$8m = $2 per kiwi. whatever.
Fark and PlentyofFish
I’ve been a fark fan for a while – it’s completely irreverent – even a ‘collosal waste of time’ according to founder Drew Curtis.
Meanwhile PlentyofFish is the biggest online dating site in the world, also ‘according to its founder’ – Markus Brooks.
What’s amazing about these two huge sites is that they each have just one employee – the founders Drew Curtis and Markus Brooks. There’s a great video of a forum moderated by Guy Kawasaki with these two and four others as panelists. Watch it.
(Actually I can’t watch it all as my @#$%@#$ broadband is patheticaly slow and it has frozen after 7m:59s of 56m:13s. I suppose I’m meant to feel lucky I got to see even that much)
Telecom pathetic: cannot provide telecomms
Would that Telecom could get the basics right… I don’t want money back, I want usable internet service.
Being back in NZ means being back in the primitive ages of the internet. My (“max-speed”) access here at home is pathetic compared to France, UK and USA. It is too slow and unreliable for YouTube. How on earth we can be expected to lead NZ into the new world of internet media when the pipes are broken?
Telecom is to blame, although I do not know whether to point the finger at their lawyers for foot-dragging, their management for under investing, marketing department for over-promising (and over-spending), management for worrying about government regulation rather than customers, senior technical staff for general incompetence, management for not listening to senior technical staff/contractors or contractor Alcatel for under performing.
In time the story will emerge of this National Disaster
PS3 vs Wii
So the PS3 will be $1199 in NZ. I’m a crazy technophile, but the PS3 holds no appeal. I could have purchased one in the USA this week – they were in stock at a Best Buy in Salt Lake City, but at US$600, and with the demo frozen due to overheating, I really could not justify it. I did get a lovely new camera though.
Meanwhile the Wii (I got one on launch day) is a seriously cool device – breaking the genre. The Wii’s appeal to people that do not like video games is astonishing, and there is prospect of breakthrough titles that use the Wiimote in interesting ways.
The Best Buy in SLC had no Wii for sale – indeed they apparently arrive randomly in shipments of 30, and generally sell out in 30 minutes or less to whomever is in the store at the time. Meanwhile they had sold just one of the 16 odd PS3’s they had in stock over 5 days.
Ferrit as a price comparison engine – not good
Adam points out the Ferrit serves a purpose as a price comparison site, and Peter Wogan chimes in and agrees in the comments.
Unfortunately Hitwise numbers (which I am the first to admit are not the most reliable) show that Ferrit is ‘far behind’ price comparison leaders Pricespy and Smilecity. Those sites are both, as far as I can tell, run on a shoestring, and are doing very well.
Sadly we cannot confirm this data with with the official NetRatings stats, as I cannot see either Smilecity or Pricespy there. (Both those sites should be in the NetRatings stats, and should be pushing those stats at advertisers and retailers….)
Meanwhile Rowan is accusing me of a “rant” against Ferrit, which has with this post has apparently turned into a “crusade”. It’s not meant to be a crusade per se – I have not blogged about Ferrit for a while. I guess I am just expressing the frustration that those of us in the business and the internet industries are feeling as we watch a partially Government owned company invest and reinvest in a seemingly pointless endeavour.
There is value in that space, but the sledgehammer advertising led approach is not the way – Rowan’s comments on usability are right on the money.
Jetblue vs Eurostar
Jetblue have introduced a passenger bill of rights after last weeks debacle. If you are delayed departing for 1-2 hours you get a $25 voucher, and 2-4 hours gets you a $50 voucher. This, by the way, is the best airline in the USA, and I am a loyal customer whenever I fly one of their routes. Indeed I flew them today and the flight was perfect.
However for real customer service consider Eurostar, who gave all the passengers on my train from Paris to London free tickets for the next trip when we were delayed a mere 1.5 hours. Moreover, rather than handing out vouchers, travelers have only to present their boarding pass the next time they make a booking. That’s customer service.
Ban incandescent bulbs – not a no brainer..
No Right Turn suggests we follow Australia’s lead and ban incandescent bulbs. While I think this is a clear case of Government intervention helping consumers reduce total cost of ownership it is not a total ‘no brainer’.
