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Archive for April, 2010

S3 Video Bites

April 12th, 2010 1 comment

The latest craze in the Internet Marketing industry is having these blank pages with one video, and no fast forward/rewind controls.  And these videos are set up to pop up an order form, or a link for more information after the video is o ver (or starting from a key point in the video).

I love those pages.

But I have one problem with them.  They always seem to use Amazon S3 to host and serve the files, and sometimes that makes the video insanely choppy.  I don’t understand how marketers get away with that.  I’ve been missing out on a lot lately, because I just won’t sit for the choppy video any more.

I know that video is expensive, but if you’re going to do video marketing, go for better hosting!  If you insist on Amazon S3, at least use CloudFront to make the experience better!

Please?

The Big Monster That Couldn’t

April 10th, 2010 No comments

When I was a kid, I used to love the story “The Little Engine That Could”.  I guess it was an early sign of my coming entrepreneur-ism that I loved.  The big engines wouldn’t pull the big train cars, but this pipsqueak little engine tried… and tried… and tried.. and DID!   Proving that the little guy DOES have power to play with the big boys.

This past friday, Logiscpae announced the launch of their new monster, called Monster Splash.  I’ve got to be honest.  It’s cool… but in my opinion, not THAT cool.  It’s kinda like having another BIG engine.  Yeah, sure it’s nice and shiny, but is it really doing something difficult or even helpful to bring into the industry?  Or is it going to stand there looking shiny, and doing good things… but not the things that you’d expect from a big shiny engine?

Basically, it’s very similar in idea to the “splash page network” from Traffic Era, in that you can create ads and ad placements on your website, and then you basically barter people’s ability to place ads on your website for your ability to place ads on other websites.

Honistly, I’m a bit curious as to why they’d have selected this particular business model so recently after releasing their traffic exchange oriented TEBrowser web browser.  The TEBrowser helps people click between their favorite traffic exchanges and thus totally miss ads that will be displayed with Monster Splash…  And if their surfing with a fast surf counter on any exchange: well, to put it lightly, anyone who allows ads over their site on an exchange with a 6 second timer isn’t doing anything useful to themselves to begin with.

So, good thinking Logiscape, but I’m kinda left wondering how useful their full portfolio is together.  They’ve got lots of GREAT sites, but I’m not liking things in 2010 so far (even HitSilo doesn’t seem to be doing so well, which is disappointing).  And don’t get me wrong: for the record I LOVE LOGISCAPE!  TS25, TrafficPods and HitPulse were some of the early exchanges that I surfed, and are still some of the best converting (for me) exchanges out there!

On the other hand, a big (albeit belated)  kudos out to Gary Ambrose with his recent launch of List Wire, an incredible site that lets you have a 100% fully-functional autoresponder for free!  So there’s no more excuses for saying that you can’t afford iContact or aWeber (although they do have better services which are worth the money!).  Start building your list today.  Thanks for that, Gary!