Domain Registry of America sent me some snail spam about renewing one of my domain names.  The price?  $30 per year.  That’s outrageously expensive.

To their credit: they actually have a pretty nice paragraph pointing out that this letter is not a bill and that people don’t have to pay it.  It even says, “Review our prices and decide for yourself.”

So, I will not transfer to them.  It’s just too expensive.

If you’ve been hearing about Ruby on Rails, you’re probably wondering, hey, why can’t I do that with PHP?  You can.  Just use CakePHP which is based on Rails.

It’s still young, but it’s pretty neat.  I’ve been working in it for the last day or so and have to say that it’s been fun to work with.  It handles so much messiness in the background that I’m sold.

It has some imperfections (apparently a performance bottle neck or two, nothing earth shattering), but I’m guessing those will work themselves out in the next couple of releases.

FastWebUpdates.com is pleased to introduce ZeroCoolMarketing.com.

The 11/25-12/1 edition of The Economist has a brief piece of click fraud. Some of their points:

• Internet advertising is a $27 billion business today and it should be $61 billion by 2010.  In 2001, it was just $9 billion.
• Click fraud comes up from two areas. First, advertising affiliates (read: the Google content network) create bogus clicks. Second, competitors click on your ads to exhaust your budget.
• What percentages of clicks are fraudulent? 10-50%, with an emphasis on the 10% range.
• Google and Yahoo are now taking the problem more seriously and both expect to have an independent auditing system by the middle of next year.
• One alternative to pay per click is pay per action.  The advertiser only pays on conversion.  This idea doesn’t have a lot of traction yet and, in fact, may be a non starter since it would link search engine compensation to factors outside of their control.

Great. So what can you do in the mean time?

My own strategy is simple. I never advertise on the content network (it never resulted in new customers for me, anyway) and, while my advertising is on I have a high enough daily budget that I’m sure I’m not going to run out. Oh, and I also track the IP addresses of visitors and complain loudly if I think someone is scamming me. Finally, I do some common sense things like add negative keywords for searches that Google sent my way even though they aren’t particularly useful.

Interestingly, having just done a search on Google, I can’t find anything which specifically says “Report Click Fraud” so I sent them a note asking how to do it. I’ll post their reply.

And, note to anyone from the Economist reading this: your leader on page 13 and your article on page 65 are so similar they’re practically redundant.  I expect better from you.

Just added to our corporate library a bit here by purchasing two marketing books from Amazon for a little light reading over the holidays (yes: Amazon prime one day shipping). They are Call to Action and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, both by Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg (with Lisa T. Davis in very small print).

Stay tuned for a more detailed review when I get back.