Blogger Tool Economics

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

A few of you asked me to explain the economics behind the blogger tools. Specifically how someone can earn money on the bookmarklet when the per-click rate is just a few cents.

The following illustrative scenario highlights how, if a blogger were to make this part of their routine, the aggregate value of all the links in perpetuity would continue to grow and become very significant.

Lets say this sample blog receives 200 readers per day and each embedded link receives clicks according to the following schedule:

• Day 1 (the post is new and people receive it in the RSS feeds): 10 people click a link
• Days 2-7 (people are commenting and linking to the post): 4 people click a link
• Days 8-30 (the article is no longer on the blogs home page): 1 person per day clicks
• Days 31+ (the post is old, but google still deep links to it): 1 click per week

The key here is that even after day 31 the link is still active and brings in a few cents a week, for as long as the blog is active. So even though the first day would only net $0.50, at the end of the first year that link would have bought in $4.10 - and thats per link. Each subsequent year would net $2.60, again, per link.

OK, so $4 isn’t a whole lot, but now lets assume the blogger publishes 2 articles per week. Now you’ve got 100 links, per year, each pulling in $4 in their first year and around half that in subsequent years.

Fast forward 2 years, and if the numbers hold true, you’ve $600-$800 per year. Once we begin to plot that you end up with something like this:

Each link trails off fairly rapidly, but never hits zero. So, like with any long-tail (or power law) distribution, over time these onesies and twosies add up and become very significant. The blue line, which represents total revenue, grows exponentially - and thats how the money is made. Of course, the real amount that you would earn specifically would depend on number of links, traffic and click through rates. The example here is really to illustrate the power of aggregating the long tail.

New Blogger Tools

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

We spend a lot of time here at Snooth HQ thinking about how Snooth can better serve its constituents, and recently we’ve been thinking a lot about bloggers.

With help from our 20 odd blogger beta tester’s (thats “20-odd” bloggers, not 20 “odd bloggers”) we just released the following two affiliate tools which are unique in the industry. Also, particular thanks go to Ryan Opaz for his help in rallying people together to help test the two tools.

Snooth Bookmarklet - The easiest way for a blogger to drop contextual links into their blog, allowing them to monetize content in a more relevant and engaging way than ads - just click on the image below to read more about it.

Installation is literally just a case of dragging a link to your address bar, and then when you need the bookmarklet, just highlight some text, click on the bookmark and it’ll popup with everything you need. From there, you just paste in the link and start earning money.

Snooth Quick Search - A simple implementation of the common side bar search, however with the same search capabilities as Snooths main search engine there’s full support of foreign characters, food pairings, tasting tags and weird queries.

Both these tools are super simple to use, come with tracking code already implemented, and with no monthly traffic minimums and full Paypal integration setup, and payment is a 2 minute job.

Please let us know how you find these and of course, just holler if there’s anything else you need.

Snooth to Twitter

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth, Wine

Admittedly, both @SnoothPhilip and I (@snoothmark) were later to the Twitter party than some, but it’s good to be here. Yesterday we noticed there was some buzz about a new wine related Twitter account, @winetweets.

Winetweets is an opportunity for wine and twitter lovers to share their wine findings. Some folks were asking for links to purchase the wines in addition to the mini reviews. With our 2 million+ prices and reviews, this was a perfect chance to connect winetweets to more information about the wine. Now, in addition to exporting the text of your review you can Twitter it directly from the wine details page where you edit your review.

When you click the Twitter “t” logo next to your review you’ll have to link up your account:

From then on it’s one click to send your review to Twitter:

And it shows up on your Twitter home page!

The Twitter API was wonderfully simple to use. The entire integration took us less than a day to finish, and hopefully the growing community @winetweets will find it useful.

What’s Next?

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

At Snooth headquarters we’ve spent the past week or so doing a bit of Spring cleaning. In addition to our ongoing data work we’ve been going back over the codebase we have, dusting and preparing it for the weeks ahead.

That said, we’ve still managed to roll out some new features. Recently we added the ability for users to tag wine reviews with whatever tags they would like. Peppermint stick, flower pot, clump of dirt: all of these can now become your custom tags for describing the wines you drink.