While the short term increase in spend will eventually be matched by reduced electricity bills, this will be an unpopular measure for many. For those people living from pay packet to pay packet (or benefit payment to benefit payment) the extra say $5 per bulb is a meaningful amount, and could mean forgoing other essential spending.
Yes it is a smart thing to ban, but no this is not a political no-brainer, especially for the Labour party.
Still – I believe a ban should happen – provided there is sufficient competition in the compact flourescent market – we wouldn’t want to see a price rise after the law took effect would we…
Go ahead – be brave – charge fatties more
Go on AirNZ – please start charging by total weight….
I do like Rob Fyfe’s take that airlines would start offering discounts to the slim rather than charging premiums for the large. That may well be how it goes, along with surcharges for the super-fat.
On the other hand why not just weigh the passenger and the luggage at the same time? (using say sensors embedded in the floor in front of check-in counters.) That way larger folk can reduce their feeling of being offended, when confronted with an actual measure of their weight, by assuming that their luggage is extra heavy.
The surcharges paid should be in proportion to the original ticket price so that discount fare purchasers are not put out.
It is also bad as fare buyers would not be sure of the total cost before check-in. This is something I really despise – similar to the US practice of adding tax and tips. The effect would be to reduce sales, which is obviously not good. Estimating your total mass at ticket purchase (grouped in say 4 categories with easy to figure out charts) may be the best way forward, with surcharges or refunds payable if total mass differs too much at check-in.
Of course a side effect would be a boom in sales of food after security – as all the people that have fasted before their flight head to rehydrate and engorge…
On the other hand for me this is bad – as I am a male (and therefore on average heavier than half the population) and I tend to carry a lot of stuff when I go on these extended skiing/ business/ social trips around the word. But at least it puts a tangible value on the extra rashers of bacon or pair of trousers packed.
Ferrit – $36m flushed….
I missed the money quote…
“Mr Brayham says Telecom expects to spend about $12 million on Ferrit in the next financial year, matching its contribution for the past two years.”
That’s $24m dropped on a site that delivered $12,500 in revenue in the busiest shopping month of the year. Alternatively that $24m dropped on 2,700 paying customers in December, which is $8,888 per customer.
Or let’s say that’s $36m by end of 2007 dropped on …. oh why bother – there simply is no way to make the numbers work.
In fact to make $12m in 2007 Ferrit would need to handle $200m of sales (at 6% take rate). To make $36m (cumulative spend to end 2007) they would need to sell $600m worth of items. If you try to make a discounted cash flow work on this then the assumptions will be laughable. Even given the sunk $24m cost, there is no way I could justify an investment of $12m in Ferrit in 2007.
This dog is dead.
Or maybe it isn’t. After all the site exists, and love it or laugh at it people do know the name. Ferrit could perhaps be saved by cutting all non-online advertising, by slimming down non-dev staff (to about 3), bringing dev in-house, losing the ad agencies and other external suppliers and focusing on usability, great customer experiences and usability. (repeat deliberate)
Ferrit – It’s worse than I thought
Some interesting Ferrit stats from this article (thanks Q). Firstly only 1.2% of the visitors in December bought anything, secondly Ferrit makes “between 4% and 8%” of each sale. (Let’s be nice and say an average of 6%). Thirdly the average order size was “more than $100”. Let’s call it $110.
So in December 2,700 people spent a total of about $300,000, and Ferrit made just shy of $18,000 from that.
I do not know how much Ferrit spent in advertising during December, but it was a lot – Ferrit had a full-court press approach, ranging from online to TV (which is really expensive) and billboards. Online ad spend would have been the most effective, but even that is not free – the online rate card for NZHerald suggest costs of at least $6000 per week for a home page banner. The December ad spend number may bever be know, but it could well be north of $250,000. or $1m. or $5m. Gee – I’m just guessing here – anyone care to provide the real number or a good estimate?
That’s not a great ROI, considering that the customers acquired do not seem to be coming back in droves.
Now let’s revisit the numbers from before.
“Given that Ferrit is on record as saying that 2% of visitors buy something, that’s an estimated 1,600 buyers in the first half of Feb (to the 15th), or 108 per day. Call it 3,500 buyers per month, at an average of say $10 revenue per buyer (I made the $10 figure up, but the average sale price is most likely between $80 and $120 from the comments in the blog entry linked above). That’s $35,000 per month in income.”
