Robin Yap, a very wise friend of mine commented on Facebook today, and it seems that we have to be more careful about the sites we sign up for. If you don’t read it, you could be giving away all your content.

Here is a piece from his post:

From the initial discussion on a Facebook thread with Liz Strauss, I decided to investigate other network ToS’. First stop, Facebook (text in bold are for your reference).

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Read all of Robin’s post to understand how problematic this could all be.

Originally posted on August 9, 2007 @ 12:49 am

John Chow might be kicking himself a bit right now as the advertising spot he sold on his site originally for $1000 USD has made others much more than that, and is now going to be sold once again.

After the Google 300×250 ad spot was flipped the first time, some readers speculated if it would be flipped again. Well, those speculations are about to come true. It seems Rich4Life.Us, the buyer of the ad spot will be flipping the spot to advertisers for the last 10 days of the ad run.

The advertisers blame a slow down on sales coming from the advertisement and have begun selling spots which will help make them even more from their now seemingly small investment. A brilliant move by all those involved.

I look forward to seeing what John does with the advertisement next month.

Originally posted on August 21, 2007 @ 10:03 pm

Over on John Chow’s blog I found a report from Chitika (pdf) that states that the top fifty-thousand blogs brought in five hundred million dollars in ad revenue in 2006. My first thought is that if that money was evenly split, that would only be $10,000 per blog. While I know it isn’t an even split, I have to say that $10,000 per blog isn’t enough to live on.

According to a recent case study by the University of Texas and Chitika, the top 50,000 blogs on the Internet generated $500 million in ad revenue last year. That sounds all well and good but I think the methodology to come up with the $500 million number is questionable.

Chitika took their 12,000 publishers, found their Technorati ranking and how much they made from Chitika in 2006. Then they made the assumption that the blogs will run three revenue sources and came up with a revenue number.

It is an interesting article, and if you want more details you will have to check out the report, it is only three pages long.

Originally posted on August 4, 2007 @ 2:29 am