Exile From the Herd - Living off the net

I once was lost, but now I'm found

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:11:53 -0400

For some reason, PrivateWorld.com, the domain name I recently moved my personal blog to, a domain I've owned since 1997 and used to house the company website from a previous partnership (Private World Communications) was delisted from the Google index. I'm not sure when it happened as I was receiving traffic from google via this domain almost immediately over the cutover.

To avoid a possible penalty for duplicate content I began using a 301 redirect from my previous Mark.Jeftovic.net blog hostname. No good deed goes unpunished, they say. Once PrivateWorld got dropped from the index I was gone completely since the 301 redirect had basically transferred all my pagerank and indexed pages to the now dropped name.

I think way to handle a situation like this is to ask around on the Google webmaster groups and ask about your particular domain, because Google staffers tend to read these and can sometimes address your site's particular circumstances.

Then watch this video and follow the steps therein. If you haven't already used the Google webmaster tools , there really is a wealth of information and diagnostics there about the Search Engine visibility of your website. I added my sitemap there so I could see what Google saw, I've requested reconsideration - which is supposed to take weeks, but after a few days I seem to be tricking back into the google index.

One of things I did notice under the webmaster tools is the keywords associated with my site content looked pretty "spammy" and I think those were old and dated back to a brief time when I just had the domain parked with a commercial domain parking service. If this is what got my domain dropped from the index, it is mildly startling to say the least. I'm used to seeing parked domains not appear in the google index, but I have also routinely "unparked" domains by developing them and found them appearing in the index within reasonable intervals (less than a few weeks) without seeming to be penalized for their past "parked" status.

So it's a mystery, but an unsettling one when it's unknown why it happened. When my personal blog gets dropped from the index, it's not the end of the world. But had it happened to a domain more central to my business interests, like say, easydns.com, it would be a non-trivial event that would really impact my business - and that scares me. So even though I seem to be re-appearing in the index, I'm hoping my reconsideration request produces an explanation on what caused this.

My Domainer's Magazine is in

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 11:28:26 -0400

I was just wondering about this last week, "didn't I subscribe to some domainer magazine, sight unseen a while back?"

Yes I did, and my first issue of Domainers' Magazine arrived this week. It looks quite professionally done. Looking forward to checking it out, I'll bring it home with me going into the long weekend (Happy Canada Day hosers and an early Happy 4th of July to our southern neighbours eh)

Attack of the TechnoPinkos

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Wed, 23 May 2007 15:24:29 -0400

I have been toying with an adage in mind for a few months, I think I may have invented it. It's one of those "there are three kinds of people" type quips, goes something like this:

There are three types of people, libertarians, conservatives and socialists.

Libertarians think they know how to live their own lives.
Conservatives think they know how to run everybody else's lives.
Socialists think they know how we all should live.

This morning I was forwarded a link to the Business2.0 article on domainer Kevin Ham about a half-dozen times and one sent the reddit comment thread on it (titled "This guy is a piece of s**t") and I had to chuckle and replied "I see Techno-Pinkos are out in full force".

Some of the comments are just classicly clueless:
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Domain Aftermarket Overdue for an "Asset Repricing"

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 17:57:05 -0500

For the last couple years the domain aftermarket has been hot again, we're seeing valuations not seen since bubble1.0, which saw valuations like 7 million dollars for business.com and 4 million for drugs.com. The TechWreck was induced by the Nasdaq crash of 2000 and the fun was over for awhile.

What differentiates this bubble in the domain aftermarket from Bubble 1.0 is domain parking and monetization. While it existed in 2000, it was a weirdism on the fringe. Yun Ye was quietly building his Ultsearch empire and cleaning up.

When he sold out to Marchex, for 60+ million cash, the masses "woke up" to parking and PPC. Now we have Internet REITs, domainer conferences and, the second last sign of an overheated market dropping in to place: VC funds are tripping over themselves to invest into PPC and the monetization game. (The last sign of an overheated aftermarket are the sales letters I get from places like domainprofiteer.com offering me courses in how to get rich buying and flipping expired domain names)

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The problem with remora websites

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 15:06:16 -0500

In the biological world, remora's attach themselves to larger organisms such as sharks or whales and they "benefit by using the host as transport and protection and also feeds on materials dropped by the host".

I've coined the term "remorasites" to refer to the crop of websites that spring up around any big internet whale and derive their value entirely from servicing that website. The plethora of MySpace profile builders, AOL Instant Message Icon sites, Youtube scrapers all fit this category.

