What’s wrong with online advertising

When the news broke today that a crane had fallen in New York City I immediately went to the web in search of video footage. CNN was my first stop. As expected, they had a video clip at the top of the page.

The next two minutes were a stunning realization of all that is wrong with the current attempts to monetize online video. The clip was 75 seconds long. In order to watch the clip I had to endure a 30 second pre-roll advertisement . . . for VIAGRA!

I am a woman in my late 40’s who has no need or interest in Viagra. The length of the ad was nearly 1/2 as long as the length of the news clip and I had absolutely no interest in the product. What a waste of my time.

I used to pay CNN an annual subscription to access their online content without advertising. What a pity that they discontinued this service. I would rather pay a few dollars a year for their service then waste precious time and have my brain cluttered with useless advertisements.

David Byrne On The Music Business

David Byrne has an excellent article on the music business over at Wired. He offers this brilliant insight into music business today:

What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that’s not bad news for music, and it’s certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists.

A very good read.

FedEx Trumps UPS

Fed ExA few years ago Book of Joe inspired me to open a personal FedEx account. His logic was impeccable and extremely practical. Since then I have shipped numerous packages enabled by the wonderful tools on my account at the FedEx web site. Some of the outstanding features include:

A few weeks ago we moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We now live a stone’s throw from a UPS Store so when I had a few packages to ship recently I decided to give the competitor a try. I logged on to UPS.com and created an account. Within minutes I had created three entries in my address book and printed three shipping labels.

I dropped the packages at the nearby UPS Store and declined a receipt. I mean, why bother with a paper record right? I assumed I could just go home and track the shipping status via my online account, where I had created the shipments!

Imagine my surprise when I logged onto my UPS.com account later that evening and could find no record of my shipments. The UPS online system has no tools to keep track of history. My packages are gone and I have no idea what the tracking numbers are. I guess I will call my family tomorrow and see if they arrived.

I am sure that the UPS shipping tools for corporate customers have all the history and tracking that one could want. But for a personal account, my money is with FedEx.

Contracts, Contracts, Everywhere

200710081320Long term contracts and petty fees are everwhere.

When we moved to Princeton last year we signed up for Poland Springs water delivery. (Poland Springs is owned by that bottled water juggernaut, Nestle Waters.) They offered an inflexible monthly service plan of 4 bottles per month for $32.96, which was the best deal in their array of undesirable options. You can skip a delivery, but not a payment.

When the first bill arrived I was surprised to find a $2.00 fee for an Oil Surcharge. What? This is nothing more than a price hike disguised as a fee, hiding behind rising fuel prices. They are in the delivery business. Fuel charges are integral to their cost of doing business and should therefore be integrated into the price.

My biggest disappointment came when I set out to cancel the service due to a pending move to North Carolina. I knew I had signed a contract for their flat rate service but I remembered it as being a one year commitment. Imagine my surprise to discover that I had, in fact, signed a two-year contract and was now facing a $50 cancellation fee. With our move date rapidly approaching, I paid the fee . . . and said goodbye to Nestle Waters.

The cell phone industry introduced us to contracts with the rationalization that they were subsidizing the price of the phone. Our “commitment” helped them ensure that they recovered the cost of the phone. Now that we let them in the door, the industry is charging contracts everywhere. AT&T requires a two year contract with the iPhone despite the fact that there is no subsidy for the hardware. T-Mobile required a one-year contract extensions just to upgrade my handset to a Blackberry. No thank you.

Contracts have a modicum of acceptability if the company incurs set-up costs, such as when the cable guy has to come out to your house to set up your cable box. But Poland Springs had no startup costs with my service plan. They delivered four bottles of water to my house once a month for a cost of $8.74 a bottle (or $1.75 / gallon). The entire delivery too mere minutes each month. It seems to me that they should be able to make a profit on each delivery, beginning with the first one.

I guess I have learned my lesson with bottled water. There has been a lot of buzz in the news lately about the potential hazards of plastic bottles leaching their chemicals into their contents. (Check out the great Smart Plastics pdf at the The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy). Time to get a water filter.

Mortgage Debacle

Gretchen Morgensen has written an insightful article in the Sunday Business Section of the New York Times. After the heartbreaking introduction of a homeowner in New Jersey who would like more than anything to keep her home, Gretchen offers the following insight:

Lenders, government officials and loan servicers, who take in borrowers’ monthly mortgage payments, contend that troubled borrowers everywhere are being helped to stay in their homes by those overseeing their loans. But neither data nor anecdotal evidence supports this view. A recent survey of 16 top subprime loan servicers by Moody’s Investors Service found that for the first six months of 2007, an average of only 1 percent of loans experiencing an interest rate adjustment, or reset, had been modified.

A few minutes of logical thought would lead one to assume that lowering the interest rate of troubled loans so that the homeowner can continue to make payments and keep the house would be the best result for all concerned. The holder of the mystical “collateralized debt obligation” would continue to receive an income stream (albeit slightly reduced), the loan servicing agency would continue to skim fees for processing the loan and tax payments and the homeowner would get to keep his / her house.

But alas, the world does not operate according to my logical expectations. Later in the article, Gretchen explains,

. . . on the billions of dollars worth of mortgage loans that have been sold to investors in the last few years, it is not the banks or lenders like Countrywide that are hit with big losses when homes go into foreclosure. It is the sea of faceless investors who own pieces of these trusts. Also, under the trusts’ pooling and servicing agreements, Countrywide and other servicers typically recoup any costs they cover in the foreclosure process, such as legal and appraisal fees.

The foreclosure process is a profit opportunity for servicers and lenders, but there is very little oversight of the fees imposed.

Now it all makes sense. The profit for the “loan originator” is not in the loan, but in the transaction. Any transaction.

Something is broken here.