The economics of this kind of enterprise has changed radically in just the last few weeks. As long as your site is heavy on content, and light on sex/crime/death/disaster, it is now possible to cover your expenses, and more, just through placing a few unobtrusive text ads.

Due to the secretive terms-of-service, I can't discuss numbers, but let's just say I'm pleasantly astonished, and so are many other clueful web site owners I know.

Free content sites were a financial drag on those unlucky enough to be obsessed with building them, like me. Now, all of a sudden, they pay surprisingly well. Not enough to make you rich, or let you quit your day job, mind you, but nothing to sneeze at.

See http://www.google.com/adsense/ for details.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Monday, September 29, 2003, 7:13 am

Leave-taking. A colleague on an email list described taking his son ("BOY") to college at Dartmouth. I wrote:

I missed this scene from BOY's perspective, since I attended the hometown university, with which I was already intimately familiar; when I moved out of my father's house a couple of years later, no one took any notice.

Rather, just four weeks ago, we achieved the kindergarten version of this milestone.

SGSK, our one and only child, fresh from her fifth birthday, is already eye-rolling at her parents in public. "LOOK," she hissed at me in a crowd recently, as I made faces to entertain a nearby infant, "Do you see anyone ELSE doing that?" I suppose almost everyone of sufficient age is accustomed to getting urgent deportment guidance from a young person with less than one-ninth one's real world experience, but it was new to me.

So here she is, SGSK, now a "big kindergarten girl", mandatory backpack in place, eyes darting toward the beckoning classroom door as we try to take a few pictures to commemorate the occasion.

Despite the very self-assured prediction of the kindergarten teacher, delivered in previous parent meetings, there are no tears on either side. Indeed, I didn't see any tears shed anywhere.

It's very different from my own first day of kindergarten, which occurred in the waning months of the Eisenhower Administration, in the days when kids starting school were being ripped for the first time away from full days with family, and kindergarten was scheduled on the half-day to allow them to "adjust". Nowadays, most kids by age five have had years in day care, preschool, and day camp. Kindergarten half-days are now an inconvenient anachronism: working parents must seek for-pay options to cover the other half-day.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Friday, September 19, 2003, 1:12 am

Why things have changed. In 1958, the federal budget was $82 billion. In constant dollars, adjusted for population growth, that would be about a third of what the federal government spends today.

Calpundit muses on this point, listing all the important things which would have to be scrapped to reduce the federal budget by two thirds in order to return to 1958's spending level; he imagines a much less appealing society for most people. And I would certainly agree with that.

His commenters, in a wide ranging discussion, argue the pros and cons of living in 1958 versus now, and why it is that our federal government costs three times as much now as it did then.

My take on why things are different now: massive cultural change.

In the decades since 1958, we have become a much more atomized, individualistic society. Civic participation and joining and taking part in community activities has plummeted since then. Charitable giving may be "up" in dollars collected, but it's way down in percentage of income. And no, these changes were not brought about by any government policy. See Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone for vast documentation on all these points.

Yes, individuals in our society became much freer than ever before, and the ethic of individual freedom to do one's own thing became a part of the culture like never before. This is such a powerfully good thing in so many ways that it's easy to forget the downside. Some, freed from social constraints on their behavior, did bad things: the homicide death rate more than doubled from 1960 to 1975, and other crimes rose in similar proportion.

What used to be considered obligations to family and community were redefined as optional choices. Social mores no longer dictated that you had to bear some responsibility caring for disabled or mentally ill relatives, let alone one's neighbors. Technological and social and economic change combined here. If your disabled and unemployed parent or sibling ran up a $55,000 hospital bill, would you choose to shoulder that debt — or let Medicaid (i.e., the government) pay it?

In this heady atmosphere of I-can-do-whatever-I-want, leave-me-alone, I-have-no-responsibility-for-you, libertarianism as a mass phenomenon was born. But libertarians seem to forget that somebody has to pay those bills.

Another point: improvement in transportation and communications have increasingly centralized our news and our culture at the national level, while eroding local and regional culture or even awareness. This greatly increased mobility has fueled a tendency to think of the United States as all of a piece. The news media, now concentrated into national chains, already had plenty of incentive to cut back on labor-intensive reporting on local and state politics. People today are more likely to hear about, or care about, trivial events in the U.S. Congress, than momentous ones in their own state legislature.

