbox for marketers. CIOs are some of the most cynical people in the world about marketing and they quickly abandon these events.

In contrast, Evanta gives marketers almost no stage presence. A couple of top sponsors get worked into the program, but the speakers must be CIOs themselves or the top officers in the company. You will never find someone with a marketing title on stage. The exhibits area is tasteful and low-key. And you have to be invited by the governing body to even have a chance to exhibit in the first place. To say that the exhibitors are on their best behavior is an understatement.

• They give away good stuff. In Washington, the conference concluded with a drawing in which no less than 13 trips to resort destinations were dispensed to the attendees. With 150 CIOs in attendance, the odds were pretty good. So is it any surprise that the room was nearly full at 5:30 p.m.?

There are many other details, but that’s the nub of it, in my view: give people an event they want; don’t let sponsors take control and give the audience incentives to stay all day. It’s working incredibly well for Evanta because they’ve never taken their eyes off the ball. A lot of media companies could learn from this.

(P.S. If Evanta sounds like a good acquisition candidate, it’s too late. The company was acquired by DMG World Media last year).

Our podcast interview with David Meerman Scott

This week in Tech PR War Stories, David Strom and I chat with David Meerman Scott, author of the forthcoming book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, which is due out any day now. David talks about the ideas that got him elected to Marketing Sherpa’s Viral Marketing Hall of Fame two years running, as well as his call for PR people to get a clue about search and start writing press releases using terms buyers care about rather than words they think the media wants to hear.

This will be a two-part interview, with the second running next week. And we barely scratched the surface of what’s in David’s book. Download the podcast. It’s free!

The New Influencers in the Merc

The San Jose Mercury News’ Dean Takahashi devotes a column to The New Influencers today. Takahashi, who’s reported for The Wall Street Journal among other journals, touches on several key points from the book and notes that a former colleague of his, Peter Rojas, went on to become a millionaire and a poster child of blogging success. He asks playfully (and a bit ruefully) if there’s still time for him to become a new influencer with his popular gaming blog.

Dean took the time to speak to me at some length on Monday evening. He also read the entire book, a fact that is both flattering and impressive in this continuously distracted world. It’s a thrill to be cited in such an important newspaper and by a reporter whose work I respect so much.