marketing – Grey Panthers Savannah

Doing some estimations

gpanther — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 08:39:00 +0000

This is again one of those topics which I like to rant about, so I give you the short version: when you see a number, question it! Most of the numbers thrown at us in different media can be disproven quite easily and it is our responsibility as people not to just repeat whatever we’ve heard, but rather stop and think a little about it (of course I’m not immune to this myself, since I’ve just fallen into this trap when reading the “Contemplating Financial Trading At Picosecond Resolution” on Slashdot, only to see the very insightful comment: light travels 3mm in a picosecond – yes I’ve done the math – so this article is pure BS).

Offtopic: why do sayings in different languages have so much in common? For example we have the “beating the dead horse” expression in English and in Hungarian we would say somebody is talking about is “horse made of branch” (vesszoparipa). Ain’t it interesting?

Getting back to my rant :-). I’ve seen an article recently about a local (Romanian) affiliate program: eMAG Profitshare 2010. I applaud them for their openness and it also gives us the possibility to do a quick calculation. They say that they’ve given out 463 000 RON (~109 905 EUR / 153 499 USD) to 8690 sites.

Does it sound like a lot? Yes. Is it a lot for each individual site? Unlikely. Lets do a quick math: assuming that each site gets the same share (a very simplistic assumption) we have: 109 905 EUR / 8690 site = ~13 EUR per site / per year (these are yearly figures for 2010) so around 1 EUR (!) per site per month (!).

Ok, so be more real. You have a big fanbase, so you should be in the top sites as revenue. Lets consider a binomial distribution of the sites and do a little chart with Google Docs:

What you see here is the revenue per month for a site in a certain category (categories are from 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest traffic one and 10 the highest traffic one). The number is in EUR. The conclusion: this business model is a very poor revenue source for the individuals participating, but probably a very good marketing avenue for companies (I assume that the cost for companies is around the same as doing a ad campaign, but the returns must be much better – not to mention the google juice they must be getting from this referrals!).

PS: in the name of transparency, you can see the sheet I used for calculation here.

Dear people: try to think harder, even if it makes your head hurt!

gpanther — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 02:36:00 +0000

This again is the case of a couple of links on the same topic piling up in my reader (this tends to happen if you take a pause in blogging :-)):

The commonality between all these articles is that they make statements based on faulty questions (PHD Comics says it best). A website poll is not the same as a scientific study (to name just one the problems – it has a selection bias towards the reader of the particular site – which wouldn’t be a problem if the results wouldn’t be presented as applicable for the general population). And even if they were scientific studies, the purpose of a scientific study isn’t to find the absolute truth! It is to present a hypothesis which doesn’t contradict any of the current observation. But it doesn’t exclude the possibility that in the future there will be an observation which contradicts the hypothesis, and as such, it must be changed.

Security vendor’s “top-threat” list proof for their less-than-perfect performance?

gpanther — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:52:00 +0000

Here is something I’ve been thinking about lately: most (all?) security vendors publish their “top-threats” periodically. Those lists are made up by centralizing numbers reported by their clients. While it is safe to assume that the majority of the enumerated threats are blocked straight-away – before they can execute a single piece of code – there is a certain percentage which is after-the-fact detection (ie. the machine gets infected, a signature comes out later on at which point – if you’re lucky – the security program will block the malware).

Now I have no idea about the relative size of this subset (or if the companies have it, or how they can collect it for that matter), but I find the idea that marketing material put “out there” can backfire amusing :-).

Picture taken from tigger1fic’s photostream with permission.

Living off of the hype

gpanther — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 05:44:00 +0000

Disclaimer: I work for a competitor, however this is my personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the views of any of my past or future employers.

So tell me, what does F-Secure exactly contribute to the malware fighting effort? Sure, they have a blog and a chief researcher who has an opinion about everything (including many things he hasn’t though trough very well – like the .bank top level domain or SMS authentication), but they are only a front for Kaspersky Labs. (To be fair, they mention it in one of their blog posts). They are 99.99% Kaspersky, so why do they need researchers in two locations? Stop the marketing guys and do something useful.

Again, in the spirit of fairness, I know that this blog contributed to raising the awareness about the malware issue, however I feel that they don’t give enough credit to the main force behind them (BTW, I’m not in any way affiliated with Kaspersky Labs).

The night of the ad eaters

gpanther — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 14:19:00 +0000

I’m getting old. I know this because last night we attended The Night of the Ad Eaters and after sleeping for 8 ours I still can barely keep my eyes open :). My impressions:

Coca Cola is better than Pepsi (I can’t understand how Pepsi can put that much money in their ads and still make them suck)

Levis is better than Diesel (with Diesel clearly not being targeted at the western market)

The only IT related advertisement was from Microsoft (who else) for something called WinDays 2005 (which seems to be some business oriented conference – as far as I can tell from their website, because from the ad you couldn’t even get the slightest idea what this is about) and it sucked bigtime: it was long and had no clear message (other than that: look we licensed the rights to all these paintings and music).