Journal: News & Comment

Phil "Pud" Kaplan on building buzz at Gnomedex

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Pud made f***edcompany.com, AdBrite, Mobog, etc. How do you build buzz, how do you make money, how do you be something useful on the Internet?

• Couldn't figure out what a blog was, but already had one in f***edcompany.
• Yes, advertising is someone vestigial, and so is the traditional blog.
• In the ad world, you're either a publisher or an advertiser.
• There are a lot of ways to get traffic and make money.
• Phil has about 12 websites, with hundreds of thousands or millions of page views a day.
• There are a lot of crap websites that are only there to serve up ads.
• An example of an excellent scam: create a program that scrapes the top 100,000 sites on the web, grab all their content, finds available domain names relevant to the content, and then duplicate those sites with AdSense.
• What are better ways of building buzz?
• The press always wants to write the exact opposite of what you tell them.
• Present yourself as the opposite of the impression you want to make, I guess.
• When VCs give you money and you put it in the bank, VCs say, "hey, we could have put it in the bank!"
• "But I'm making 4% interest!"
• Ragging on things is a great way to get buzz about it.
• TechCrunch does the same thing.
• Write about a group, and every person who's involved with that group will come visit you.
• Create a personality: "contact Pud," not "contact us."
• Create a website where there's a need for people to come back.
• Are the old-school media all that important anymore?
• TV and Internet use are about equal in the U.S.A., but Internet ads are only 6% of ads.
• Coca-Cola is completely built on branding, but they're missing the kids on MySpace and now they're losing sales.
• A full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal is $100,000, and that's because it plays on scarcity.
• There is no such scarcity on the web, unless you set it up to do that.

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