Convert or Die Blog by Darwin Hall

Do you think you can turn a buck from a video clip? Yeah, yeah, I know you are saying that ” if the market this”, and “if it’s targeted that”, but I think those of you who can smell the coffee, need to take a big drink from this YouTube Java. This will be an incredible revenue machine for the tech creative. I’m drooling just thinking about it.

YouTube has come up from being the 10th biggest web property in the world to number 4 in the past 6 months. And ranked # 1 as far as Seth Godin’s Web 2.0 traffic Watch is concerned.

Here is a quote from Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube:

“One of our recent announcements, we are developing technology, we are implementing audio fingerprinting, we will be able to identify the music that people are using in their videos, when this music is identified, the labels will be notified they’ll have the ability to claim that content and generate revenue against that piece of video content, and then the user has a free and legal way to be creative, its really opening up a market that didn’t exist before. Music that people would mix to videos…with our platform they will have a new market opportunity to generate revenue with that material.”

I’m sure Lee Dodd will have something enlightened to say about this.

Many years ago, when I had alot more time to ponder life, I developed a concept that I researched for a college thesis titled, “The concept to study and decipher the human collective“. Understand, this was long before blogs. While working as a freelance web developer with ambitions of getting a master’s degree in Internet Sociology, I came up with original idea. After a couple of professor friends read it, one dubbed it, “The Internet Illuminati Theory”.

Unfortunately, I never did anything with the thesis. It’s a funny thing coming up with an original idea, you never think anyone else will ever think of it. Even though I have never ran into anyone with my exact idea, I have run across a few along the same school of thought. One being Think Tank, and a newer site called WeFeelFine. (Now I know what Little Richard feels like. LOL!)

If you would like to read a summary of my original paper you can view it here: The Internet Illuminati Theory.  Here is a mirror in the summary.  Be warned, it’s a little far out. But I’m sure you will be entertained in any case.

Well the short of it is that Google is now allowing their ads to fly on Myspace.com as a part of the content network. As far as I can tell many fear the Myspace traffic is not very qualified. But after reading Lee Dodd’s post and Michael Gray’s post I figured I will just wait and see what will happen.  I have a couple of PPC campaigns coming up and I hope to god they won’t fly my ads on myspace. Not the market these campaigns are aiming for.

For those of you who are cashing Adsense checks, you are in good company. I started Adsense in 2002. I was shocked to see all the money you could make. By 2003 I was making over $100 per day. It was an exciting time to be a post internet-crash webmaster. Between my regular job and Adsense I could finally pay my bills on time. It wasn’t long until I was making enough to quit my job, well I actually was laid-off, and started marketing online full time. I would pick up the occassional contract job here and there doing some web design or something, but like so many webmasters during thoses times, I became dependent on google cash. Google cash accounted for 90% of my monthly income. Big mistake.

I bought a new car and hired my wife as my assistant. And yes, I flirted with my assistant all the time. The base of my traffic came to 4 financial sites I made back in 2001 and 2002. I became somewhat comfortable and foolishly lost my edge. After making all the web pages, and link garnering, one day after one of Googles now famous updates over 70% of my traffic flew away like a little sparrow. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was going to die. Well, I’ve learned a valuable lesson about web marketing and that is to never put all you eggs in one basket. Unless you own the basket and the eggs. Justin Khoury has an excellent posted about “Making the most of Google Adsense“. Also check Brent Wilson’s post and article on Adsense double standards. He makes some really good points that I’m sure many of us have noticed about the policy of double standards in websites.