No wonder that anyone who sees a problem requiring government intervention is likely to think first of the federal government. Not just social programs: look, for example, at the enormous expansion of the federal criminal code into areas that used to be considered the province of states. The culture, perhaps inevitably, has come to see state capitals as just branch offices, with the real power center in Washington. Naturally, the Congress has written that assumption into more and more laws.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Tuesday, September 16, 2003, 2:11 am

The Carter Model. Conservative commentator David Brooks has an op-ed column in today's New York Times, detailing the glee among Republican pollsters and strategists over Howard Dean's surge in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

You would have thought I had asked them if Danny DeVito would be easier to beat in a one-on-one basketball game than Shaquille O'Neal. They all thought Dean would be easier to beat, notwithstanding his impressive rise. Some feared John Kerry, others John Edwards, because his personality wears well over time, and others even Bob Graham, because he can carry Florida, more than Dean. As their colleague Bill McInturff put it atop a memo on the Dean surge: "Happy Days Are Here Again (for Republicans)."

I myself haven't settled on a candidate to support. But the nominating process has been so brutally front-loaded that there isn't much time for sorting out or rethinking: it will be all over by early March, just six months from now. Wesley Clark is an intriguing but unlikely possibility. Assuming Dean doesn't screw anything up badly, he's probably going to get the nomination.

So is Dean really so beatable? True, he hails from an obscure and (some say) loony little state far into the Northeast. True, he has little foreign policy background. True, he is more negative, critical, and partisan than the other candidates. Still ...

The 2000 election led many to imagine the American people as closely divided and deeply polarized. Half the country are conservative Republicans, we are assured; the other half are liberal Democrats. But the snapshot resulting from that one forced choice under that year's circumstances is not necessarily an accurate picture.

Though Brooks is certainly correct that political activists are increasingly polarized, the non-activist public remains staunchly inscrutable. A substantial portion of the electorate probably doesn't recall with any clarity who they voted for back in 2000, let alone why. It's folly to assume that they are already certain to line up the same way next year.

The 2004 election is a whole new roll of the dice, and there is no reason to assume that it's going to be close. I'm expecting an election decisive enough that it won't really matter whether the Democrats pick Kerry, or Dean, or Edwards, or Clark, or Lieberman, or Gephardt. In the end, it will be clear that any of them would have lost, or that any of them would have won.

Moreover, the conventional wisdom about a presidential election, one year before the fact, has been pretty consistently wrong. In 1987, a Democratic win was expected; in 1991, GHWB was obviously unbeatable; in 1995, Clinton's defeat was already taken for granted; in 1999, the analysts confidently predicted an easy win for Gore.

With that awful track record in mind, here's what I'm thinking about the presidential race.

My model is that GWB is a Republican version of Jimmy Carter. Think of the parallels. Elected on a very thin margin. A less moderate administration than what the campaign led people to expect. Trouble managing the economy. Grandiose foreign policy goals, but (arguably) poor results. Evangelical Christians lend electoral support, but are alienated by policy choices. Party ideologues get impatient; some talk about bolting.

Then, suddenly, the embattled president gets a lucky break: the other party goes and nominates a candidate from what the White House regards as the extreme ideological fringe. The President and his advisers become arrogant and overconfident: they can't see how they could lose. But they do.

The Republican pollsters and strategists, quoted by Brooks in the NYT piece, are quietly hooting with glee over Howard Dean. I remember their Democratic counterparts saying almost precisely the same things, in precisely the same tone, about Ronald Reagan in 1980.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Tuesday, September 16, 2003, 1:09 am

Web advertising. I started The Political Graveyard web site in 1996. Once it had developed a substantial flow of traffic, many people urged me to sell advertising on the site.

I was reluctant, but I thought one ad per page wouldn't be too intrusive. And indeed, the 468x60 graphic banner ad at the top of a web page had become a de facto standard, widely used on all kinds of sites. It didn't require much work: you could put a snippet of HTML on your page, pointing to an ad network's server, and they would find the advertisers, supply the ads, and send a check for your share.

In February 1999, I signed up with ValueClick. I tried a lot of other advertising networks, but for various reasons, I ended up staying with ValueClick for more than four years.

Web publishers are usually paid for advertising on a CPC ("cost-per-click") or a CPM ("cost-per-thousand") basis. There are also commission-based plans, but in my experience they generate only tiny amounts of money.

CPC-based ad networks, like ValueClick, tend to be solid and reliable; CPM-based ad networks are usually the reverse, making big but vague promises, retroactively lowering their rates, and taking months to issue checks.

