It seems that those layoffs weren't so necessary, though I'd be willing to hear an explanation that put layoffs and pay raises in sync with one another.
Company is run in a very inefficent way. Management re-organizes and, through streamlined processes and automation, company can produce the same amount of output (or more) while reducing the number of people required. Management is rewarded for their efforts.
End result: fewer workers, management rewarded, increased profit for shareholders. And in fact, it's the right thing to do.
Yeah, about that, your white priveledge coupon book was posted to my place by accident and I forgot to tell the postman. I now have two. Sorry about that.
I mean this with no offense to Alex or anyone else who's offered advice, but the big thing that's missing from what everyone else has been saying is the word that you all dread: marketing. In the original sense of the word (not advertising), to find out what your customers want. Here I'm talking about your readers, not the advertisers, because they're the ones you have a good relationship with.
Advertising is a good way to go but, as you've seen from your revenue streams, it's not the only one. There are smarter things that you can do than put in more columns of AdSense!
Customer segmentation is when you take a population and figure out which of the people within that population have more in common with eachother than with anyone else. So, for example, which x% of your readers are happy to pay for certain content and what differentiates them from your other readers?
A conjoint analysis is a tool that presents users with preferences that they rank to tell you the relative importance of each one. For example, is freshness of content more important than web design? Is price more important than freshness? By figuring out which of your users value which attributes of the product that you are offering, you can present the best product to each segment. You can even figure out the optimal price for subscriptions to your PDF (if that's indeed what anyone wants - Alex doesn't!). Otherwise how are you pricing it? Why $29 a year? Why not $10 or $100?
These two things should let you build a financial model of costs to yourself and revenue projections from each user. A good analysis can be made by presenting a questionaire to a few hundred people. If you really have 200,000 readers then you have a huge wealth of information that you can gather and use.
Once you know your readers you can really go to town. Run some experiments to figure out the most profitable page layout for advert placement that your readers are happy with. Maybe they'll be willing to fill out surveys for companies you cover that you can sell. They might be happy to buy products from Amazon and give you a referral fee. You might even find quite a few of then are happy to subscribe, given enough incentive.
These things are not hard or expensive - they are free actually if you want to do it yourself (and you should!). If you want some more advice feel free to email me.
If that's really the case, and all we really need are a bunch of people to do the tedious work that's time consuming, let's all write down what's needed and contribute a few bucks to get a few teams on something like Rentacoder working on it.
It's good to hear that you've got all three things. I too found the whole concept of marketing to be frustratingly vague: I had a product that people wanted but didn't know how to advertise. The thing is, as I've learnt, there's a big difference between marketing and sales.
Advertising is not the way to go, not if you have a product that people want. The only way to know if someone truely wants your product is to ask them. It's that simple. Until someone has said that they want your product you never actually know.
Marketing is all about finding out what the market wants. The nice thing is, once you know who wants your product and what they want it for - you can sell it to them very easily! You know who they are, where they are, where they live and what they do. Just pick up the phone or send them an email. Once you've find a few customers, things like word of mouth become much much more reliable. You can also do a lot with even a small amount of customer data to figure out how to expand your customer base to others with similar needs (this is called segmentation analysis and is not at all hard to do).
You make a very good point. You wouldn't want a doctor or manager that consistently fails to plan a good strategy but is good at sweeping up the pieces, so you do need a balance. On the other hand, consider the difference:
A doctor who's bad at planning ahead will have trouble eventually, with things happening that tip him or others off that things need to change. He or others can take time to figure out what needs to be done.
Alternatively, a doctor who cracks under pressure will screw up and someone will die.
The difference is that in the planning phase you have lots of chances to get it right, whereas in the emergency phase you generally have just the one. It's the same in businesses. All that said, it's generally accepted that in business, those managers that have a clear, well though-out strategy are the best at adapting when the world changes around them.
For example, the idea that humans compute the "expected value" of future events is central to many economic models.
Humans may not do this on an individual basis, no. However, pretty much everyone who makes an economic decision attempts to do this, be it through guessing, heuristics, or with a spreadsheet. The interesting thing about markets is that they collect and aggregate all these decisions together and produce a very accurate result.
That's why, even though people may act without full logic and with error, markets tend to be efficient.
Re:The stupidity of the market
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1
No. When demand decreases, prices fall.
Even if you're a monopoly.
If you take a look at their publicly filed 10-Q, you can see that's not the case.
First, their cash went from $149m to $255m, and their short term investments from $185m to $294m. So in total their interest-bearing assets went up by around $230m, not $2bn.
Also, their income statement shows that they had a net interest expense this quarter of $1.5m, so they actually spent money in interest payments overall. Probably on capital leases it looks like.
Absoloutely. A lot of people assume that the dot-com bubble burst has everything to do with lazy programmers who were too busy playing games and not busy enough programming. If this were the case, all the companies that went bust would have had crappy applications. This isn't true - there are lots of good hardware/software companies with hard working people who went bust because of financial and not technical reasons. The best software in the world won't make you any money with a bad business plan.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that those layoffs weren't so necessary, though I'd be willing to hear an explanation that put layoffs and pay raises in sync with one another.