We also modified the ratings over time graph on the detail page. Before it showed a breakdown of ratings by year, but if all of the ratings came within one year it wasn’t as easy to see the breakdown. Now that’s changed and you can see ratings by quarter or even by month depending on what is appropriate.

We’ve got some more exciting features planned, so stay tuned. And have a good weekend.

Uncommon bottle sizes

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

Wine bottle sizes, like most other things in this frequently quixotic industry, are hard to categorize. Wikipedia shows 26 bottle sizes, but with tetra-packs, wine in a box and other non-standard packaging Snooth has close to 50 sizes in the database. Many of them may have fun names: piccolo, meaning small in Italian, for the 187.5ml tiny airplane sized bottle for example, but they play havoc with the concept of average prices. And this is why I’m writing this.

Before we modify how the average prices for a wine are calculated on the site, I’d like to turn it over to you to hear what would make the most sense to you.

If a wine is only available in Rehoboam and Methuselah (3 and 6 liters respectively) sizes, would you rather we calculated a theoretical average for the 750ml bottle based on standard conversion rates for bottles of that size, or should we just say something like “Price = $2,000, based on 3.0l bottle” and let you figure it out when you clicked through to see the individual bottle prices?

For the casual user the fact that we could calculate a theoretical 750ml price might be useful in quickly comparing different wines, as they’d all be forced to a common scale. However, for the collector, and especially for someone trying to value their cellar, this would prove to be a source of frustration.

Drop me an email and let me know your thoughts, or just leave a comment below. We’ll see whats popular and put that in place.

Calling all bloggers

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

We’re in the process of building a tool to help bloggers monetize their sites. Its still in private beta as we’re working out the bugs and we’re still looking for more people to help us test it.

If you are interested please message me through the site: here.

I’m excited by this, but am trying to keep quiet until its ready for a formal release…

Maintenance

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

Hey Snoothers, we’re going to be unavailable from around 12 midnight EST tonight while we shuffle some servers around. We’re expecting a good boost to our power, reliability and performance due to this upgrade. If all goes well, it should take 4-6 hours to complete the maintenance. Your reviews and other content will be unaffected.

So get your Snoothing done early, sleep well, and check back with us in the morning.

Filtering and Voting

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

We’ve gotten feedback from some of you on the new extended functionality of the merchant select last week, but we definitely invite more. Our goal with this feature is to streamline your wine buying. We want to connect you with stores that are relevant to you. And with thousands of stores integrated, there are some UI considerations that don’t necessarily roll off the drawing board.

While the number of prices is pretty exciting, it was very quickly apparent that the buy page was confusing. Even if you had chosen a merchant with the merchant select you were confronted with prices from stores around the world. I’m using the past tense because it’s no longer true.

If you log in and use the merchant select your country will automatically be chosen here so you’ll only see the prices from stores in your area. We also added voting for merchants. The best merchants (according to the community) will show up at the top of the list.

Finally, if the winery sells the wine directly it will always be at the top of the list. To me, buying directly from the winery is kind of like buying a CD when you go to a concert. Very supportive!

Keeping busy

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth, Partnerships

Mark talked about this before, but our Merchant Select tool is becoming more and more of a key feature. We ramped it up again last last week: now you can select merchants specifically, you can refine by country, you can also look up a winery and see what they are selling direct to the consumer.

As we begin to really ramp up the number of merchants we are displaying on the site, and begin to add more and more international ones this feature is going to be a cornerstone of the site’s search. Its very powerful, and key to getting more relevant results.

Have a play and tell us what you think.

PS. To find and use this thing, click on the ‘Add a merchant’ link on the top of any search results page

Flash Can Be Subtle

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

I sometimes get a little annoyed with Flash heavy websites. There’s a way to use Flash that’s subtle and tasteful. If you check out the Snooth homepage you’ll see the new flash search examples list. It’s much improved over the old ticker version.

We can easily add in additional searches, so here’s a chance for you to make some changes to the site. If you have run any searches on the site that you think are interesting or helpful to either a new user trying to figure out how Snooth works or a grizzled Snooth veteran, please post them in the comments. We’ll be only too happy to add them.

In other homepage news, we are going to change the old text on the flash banner to something a bit more search oriented. Philip’s been talking about that here, so make your way over and let us know what you think.