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5 things your customers want from you

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 14:24:57 -0400

After a long absence from blogging (again), I've compiled a short list of the 5 things your customers want from you and they have nothing to do with web2.0, social bookmarking, widgets, marklets, CSS, RSS, Ajax or search engine optimization. In fact this post formed in my mind over the course of buying a new house, moving into it, and selling the old condo.

In other words, these 5 factors became evident to me offline, in the bricks and mortar world, and in keeping with my tired old view that "there is no such thing as The New Economy", it all translates back into things I can take back to the online world I live in.

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Better Living through Private World Domination

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 18:49:57 -0400

After reading Seth Godin's So What's Wrong With Small Business, it occurs to me that my blog's subtitle, describing myself as a "serial entrepreneur" may have been somewhat inaccurate.

"The distinction I've always made is that an entrepreneur is trying to make money while she sleeps, and does it with someone else's money! That she builds a business bigger than herself, that scales for a long time, that is about processes and markets. A small businessperson, on the other hand, is largely a freelancer with support, someone who understands the natural size of her business and wants to enjoy the craft of doing it every day."

I didn't quite know where he was going with this, but I realized that if that's what an entrepreneur is, if Other People's Money (OPM) is essential to the definition, then that's not me. The problem with OPM, I've personally found, is the "Other People" part. Not to sound like a misanthrope. Other People's Money comes with other people's expectations and the expectations of VC's, and external shareholders crimp my own objectives which are more about total personal freedom than leveraging OPM.

My "lifestyle" is important to me, and I've found over the years that "lifestyle" is a type of "L-word" to venture capitalists and other investors. They don't like to hear it from their prospects and if any of the founders cite their "lifestyle" as important to their future plans, that in itself can earn them an earmark as one of the founders who's gonna get fired down the road (in the inevitable purge that occurs after the VC's get the thin edge of the wedge into your company).

He continues:

"The more I see both, the happier it appears that small business people are. They often make more money, take fewer risks, sleep better and build something for the ages, something they believe in and can polish and be proud of."

This resonated with me and felt like a more accurate description of my circumstances. I've read some of the "Rich Dad" book series and having made the transition from the self-employed quadrant to the business owner quadrant during the course of easyDNS, I feel like I'm on the beam and living exactly the type of life I've always wanted.

The prospect of being some celebrity entrepreneur a la serial bankrupt Donald Trump does not excite me. And when I look at CEO's of public or VC funded companies, it seems like most of them have maybe 2 to 5% equity, and a Board of Directors who have the power to fire them, perhaps from the very company they founded. That doesn't sound like freedom to me, it sounds like servitude. It seems closer to Kiyosaki's first quadrant (that of being an employee). When and if that "liquidation event" finally comes, I think the above mentioned CEO, after all the special share prefs of the VC's get converted out, etc, they may wind up pocketing the same amount of money I'd walk away with if I sold out my 100% stake in the business now.

What does excites me is the idea of the Sovereign Individual. Having your affairs setup in manner where you are independent from the whims and pitfalls of OPS (Other People's Stupidity). This is accomplished by owning income producing businesses, assets and investments. One of my role models in this respect has always been my friend and mentor, the Atavist, who has owned a medium sized regional courier company for 35 years. When I met him he was piggy-backing a self-funded financial software company on his setup and today he's developing a property in Panama. The only people he's had to answer to are his customers and himself for decades, and that is a laudable state of affairs.

So while Seth summed saying in effect "Don't worry, I'm still an entrepreneur", I will sum up by saying that after thinking about it, maybe I'm not. So I've changed the subtitle of my blog from "Mark Jeftovic's blog for serial entrepreneurs and loose canons" to Better Living through Private World Domination.

"Private World" is an archetypical concept for me. Back in the early 90's when I was playing in a heavy metal, glam rock band called Landslide, our indie label was called "Private World Entertainment", so later on in the mid-90's my friend and I founded a technology company called "Private World Communications". The ideal of being fiercely independent, beholden to nobody was always my guiding vision. Today, one of my holding companies (and parent company of easyDNS) is Private World Domination Inc.

Thanks to Seth Godin for helping discover something about myself. No wonder he's a net.guru.

Drink your own kool-aid and scatter some acorns

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:52:33 -0400

While I have always been quick to point out that there is no such thing as "the New Economy" I have to admit that several playing fields have been more than levelled in the internet age, they've outright cratered.

What makes a lot of the innovation possible is the drastic reduction in the opportunity costs of failure. Examples range from telephony to the recording industry. Where once a state-of-the-art SS7 telecom switching station cost several million dollars to construct, today you can pratically hookup a laptop with
SER and Asterix to a PRI card and be in the same business for under two thousand bucks.

