This seems interesting as a conflict between the old and new business model. This was the first verdict, I suspect there might be some appeals as the verdict could serve as precedent to force any dutch webshop to rent commercial retail real estate, that nullifies their main competitive advantage and increases the threshold to set up shop. Online retailers from other countries don’t have the problem, so it would also weaken our competitive position in the international online retail market.

I think a lot pf people will want the court to add some nuances :)

At first you pay 98% interest and 2% debt, at the end you pay 2% and 98% debt. In the netherlands we have a specific regulation that allows for deduction of the interest payment from taxes, that benefits startup families and can lower the tax pressure from roughly 35% to 30%. After 20 years on average people make more money and can do without the deduct.

In the bubble one brand-new idea was the interest-only mortgage, where you pay the entire sum at the end when you sell the house.

There are arguments for it, and arguments to never go there.

That would seem amazing, average joe can refinance his 200K house and pays only 70% compared to an annuity mortgage.

Problem remains that in a free market the price is what the market pays for it, and if 50% of the market is the average joe population the market has a 1000/mo budget, through competition the market price of houses goes up :

Without the payment on the main debt, the prices on the housing market becomemore volatile. If interest goes up the prices drop, part of the mortgages can become a risk to the houseowner and bank, who can even lose their triple-A and that drives the interest up even more.

If Joe bought the house at 2% 600K and the price drops to 450K with 3% interest, Joe has a 150K net debt that is not covered in the sale of the house. 20 Joe’s is a million dollar problem. 200.000 Joes is a 10 billion dollar problem. We have roughly 3 million Joe families so we would have a 150 billion dollar problem.

A strong argument not to go there.

The second problem is the release of funds in the refinance round, the old mortgages were annuitary and some were almost completely paid. Selling a 200K 4% for 300K 4% frees 300K and that will largely be spent in the overal economy. It could amount to 300 billion for the netherlands, 20.000 per capita that is not structural growth.

The basic spend on housing, gas water electricity, municipal and state taxes, health insurance didn’t change, and much of the extra funds is spent on luxury. The baby-boomers were 45-55 at the time so they benefitted most from the refinance round, and could suddenly buy a Bavaria yacht for daddy, a timeshare pensionada home in Spain or Portugal, adventures on the stock exchange, music, computers, extra dinners.

With as result the yachtbuilders booming, expanding, entire new factories for ships, and now the entire demand is gone and half the companies go bankrupt. Construction of pensionado village in Spain and Portugal is over, sadly it was mainly the pension funds that invested in these projects (another reason not to go there).

Building capacity to satisfy extra demand in a bubble is a waste, there is no structural long term demand. John Maynard Keynes hinted at that, it is wise for a community to save money when things go well to support spend when things go less well, and choose a long term stable balanced growth.

In keynesian thought the state is the complement or maybe superego  of the population and in these phases increases taxes and cuts budget and spend on education, culture, health care to dampen excessive growth, once the economic growth slows down the state  lowers taxes and spends more. The state spend is complement to the populations spend and together they spend in a stable growing pattern. That allows for stable turnover for companies and stable employment, and would prevent building up bubble luxury overcapacity.

That remains a critique on my part, part of the crisis is caused by the egotism of the baby-boom. The baby-boom demographic segment is 30% bigger than normal, we have 6% “extra” population in that segment mainly in countries involved in WW2. When voting, they can outvote other demographic segments related to life phase issues.

The baby boom itself causes an independant extra demand in lifecycle related products of 30% in the west, and also a 30% drop in demand for these products as they move towards the retirement home. They could simply be used to catering to their own needs, for them the growth in business would always seem related to their lifecycle products, as if society actually shapes itself to satisfy their needs.

All in all, that makes the main search engine marketing tip for the next ten years Granny Gift shops on the web, lots of photos of happy little toddlers that make Granny happy, with $20,- gifts for Granny’s own grandchildren. Home delivery so Granny does not have to go out on the streets.

There is a 30% extra demand in the segment throughout the west (unless the pension funds go belly up). In 2015 there is 50% more demand for “happy 70th birthday” cards in the Netherlands.

Just some random thoughts.

I am going to get some coffee, I have a very stable coffee demand pattern that I *must* stafisy, my demand is very stable and long term a-cyclic.

I noticed when testing it with Twitter the whole key set is stored on the dev.twitter subdomain and not in the application directory where you register an application initially. When my first tests failed I think my keys were marked invalid, one working solution is revoking the application access and renewing the keys, then test again and it works. Once it works, it works flawless.

