Conversion Rater

I recently received my first auto-renewal email for my iPad 3G wireless data plan from AT&T. I suppose I should first give them some credit for even bothering to send an email to the customers they are auto-renewing since so many companies don’t do this at all. However, it seems like sending these emails would be common courtesy so I can’t get too excited.
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A member of my team put together a short but sweet case study of one of our advertising partnerships with PCMag/Ziff Davis and it’s now up on the YPN Blog.

It gives a preview into the type of things we’re working on making possible in a scalable manner through a premium exchange on APT from Yahoo!.

In the middle of economic crisis, it’s always good to have a little humor.

Enter another ahort-lived internet meme, Sad Guys on Trading Floors. The captions are the best part.

I’ll admit it, I’m a green hypocrite. There are a lot of green and sustainable activities I participate in and support, but I’m far from perfect on me and my family’s environmental impact.

In some cases, we’re not being as green as we could be due to not wanting to make the sacrifices, but in other cases it’s a lack of knowledge.
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As this past year at Yahoo! has been my first year working for what I’d consider to be a large company, I’ve become more interested in strategies around running and operating companies efficiently. My past experiences have been with startups or small companies where a lot of the challenges that larger companies face don’t exist.

This recent article about a practice at Zappos.com where they pay new customer service employees $1,000 to quit after their first month of training caught my eye. They seem to be thinking it’s doing well so far in making sure the employees working for Zappos.com really want to be there and feel that they are a good fit for the company.
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Microsoft pulls the offer for Yahoo.

It’s been quite a while since my last blog post, and unfortunately I’m not blogging much for a variety of reasons. Essentially:

1. Adding a third kid to the mix at home definitely takes up some time.
2. Work is very busy and very engaging leaving not much time to blog.
3. A lot of the stuff I would say and discuss is either off limits while doing what I’m doing, or at least close enough to the line that I don’t want to spend the time analyzing it.

I would like to get to posting a bit more, so perhaps you’ll see some quicker posts with just quick comments. I tend to want to provide a lot of value to a post, but I rarely have the time to sit down for an hour or more and work on a lengthy post.

One thing that may help solve this is I’ve installed the wphone plugin so I can post directly from my iPhone. I’m finding that I’m interacting with Twitter and Facebook much more because I’m so often using my iPhone while traveling or out and about, so maybe if I can post to this blog easier through the iPhone I’ll do it more.

Instead of making lots of quick posts, I’ll go ahead and do a quick update in what’s going on:

1. I’ve had a number of recent offsite work trips recently that have been very productive and fun. There have been great discussions with smart people, and a lot of excitement about what we’re building at Yahoo! despite any clouds looming on the horizon. As you can see from the picture above while sailing in the Pacific Ocean, the offsite meetings also have a little fun as well. Unfortunately my team didn’t win the sailing race.

2. Ad Tech in San Francisco was quite a show, as it seemed like the largest show in recent memory. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really blown away by much there, as it seems like a lot of companies are competing in the ad network and ad exchange space without really differentiating themselves significantly from the competition.

3. The iPhone is really the most revolutionary thing web or technology wise that’s hit me in a long time. I’ve had mine for quite a while now, but it amazes me how useful it’s become. I also find that I do more RSS feed reading, twittering, Facebooking, and Digging on the iPhone than on a normal computer. Part of that may be because I’m traveling quite a bit, but I think mainly it’s because those applications all have simplified versions for the iPhone that I find more usable than the full web versions. I can’t stand the normal version of Facebook now compared to the ease of use and simplicity of the iPhone version.

4. My family is a lot of fun right now with the three kids all making it pretty wild at home.

5. I’m excited for summer and fall, as they are really the prime two seasons in Eugene for enjoying the outdoors.

Hopefully I can follow this up with an increased frequency of posts, although I anticipate keeping them pretty short until I have more time in my day at some point.

As a father of three kids, I found the following video from Dr. Randy Pausch to be important and quite moving. Paush is a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who only has a short time to live due to pancreatic cancer, and he made a special last lecture for his class and most importantly his three kids that is about his mindset and how to live life. Pretty inspirational stuff.

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Over on the YPN Blog, Jerri Gillean here in the Eugene Right Media/Yahoo! office contributed an overview of what an Ad Exchange is and some important questions to ask when comparing ad exchanges.

When you’re looking at joining an exchange, ask these questions:

1. Does it work in real time? Using historical data is like checking yesterday’s weather to predict what to wear today.
2. Is it neutral? A neutral exchange simply provides a technology that allows for buying and selling, and doesn’t attempt to hold all the relationships with the buyers and sellers.
3. Is it scaleable? If your site goes from 100,000 to 100,000,000 impressions a month, will that exchange be able to handle that volume?
4. Is it secure? How does the exchange protect you as a publisher? (This is key: It isn’t as easy as you may think.)
5. Is there open competition? Does the exchange allow non-members to compete with exchange members?
6. Is it a community? Sure, there’s competition, but are there also forums so that people can communicate with each other and form partnerships?
7. Is it a technology platform? Is it open, with APIs that anyone can connect to?
8. Does it have publishers, advertisers AND networks?
9. Is there a solution for me? Does the exchange offer a solution for both enterprise and non-enterprise publishers?
10. Are there strings attached? What else does the exchange require you to do?

In my opinion, not everyone claiming to be an ad exchange today really is one.  So the questions Jerri lists are definitely interesting to ask across all the companies who say they are operating an ad exchange today.