Company is run in a very inefficent way. Management re-organizes and, through streamlined processes and automation, company can produce the same amount of output (or more) while reducing the number of people required. Management is rewarded for their efforts.
End result: fewer workers, management rewarded, increased profit for shareholders. And in fact, it's the right thing to do.
Yeah, about that, your white priveledge coupon book was posted to my place by accident and I forgot to tell the postman. I now have two. Sorry about that.
Your lobster dinners are delicious, by the way.
Advertising is a good way to go but, as you've seen from your revenue streams, it's not the only one. There are smarter things that you can do than put in more columns of AdSense!
Customer segmentation is when you take a population and figure out which of the people within that population have more in common with eachother than with anyone else. So, for example, which x% of your readers are happy to pay for certain content and what differentiates them from your other readers?
A conjoint analysis is a tool that presents users with preferences that they rank to tell you the relative importance of each one. For example, is freshness of content more important than web design? Is price more important than freshness? By figuring out which of your users value which attributes of the product that you are offering, you can present the best product to each segment. You can even figure out the optimal price for subscriptions to your PDF (if that's indeed what anyone wants - Alex doesn't!). Otherwise how are you pricing it? Why $29 a year? Why not $10 or $100?
These two things should let you build a financial model of costs to yourself and revenue projections from each user. A good analysis can be made by presenting a questionaire to a few hundred people. If you really have 200,000 readers then you have a huge wealth of information that you can gather and use.
Once you know your readers you can really go to town. Run some experiments to figure out the most profitable page layout for advert placement that your readers are happy with. Maybe they'll be willing to fill out surveys for companies you cover that you can sell. They might be happy to buy products from Amazon and give you a referral fee. You might even find quite a few of then are happy to subscribe, given enough incentive.
These things are not hard or expensive - they are free actually if you want to do it yourself (and you should!). If you want some more advice feel free to email me.
If that's really the case, and all we really need are a bunch of people to do the tedious work that's time consuming, let's all write down what's needed and contribute a few bucks to get a few teams on something like Rentacoder working on it.
It's good to hear that you've got all three things. I too found the whole concept of marketing to be frustratingly vague: I had a product that people wanted but didn't know how to advertise. The thing is, as I've learnt, there's a big difference between marketing and sales.
Advertising is not the way to go, not if you have a product that people want. The only way to know if someone truely wants your product is to ask them. It's that simple. Until someone has said that they want your product you never actually know.
Marketing is all about finding out what the market wants. The nice thing is, once you know who wants your product and what they want it for - you can sell it to them very easily! You know who they are, where they are, where they live and what they do. Just pick up the phone or send them an email. Once you've find a few customers, things like word of mouth become much much more reliable. You can also do a lot with even a small amount of customer data to figure out how to expand your customer base to others with similar needs (this is called segmentation analysis and is not at all hard to do).
Good luck!
You make a very good point. You wouldn't want a doctor or manager that consistently fails to plan a good strategy but is good at sweeping up the pieces, so you do need a balance. On the other hand, consider the difference:
A doctor who's bad at planning ahead will have trouble eventually, with things happening that tip him or others off that things need to change. He or others can take time to figure out what needs to be done.
Alternatively, a doctor who cracks under pressure will screw up and someone will die.
The difference is that in the planning phase you have lots of chances to get it right, whereas in the emergency phase you generally have just the one. It's the same in businesses. All that said, it's generally accepted that in business, those managers that have a clear, well though-out strategy are the best at adapting when the world changes around them.
For example, the idea that humans compute the "expected value" of future events is central to many economic models.
Humans may not do this on an individual basis, no. However, pretty much everyone who makes an economic decision attempts to do this, be it through guessing, heuristics, or with a spreadsheet. The interesting thing about markets is that they collect and aggregate all these decisions together and produce a very accurate result.
That's why, even though people may act without full logic and with error, markets tend to be efficient.
No. When demand decreases, prices fall. Even if you're a monopoly.
Very true... but at least you don't have to drive to their place to hear that!
Here's a solution for you:
Buy them a Mac.
If viruses and spyware are the main headache, that should help.
If you take a look at their publicly filed 10-Q, you can see that's not the case.
First, their cash went from $149m to $255m, and their short term investments from $185m to $294m. So in total their interest-bearing assets went up by around $230m, not $2bn.
Also, their income statement shows that they had a net interest expense this quarter of $1.5m, so they actually spent money in interest payments overall. Probably on capital leases it looks like.
Absoloutely. A lot of people assume that the dot-com bubble burst has everything to do with lazy programmers who were too busy playing games and not busy enough programming. If this were the case, all the companies that went bust would have had crappy applications. This isn't true - there are lots of good hardware/software companies with hard working people who went bust because of financial and not technical reasons. The best software in the world won't make you any money with a bad business plan.