Yesterday if an artist wanted to record an album, he usually needed major label backing and minimum several hundred thousand dollars went into one album, and even the indie cinderella stories spent in the 10's of thousands of dollars to record their sleeper hits. Today you can do it for, again, under a two thousand bucks.

So today in many cases we have virtually cost-free failure, and that fuels a lot of innovation. People don't have to bet the farm, max out their credit cards and mortgage their house in order to give an idea a shot. They can bootstrap, edge-in or hell, spend one afternoon coding and 10 bucks on PPC and they'll have a good indication of whether an idea may have legs.

Unsuccessful searches are opportunities in disguise

Out of all my ideas I realize the ones that seem to work best are those for which I have personal use for. Rather than sitting around trying to think up something to invent, I end up wishing for something I could use, right now. If it turns out not to exist, or at least I can't find it, the lightbulb goes on. My basic assumption is I am not the only person looking for this, but I just may be one of the few who will do something about it sooner than later.

This occurred to me yesterday when I was explaining the origins of easyDNS to a reporter. It's background was in another company where we kept running into the same problems whenever we added a new client and needed them to make changes to their domain name. So we built a system to solve this problem, and this tool took on a life of its own. Nobody remembers the original company.

Around the same time I was playing with what I called a "context-based junk mail filter", because I wanted something like that but it also didn't exist yet. A couple other guys joined in on the collaboration but eventually, it just petered out and died on the vine. But then one of the guys took that failure, refined it, made it into something new, and you may have heard of the result. It's called SpamAssassin

I'm constantly spinning out ideas and launching things and they don't always get off the ground. I have one website I launched last year and I'm the only person using it. It has lots of members, they never actually activate the service. I personally find it invaluable,but I consider the site, on the whole, to be a flop. It didn't take much more than some coding time and a server.

Failure in this context is no big deal and one person's failure may be an acorn for somebody else's grand slam.

So build things that you find useful for yourself. There is no shame in building yourself a tool even if nobody else uses it. Even if it stiffs, it may plant a seed that somebody else can run with.

It all adds to the sum total of knowledge and exerience.

The bubblelicious benchmarks of ROI in Google

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 13:57:40 -0500

For amusement I have been watching the share price of Google for awhile now. I remember being taken aback at the lunacy of it all when I heard the CNBC cheerleading squad call for $400 back when it was still in the $200 range.

Well, it's been trading above $400 for quite some time now and the other day on a long car drive I did some back-of-napkin calculations to compare what gives you the greatest ROI from Google.

First, some review (at least I hope this is review

The object of investing is what? It is to obtain an adequate return on capital commensurate with the risk.

Why does one buy a stock? Trick question. Most people will say "to sell it a higher price", buy low, sell high, etc. This is why most people buy stocks, and in case you didn't notice, most people lose money in the stockmarket.

You buy a stock to gain ownership in a business, and thus to partake in a portion of its earnings.

Circling back to the top and closing the loop: you make investments in order to generate returns on those investments. Remember that as we work through the following:

Google's Adsense program is truly ubiquitous across the internet. Nearly everybody has those contextual text ads on their websites and they are a true bonanza for content and forum related sites. Some people are making truly stupendous amounts of money monthly from Adsense revenues.

Take a website that earns a steady $25/day in Adsense (I know a modest website that does this much and its far closer to the bottom end of the ladder than the top). That's $750 month, or $9,000 a year in income. Lets figure $100/month for a server and bandwidth, you're looking at net $7,800 annually in free cashflow, paid monthly out of Google and to the website owner.

Now, Google is currently trading at a p/e multiple of about 95 (!). So it's earning about $4.50 share. Divide 4.5 into 7,500 to arrive at the number of shares of Google you would need to own to get the same earnings = 1,666. You would need to own 1,666 shares of Google to derive the same earnings as our hypothetical website earning $25/day via Adsense. 1,666 shares of Google would cost you $713,731 on the open market today.

Which gives you the better ROI? Owning shares in Google or owning a website that earns income via Google Adsense?

Consider that there is a fairly liquid marketplace for revenue generating websites and current valuations are anywhere between 1 to 5 years' revenues. Even at the top valuation, you should be able to buy an established revenue generating website earning $25/day for around $40,000.

I think this may be the internet equivalent of the "inverted yield curve" as we see an alternate method to extract cold hard cash out of a company trading at nearly 3-digit earnings multiple that doesn't even pay dividends.