This now changes to 960 buyers in the first half of Feb (@ 1.2%), and, at an average of $6.60 (6% of $110) revenue per buyer, that’s a trivial $12,500 per month in income. That’s truly pathetic for a dot com that has been going for 14 months and with the amount of money spent.
Wake up Telecom.
Online retail: Ferrit sinks
Let’s see how the online retail market is going….
After a dip over Christmas/New Year Trade Me is back on track, while all of the other players are still not making any impression….
Ferrit’s pre-Christmas promotion gave a leap in traffic (this page impressions chart has two scales), but January and February to date are pretty sour with an average of just 36,800 domestic page impressions each day in Feb. Note the stark difference between Trade Me, which has recovered after Christmas, and Ferrit, which is actually dropping. That’s bad news for the Telecom owned site, and it’s most likely becasue they have not been pushing hard with advertising.
Ferrit’s Unique Browsers have also dropped away post Christmas. Given that Ferrit is on record as saying that 2% of visitors buy something, that’s an estimated 1,600 buyers in the first half of Feb (to the 15th), or 108 per day. Call it 3,500 buyers per month, at an average of say $10 revenue per buyer (I made the $10 figure up, but the average sale price is most likely between $80 and $120 from the comments in the blog entry linked above). That’s $35,000 per month in income.
With 40-60(?) people to support and the huge advertising budget this dog still does not hunt.
When will Telecom wake up?
Dodgy boats…
So a bloke buys a boat, goes out with his family without checking the integrity of the boat even though he had painted the boat and suspected the hull was rotten. He also goes out without lifejackets for his family members. They get in trouble and the boat capsizes (not “sank” as reported, as they were “clinging to the upturned hull”.)
But apparently the headline news here, via Stuff, is that the boat was bought on Trade Me. Sorry – the news is a guy is lucky to be alive thanks to calling for help and some nearby fishermen.
If you want to buy a boat these days then Trade Me is increasingly the market, especially for smaller boats. But that’s a different story.
Food miles
New blog Celsias makes a point about food grown locally being more beneficial to the environment as it reduces ‘food miles’. A catchy phrase, but one that avoids much of inputs into the energy or carbon balance of providing food, as he alludes to.
To be fair to farmers in NZ, for example, the total energy inputs required to grow and deliver food should be compared, and the environmentally conscious consumer will seek to minimize that number. Inputs into the energy balance, aside from transportation cost of the finished product, include delivery of water, manufacture and delivery of herbicides (natural or otherwise), seeds, equipment used on the farm (ploughs, seeders, watering, weeding, picking, fertilizing), transport of labour and the list goes on. Good natural conditions gives kiwi farmers an advantage here.
As the article points out we should also be cognisant of how many people are earning a reasonable living from the farm, particularly when there are no alternatives.
Not mentioned in the article (at least positively) is that we should seek to maximise sustainable productivity from each unit area, so that we can keep farmed land to a minimum and maximise land used for nature.
This is another version of the nappies debate – where there turns out to be similar environmental impact between disposable and reusable nappies – provided you count all of the costs.
My guess is that well run environmentally concious farms will almost always out-perform small farms close to the markets, and they will do so using far less land. Simple economics tells the same story – big farms are more efficient and can produce and deliver food for a lower cost than local farms.
All that said, the quality of locally grown fresh food is hard to beat, and much of the large scale industrial farms, especially in the USA, are producing food of dubious quality.
Dating in parallel
I especially like the first comment to this engineering oriented post on dating in parallel. Readers should be warned – playing with electricity can be extremely dangerous, and I feel that the size of the power source is in reality orders of magnitude higher
Is Yahoo!Xtra Australian?
As Mauricio Freitas points out Yahoo!xtra has a page up for a sneak preview, but with nothing showing just yet. I noticed one other thing- the url: http://au.docs.yahoo.com/xtra/ and the copyright message at the bottom, which is “© 2007 Yahoo! Australia & NZ Pty Limited.
From this can we (over-)read that NZ is being run as part of the Australian company, and that NZ plays second fiddle? The question is whether the NZ branch will be run from Australia (or the USA?) or whether there will be technology people based in NZ. I would assume that there will be sales professionals based in NZ, as even Google has now a local presence. Yahoo has very low penetration in NZ versus say the USA, so perhaps they may wait.
Lance Wiggs 