Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Mega Companies that are Family Owned!

Did you know the following mega companies are still controlled by amazing family members? Even if they are publicly traded, family members still control the major share.
  • Michelin
  • Estée Lauder
  • Hallmark
  • Walmart
  • Cargill
  • L.L.Bean
What do Walmart, Chanel, Tata, Comcast, L'Oreal, and Dell have in common? They are also family owned mega billion businesses. Family businesses don't necessarily mean brick and mortar or mom and pop. One third of the S&P 500 companies are family owned! 

Scholars that study Family Business including John Davis of MIT Sloan's family business programs. Key source for family business statistics include Global Family Busines Index.
https://executive.mit.edu/faculty/profile/433-john-davis

Monday, July 30, 2018

Adsense Blogging and Banner Ad Monetization Basics 101

Why Adsense? Adsense is the Google banner ad  and revenue sharing product many websites and bloggers use including Zillow. Only one Adsense account allowed per entity. Did you know that you can embed Adsense ads on Blogger by Google and also Shopify? However, Tumblr no longer allows Adsense scripts. One Shopify forum discussion claims that a potential downside of displaying ads on your online retail site - you lose traffic and sales to competitors.

Unfortunately, most users who are annoyed with ads can easily block Adsense Ads with Ad Block, a free Chrome Extension. Native Ads (ads that look like the native content, a natural synergetic placement of ads), Ads on mobile (there's an ad blocker mobile equivalent), and in general ads that are less invasive have a better chance of reaching viewers.

Not adhering to Google Adsense community guidelines will result in a lifetime ban. Giving how extensive Google's coverage is, that's a serious punishment. Seriously! They will ban you. Community guidelines are important. For example, don't click on your own ads.

There are two main sources of revenue: pay per click and per 1000 impressions also known as CPM. As your blog is starting and small, the CPM can be quite small, even just cents per 1000 impressions. CPC or PPC pay per click is not so limiting. A valid technology website or product signup conversion can easily be $1.5-$6 dollars and game ads are super lucrative. Anecdotally, I heard $6 per acquisition.

For Shopify embedding, you can include external scripts, including Adsense scripts, in a snippet such as single-product.liquid so that the ad will display on your product page. I also tried it on my blog page. It doesn't work as smoothly but the ads do show up.

Adsense is easy to use, implement and very standard. Compared to getting a sponsored post or sponsored ad, copy and pasting script codes is quite easy.  Those are all pluses. The downside is that Ad Blockers can easily block it. The already small dollar amount of CPM may be cut to zero because your ads are simply not showing. If Google shuts down your account, you are screwed.

I plan to write the next post on Youtube Monetization. If that's something you'd like to see please comment below! Every vote helps!

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Deloitte Business Chemistry Framework Helps Build Better Teams

Deloitte Consulting and business services invented a framework called business chemistry to facilitate and manage teamworks. The visualization is great! The demo video shows how dysfunctional teams should be visualized - there's one that is imbalanced, that was a good one, also how harmonious and diverse team look like in abstract arts.

https://businesschemistryblog.com/business-chemistry/

A really cool concept.


Saturday, July 21, 2018

What is Discord? Social Network and Chat for Gamers?

Located in San Francisco, Discord is "It's time to ditch Skype and Teamspeak. Discord is the only free and secure voice, video, and text app designed for gamers that works on your desktop and phone." in its own words.

It is VoIP chat and call for gamers. It is also a chatroom where gamers call for raids in virtual world and reality. Some are seeing Discord as the new slack where people go talk about a topic that they are passionate about.

Pramp an online interview prep service recently switched to discord for the following reason:
They reached the Slack 10,000 message quota or limit in a week due to hyper growth with a channel of 1000. It has since then ditched Slack to join Discord which it calls "an incredible community chat app".

Local legendary raids, Mewtwo,  shiny Pókemon raids have been impossible without passionate gamers and players organizing offline raids on Discord.

Community members also discuss strategy, tips and tricks, even statistics. Discord moderators, who are topic volunteers, who are gamers not staff, organize surveys and report stats on spawning of shiny pokemons and drop rates in massive online player games.

Discord is uniquely well positioned for a boom in Augmented Reality (AR) games! For any real-life raids, for which a critical mass group of players need to gather in order to win the boss battle and win valuable items or catches, Discord is the perfect instant messaging channel needed right on our cell phones - on the same operating system as our Augmented Reality games! If you don't get enough players fast, the battle simply cannot be won. The call to action needs to be instant and location relevant, again making cell phone the perfect mobile technology with all the right censors and software.

A Discord invite looks like this:
https://discordapp.com/invite/an_unique_hashcode_7_digits_case_sensitive

If you are developing a virtual reality game, you'd better support it and communicate with your fans and users on Discord.

Follow our blog to see more social and gaming trends. We also talk about hustling and growth hacking in the silicon valley.

Read more about discord on its wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord_(software)