Need someone to lead product management at your software company? I create software for people that create software and I'm looking for my next opportunity. Check out my resume and get in touch.

Rojo's blog exchange

Freshness Warning
This blog post is over 18 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.

Rojo’s launching a blog ad exchange. Big deal.

I know a thing or two about ad exchanges. There’s a lot of time spent supporting people who aren’t making you any money. The vast majority of participants know nothing about advertising. They expect a 20% click through rate even though their ad copy is the same as everyone else’s: “My personal blog. It’s funny.” Or some variation thereof. They complain when the exchange ad is offensive, but everyone has a different view of what’s offensive. Before Pheedo bought Blogsnob, I spent 10 hours a week policing ads to ensure they were blogs, and didn’t contain profanity, porn and other prohibited content.

Rojo plans to show one paid ad for every exchange ad. Good luck with that. When people run paid advertising on their site, they expect to get paid. There’s also a problem with ad quality. The low quality of the exchange ads will probably detract from the click through rates on the paid ads. So I hope they aren’t selling those on a CPC or CPA basis.

Recently Written

Mastery doesn’t come from perfect planning (Dec 21)
In a ceramics class, one group focused on a single perfect dish, while another made many with no quality focus. The result? A lesson in the value of practice over perfection.
The Dark Side of Input Metrics (Nov 27)
Using input metrics in the wrong way can cause unexpected behaviors, stifled creativity, and micromanagement.
Reframe How You Think About Users of your Internal Platform (Nov 13)
Changing from "Customers" to "Partners" will give you a better perspective on internal product development.
Measuring Feature success (Oct 17)
You're building features to solve problems. If you don't know what success looks like, how did you decide on that feature at all?
How I use OKRs (Oct 13)
A description of how I use OKRs to guide a team, written so I can send to future teams.
Build the whole product (Oct 6)
Your code is only part of the product
Input metrics lead to outcomes (Sep 1)
An easy to understand example of using input metrics to track progress toward an outcome.
Lagging Outcomes (Aug 22)
Long-term things often end up off a team's goals because they can't see how to define measurable outcomes for them. Here's how to solve that.

Older...

What I'm Reading

Contact

Adam Kalsey

+1 916 600 2497

Resume

Public Key

© 1999-2024 Adam Kalsey.