Updated: With yet more questions in the comments.
Anyone know why the traffic at Wealthy Geek dropped off so sharply almost two months before the plunge at Diet Nation, Nomadik and Gizmo Cafe?
Another question
Updated: With yet more questions in the comments.
Anyone know why the traffic at Wealthy Geek dropped off so sharply almost two months before the plunge at Diet Nation, Nomadik and Gizmo Cafe?
AnnBrocklehurst.com 
vertical markets in click arbitrage are always going up and down. Sometimes a prominent advertiser will change their campaigns and it will affect bid prices, bid prices affect competition for a keyword, competition will change the return on buying traffic. Geosign had systems in place (the ones of which Ted Hastings boasts) to catch those changes as they are happening and react quickly.The dip in wealthygeek you see in that graph was probably caused by a change in the bidding landscape regarding investment keywords.sifting through alexa graphs you’ll find some intriguing patterns. Some industries are highly seasonal, others are steady but experience bursts of activity… you’d have to be a real SEM nerd to get excited by that
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Thanks Anonymous, but can you explain something about this Hastings quote:”The company has designed some incredible systems [that] track where the user has come from [and] if they converted for the advertiser, all in real-time. Traditional online publishers can’t give those kind of stats back to their advertiser[s].”Did Yahoo give Geosign way more info. than they give regular customers about ad pricing, conversion rates, etc. due to the fact they were making so much money from Geosign sites?How can Geosign possibly KNOW IN REAL TIME if a customer converts if they were using strictly Yahoo ads? Again, did they cut a deal with Yahoo? Is this BS? Did they have some secret sauce technology?Help!!!
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secret sauce technology + 1
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Hmmm, to know if readers are converting you’d have to have your secret sauce technology on the advertiser’s site.There’s something missing here.I can’t even find any ecidence of non -third party advertising on GEosign sites.As always, you’re welcome to tell me I’m wrong here or via the e-mail address in my profile.
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“if they converted for the advertiser”…that part is BS.Ted Hastings, like many execs, has only a vague inkling of how things really work, and in interviews (and evidently press releases as well) will make up flattering sounding shit that has no basis in reality. Geosign does *not* get real-time data about advertiser conversions. They do track “conversion” – on advertisements, aka “CTR” (Click Through Rate). And they do get data about ad pricing so they know (approximately) what the clicks are worth as they’re happening.What Ted claims sounds lovely in a press release, but is not technically accurate. Soundbytes signifying nothing.Were I an advertiser, I’d be very concerned if Geosign could spy on my conversion rates. That’s highly private financially-sensitive data. Ted really should get his crap proofed by knowledgable staff (or what’s left of them) before it gets released to the public.
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Thanks anonymous.I don’t use “CTR” and “conversion rate” interchangeably as it just makes an already confusing topic even more so.I would image Geosign sites would have a very high CTR as they were either designed to confuse people into clicking on ads or they were pure ads.However, I suspect their conversion rate was poor as in the end users weren’t getting the info they wanted to allow them to make smart decisions about what to buy.Now, as a very small-time Google AdSense publisher, I get no info. from Google at all about the ads that run on my site. Do big “publishers” like GEosign who’re lining Yahoo’s coffers get more info as far as you know?And thanks for that insight into Hastings remarks, which just didn’t make sense to me.
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Ya think Ted Hastings actually writes press releases? No, they are written by Geo’s marketing shills and Ted merely signs them off before they’re published. Technical inaccuracies are not a reflection of Ted’s intelligence, but rather a sloppy process of fact checking and a careless attitude toward truth in general
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OK, something that I’m surprised hasn’t yet been mentioned is the ongoing traffic arbitrage that doesn’t involve Google.go to search.live.comsearch for “canvas tents”look at a couple of the top advertisers there
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