After registering an app at Twitter and getting the keys, it is a nobrainer.

I built the site as demo of what I consider a SEM-blog, designed to score frontpage and get exposure. Added five backlinks, and after three weeks online it is starting to kick ass.

This is a weird video, a whole day hansa sail in 10 minutes, at 2:30 the sail starts.

Several millions.

It seems losely connected to a bh-campaign on facebook installing WinPC Anti-Virus. A lot of it comes from referals to aportals.net and canfind.com containing the same error.

A typo in the openX ad campaign I think, HTTP:/ missing one forward slash, causing the browser to dump the url to Google Search. Which then redirects to the WikiPedia definition of HTTP :).

For a quick test I dive into the money segment, got the top 70 search phrases of October off of 7Search and for each get the top 100 results, resulting in a mysql database with 7.000 url’s on 3500 domains.

Then I try three cross-sections to extract the top 25 domains in the segment :

• (100 – position) / 100 per result
• (100 – position) / 100 per result, +1 for first 10, +1 for first 6, +1 for first three
• AOL experience based percentage of search volume

rating by rank

If I rate the sites’ urls based on (100 – position) / 100 per result.

place 1 = 0.99, place 100 = 0, that yields this table :

That makes Amazon top dog for all phrases containing ‘money’. I know the first pages get most traffic, and that first method doesn’t express that, so I change the routine and do my old trick.

rating by rank, bonus for front page

(100 – pos) / 100, and
for place 1-3 3 points
for place 4-6 2 points
for place 7-10 1 points

That gives this table :

That still does not show what domains actually get the traffic I need for conversion.

It is easy to score in a low traffic niche and anyone can be a winner on long tails, “alabama ski resort”, but long tails only get you a few hits (and wonder if they are serious?). And these results doesn’t give me a clue what I can spend (or what my competition would be willing to spend) on the actual traffic spots.

So I am going to estimate what traffic every site gets. I need search volumes and percentages for the serp ranks. I grabbed the search volumes per phrase from 7Search. For percentages, Aaron Wall quotes an old AOL source on the average click through rate of search engine result pages per spot on the first page :

That was what i was looking for. Given these percentages I can estimate the traffic any spot on the search engine result front page in Google would generate, and that yields a more realistic table of the money segment :

That shows which sites actively target and get the traffic in the segment, a site like amazon doesn’t show in the top of the last table.

One way of testing the validity of the estimates is comparing with alexa rank, doing a quick SeoQuake toolbar check :

That’s roughly correct based on old AOL percentages (well done, Aaron) and Oktober’s search volumes. It does not work for youtube, msn and others that have an alexa rank based on the entire domain. Being a search engine traffic estimate it doesn’t cover your ‘audience’ (returning visitors on bookmarks and referrals off of other sites (which are included in the alexa ranking) or other segments.

Problogger for example, according to that calculation would get about 6K hits through Google but the Alexa rank indicates it has ~~160K hits a month. That indicates high return visits and direct traffic, a high usability and I think they get traffic from other segments (‘blog’ ?).

The use of it

Why did I start doing this ? To estimate a budget for niche penetration.

If I were interested in a niche and have a 1% conversion at $100,- per year per conversion, what would I be able to spend to get Bidvertisers’ traffic in the search engines ? With their traffic and my conversion, 730.000/100 = 7300 conversions per month =y 88.000 a year @100/conversion = 8.8 million dollar gross revenue on search engine traffic conversions.

If my marketing budget is 20% of gross sales, for a year project that amounts to 1.7 million dollar. If I already had 300K hits my budget would be a million.

That (roughly) answers my question.

I have my doubts about the use of a tool like this, it could function as quick way to scan a segment, make a ‘heatmap’ and pinpoint the soft spots that are easy to penetrate and get a foothold, but that would require some stiff programming and a lot of switches, as well as processing a lot more segments. Nice project for the winter.

I took a ‘spicy’ Google Trend with a very characteristic term ‘ocean of glass’, did a search and picked a page gambling that it might be what people are looking for. I published parts of it on the blog, added some links to the source article and to Flickr and posted it.

Using the search phrase ‘ocean of glass‘ as post title and linking to other resources put the post on the details page of Google Trends for the search phrase.

The next hour I got 30 hits on the blog. Checking the referrers shows them all coming from the Google Trends detail page.

After an hour the traffic stopped. It seems to me Google Trends has it’s search engine marketing value, as traffic source.