ValueClick paid 12 cents per clickthrough (briefly 15 cents before the dotcom crash). But though my traffic kept rising, the clickthrough rate fell steadily. The ads had little relevance to the average user, and most people tuned their eyes to not see banner ads. Popup ads were touted as an alternative, but I declined to have them on my site. ValueClick started running some CPM based ads, but they continued to pay reliably every month; my check was usually around $100.

But then, on August 8, I unexpectedly received a notice from ValueClick terminating my account. It was plainly a mass mailing; five "reasons" were given, none of which had to do with my site. When I asked, they offered a more plausible reason: the presence of links soliciting monetary contributions from users. Not that this issue had ever been mentioned in ValueClick's terms of service.

But by that time, I had already found a greatly superior advertising service, sponsored by a very well known firm, which provides groups of small, context-relevant, text ads — less intrusive and more lucrative than the blinking graphic banners. Look at the page tops in The Political Graveyard and you will see what I mean.

You may have noticed similar ads replacing graphic banners on all kinds of sites recently. The terms of service limit what I can say about it, but the economics of building content-based web sites has changed radically in the last few exciting weeks.

When I received another copy (only slightly modified) of the same misleading termination notice from ValueClick, I wrote the following farewell letter:

Dear ValueClick,

Since my time as a ValueClick publisher is at an end, I wanted to share a few thoughts. I have a lot to thank you folks for, and some lingering questions.

I do appreciate the more than four and a half years that I was part of the ValueClick network, and all the money I earned through your ads during that time.

I very much appreciate the fact that ValueClick, unlike other web advertising networks, kept its promises and issued checks on time. When other webmasters shared their latest horror stories of dealing with other ad networks, I could smile and say, "ValueClick is not like that."

I especially appreciate that ValueClick, again unlike other ad networks, allowed me to opt out of ads for online casinos and material I didn't want on my site.

I realize that my site is a fairly small one by your standards, with only 20,000 or so page impressions per day. And of course it is your right to terminate publishers at any time for any reason. Nevertheless, I'm dismayed at the way my account was terminated.

The letter I received in early August listed five reasons for termination, none of which even remotely applied to my site. In subsequent correspondence, I learned that there was an entirely different reason, not mentioned in the letter: your quality assurance committee had objected to the Amazon Honor System and PayPal donation links on my pages.

I appreciate that your representatives were willing to share the real reason with me. However, the ValueClick terms of service makes no mention of this as being a problem, let alone one which is fatal to a site's participation in the network. So I had no warning about this.

Today, weeks after I thought my departure was all settled, I received a SECOND termination letter from ValueClick which recites the same five reasons, none of which applies to me. It appears that ValueClick is experiencing some difficulty framing open and effective communications with its publishers. Receipt of the second, duplicative letter makes me wonder what sort of turmoil and disorganization is going on in your offices.

However, I am very grateful that you allowed my account to remain until the end of August. It would not have been possible for me to cancel a family vacation and instantly redo the tens of thousands of pages on my site.

Over the past few weeks, I removed all ValueClick code from my pages as you requested. That job was completed at 5:00 pm Eastern time on Tuesday, September 2nd. I replaced ValueClick's banners with code from another provider.

Your termination led me directly to the unexpected realization that groups of page-targeted text ads are enormously more profitable for me as a web publisher than graphic banner ads. It was also much simpler to install code which is identical from page to page.

Though it pains me to admit this, you did me a huge favor with the termination of my account. So, thank you for that as well.

Best wishes!

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Saturday, September 6, 2003, 12:15 pm

Miniature trains: The Minneapolis Star-Tribune profiles my English brother-in-law and the St. Croix Railroad in Hudson, Wisconsin.

These are not model trains, club president Tim Kirby will tell you. They are miniatures, faithful to the massive engines that are their inspiration, mostly in one-eighth and one-twelfth scale.

"Everything about it is exactly like the real thing," Kirby said, standing over his black steam locomotive. "Well, it is the real thing, except that it's small."

Some of the dozen or so engines have only enough room for an engineer and one passenger. But others, such as the steam locomotive Kirby shares with club vice president Cliff Hudson, can pull 10 gondola and flatbed cars, with room for as many as 30 passengers perched on empty milk crates, padded boards and motorboat seats. Other trains include miniature dining cars, coal cars and tankers.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

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