Archives for the 'Business' Category
A Modest Online-Revenue Proposal For Newspapers
By Josh Barsch
Back in the VHS vs. Beta video-format wars of the 1980’s, my family put all its ill-fated chips on Beta. More recently, I went all in with an HD-DVD player instead of Blu-Ray, and about four seconds after I did, Toshiba threw in the towel and stopped supporting HD-DVDs. I also thought Ryan Leaf would make a better NFL quarterback than Peyton Manning, and argued with my childhood friends that Dominique Wilkins would accomplish more in the NBA than that Michael Jordan guy ever would.
In short, I have a long history of taking the road less traveled — the one that ends up dead-ending off a cliff. But one of the rare times when I came to a crossroads and actually made the right call was when I ditched my first love, newspapering, in favor of an Internet career. It was 1999 when I left the University of Missouri’s graduate program, master’s in hand, with a variety of prospects. Could’ve gone to a newspaper, magazine, TV station, even a radio station — but I chose the Web. For once in my life, it seems, I heard the train coming before it ran over me.
These choices and the evaluation of their …
Starbucks Revamp Plan: Thumbs Down
By Josh Barsch
Last week, Starbucks’s again-CEO Howard Schultz announced quite a little rejuvenation plan for the ailing coffee franchise. I am a huge Starbucks fan myself, so I was frankly pretty disappointed in how toothless the proposal really was. I was expecting some major customer-friendly stuff, but here’s the five-point initiative we got instead (this is straight from a Starbucks press release):
— A proprietary and revolutionary in-store Clover(R) brewing
system that delivers the best cup of brewed coffee available
anywhere;
This is actually the smartest of all the intiatives they put forth, because it actually focuses on the reason that I and most of their millions of customers patronize the place: the coffee. What the press release didn’t say is that the new super-premium coffee will cost $2.50, which is $1 more than their already-spendy coffee costs. Still, though, folks who are rolling through Starbucks every day are spending a lot of discretionary income as it is. Will an extra dollar a day make or break these customers? Probably not. However, the economy is getting rough, and you’ve got to think …
The new design launches!
By Josh Barsch
Josh here, announcing the at-long-last redesign of our site. Let’s face it — our old site looked pretty dated. I’d like to say we let it get that way by being hyperfocused on doing a great job for our customers and losing site of our aesthetic well-being — and there would certainly be some truth in that — but I’m the boss around here and I’m supposed to look after that sort of thing, and I let it go way too long. Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments section (although I’m guessing there won’t be many, since this blog itself is one of the new features of the new site).
Speaking of the blog, I think it’s one of the most important additions to the new site. I’ve got all kinds of stuff to say — much of it, but not nearly all of it, about advertising. I’ll do my level best to categorize my posts appropriately so that you don’t have to read my rants about topics you aren’t interested in. But I will be spicing it up a bit with non-PPC-related stuff, because I’ve done PPC for almost 7 years now and am …
Do People Really Click Those Google Ads?
By Josh Barsch
It’s a crazy world, this one we live in, isn’t it? “Why yes it is, Josh,” you say, “but what makes you say so on this very day?” You’re in luck, because I feel like elaborating.
You’d have to be living in a cave if you hadn’t heard about Google’s astronomical rise to the top of the business world over the last few years. The company’s stock price hovers between 1 and 2 zillion dollars per share, giving it a market cap of (roughly speaking) several hundred jillion dollars. To put that in layman’s terms, Google is worth more than Germany, New York City, Saturn, Brad Pitt, Lindsay Lohan and the Church of Scientology combined. But enough with the hard-and-fast numbers. My point is: Google is phenomenally successful. They are doing something very, very right.
Even more remarkable than Google’s success is the fact that all of that money comes from essentially one source: those little blue (or sometimes white, and recently even yellow) ads that appear every time you do a search. The ones that say “sponsored links”. That’s right: Google is a one-trick pony. All of those jillions come from people around the globe doing Google searches, seeing one of …
Josh Barsch founded StraightForward Media in 2001 after a brief career in print journalism. He now lives in the sticks of western South Dakota with his wife Christina, daughter Mia, son Ezra, two dogs Velvet & Holly, and cat Chanceux, all of whom he loves dearly. And four nameless hermit crabs, for whom he feels nothing.