Giving AdSense a new opportunity

As I told you, I was part of a round table during BlogPower, in which one of the other people sat in this public round table, was Jim Ballantine, Chile´s Country Manager at Google. I told him AdSense didn´t work for us, and that we finally ended up been banned. He told us we should give it a second chance, and that we neeeded an account executive. Right now – when you are reading this, because I wrote it yesterday – I´m having a conference call with them, and they will asign me one. We will start doing something with UrbanPower.cl and TecnoSquad.com, working with Google on our monetizing performance, and trying tailored made sizes. ChileHardware won´t be included, with our new joint-venture we expect great direct sales. In fact we have some banners already sold for all next year (with fix prices) and the rest of our inventory will be sold by Terra´s sales force (which I met yesterday) at excelente CPM rates.

I´m right now expecting some cashflow before the end of the year, to say, “one more thing” =) .

We signed a joint-venture with Terra Networks

Joint-Venture: ChileHardware & Terra Chile

Santiago, December 11th, 2007-. Terra, Chile´s leading Internet portal and ChileHardware (CHW), the most successful spanish written hardware review site, announced a business and content joint-venture, that will let, among other things, empower Terra´s editorial offer as well as CHW business model. CHW hardware reviews are been read, according to Google Analytics, by over 1.000.000 unique readers a month from all around the world, that are looking to know about performance and quality about different hardware components available in the market.

As a part of the Terra network, CHW will be, from now on, represented commercially by Terra´s sales force, leader in online advertising in the Chilean territory. This also means that CHW will now track their statistics using Certifica, an entity that tracks and audits traffic, according to the parameters defined by the Interactive Advertising Bureau Chile.

This alliance is part of Terra´s strategy of improving their vertical content portfolio in different segments, and have a bigger value offer for those advertisers who want to reach specific audiences.

In terms of content, the users of Terra will be able to access CHW´s reviews from Terra´s Technology Channel (www.terra.cl/tecnologia), where this valuable material, will be added to the daily and minutely updated news, articles and product launches.

About Terra

Terra (www.terra.cl) is the most visited Chilean portal, with over 3 million unique readers a month. It´s one of the biggest ISPs of the country, and the first delivering value added content to their users, such as content delivery to cellphone. Terra Networks is a global Internet media company under the Telefónica Group of companies. Terra operates some of the most popular websites in the United States, Latin America and Spain, with over 45 million monthly unique users worldwide. Terra is also the largest access/broadband provider in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world market.

About ChileHardware

ChileHardware (www.chilehardware.com) is one of the most visited chilean websites, and the most visited spanish written technology website in the world with over one million unique visits every month. It includes daily news, hardware reviews, rankings and discussion forums.

BlogPower: Great event!

BlogPower was a huge success this last Saturday. The agenda was ran perfectly and we had lots of fun and what´s best, networking. I had the chance of meeting many interesting people, of which I only knew before for what they write in their weblogs, twitters, tumblelogs and flickrs. Our roundtable was one of the most commented, and it looks people had fun and understood they can earn some money from what they like, writing.

Picture property of Alvaro Alegria

Overall a great event. Some problems with the WiFi connection although I´ve never been to a conference or event with a flawless one and trust me, I´ve been to many. I´m really looking forward for the next one. You can check pictures of the event at this Flickr Pool.

Stats for November

At just 30 days before the end of the year, I´m publisihing our traffic statistics for the month of november.

ChileHardware had a healthy month. We did not break any records but we where quite close to our best month, which if you remember was not an ordinary one. I´m still not sure if we are going to break our all time month record anytime close, December is a strange month, with too much holidays and everybody quite busy finishing their year. On the other side January and February are vacations season in Chile, which sums up almost 50% of our traffic. But if this go on just like other years, we should see a modest three months season, and afterwards a great 2008 March.

TecnoSquad on it´s side, is kind of stucked in it´s traffic. The problem is our editors are college students and had a really hard month with their studies. They wrote 30% less posts than during October but things should get better. During December we should write a lot more and last January showed a great improvement because of CES. If this repeats, we should have a great January.

BotonTurbo, our videogames weblog, had a month almost as good as the last one. We are not too nervous about this, because we are looking forward for some changes which we are quite sure, will have great results.

Last but not least, UrbanPower had a small improvement over it´s last month. What we really need to work is on regularity over posts, but overall things feel like growing.

After looking through all our websites, things look kind of stuck. This is not unusual, and we still feel that we have lots of headroom to improve. As long as we have ideas to do better, we are calm, when we run out of ideas, I will start running in circles.

TecnoSquad in the mainstream press and the importance of a proper hosting

Today TecnoSquad was mentioned by El Mercurio, as one of the most well designed weblogs in Chile. El Mercurio, as I´ve told you, is probably the most important newspaper in our country, and this mention indeed flatten us. TecnoSquad received it´s facelift just about a month ago, and we are already working with the guys at the design studio on the new design for ChileHardware. Two or three years ago, ChileHardware was mentioned by El Mercurio as one of the most important websites in Chile, the only critic they had was it was quite ugly. Now I hope they change their opinion 😛

Unfortunately the designers working on our sites, today learned a valuable lesson. This is something I repeat everyday, and is the importance of a proper webhosting. Another site they designed – and in fact they own – was mentioned in the article, also, by visiting TecnoSquad, our readers can reach them, because they have their credits in the footer. The problem is today both, their corporate website and their award winning design website are down. If they where online, I´m sure they would have had more traffic compared to an ordinary day and why not, maybe even find a new client or two.

Travelling, again and again

For what I expect will be the last time of the year, I´m flying to Buenos Aires, Argentina for an NVIDIA event. This is the third time I have to go to Buenos Aires in the last 30 days and makes me feel that I should move to Buenos Aires in the future. It will be a short trip, I´ll depart on Wednesday and return on Thursday.

On other trip tid bits, I out to the United States the 31st of December. I will arrive to LA the first day of 2008 to meet my friend David Hayes and why not, maybe even go for a roadtrip to Tijuana, Mexico. The 6th of January I will arrive to Las Vegas during the morning, that day I have a quite busy Sunday meeting with manufacturers before the show. During that week I will attend CES and the classic post-show parties. Finally on Saturday I´m out to San Francisco for El Jobso´s keynote.

But that´s news I´ve disclosed before. I´m now preparing my trip to CeBIT, Hannover. It will be my first time in CeBIT and what´s best, my first time in Germany. I expect to be there for the whole week and then leave to Brusells, Amsterdam and Rotterdam for some quick sightseeing and then back to Miami, where I plan to stay for a night for a quick meeting.

I also plan to attend Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, although we haven´t bought tickets yet. This is because of two reasons. The first is tickets are still to expensive (sweet dates are just 60 days before travelling) and because we are still not sure if only attending Computex, or stay a week after or before in Taiwan or maybe China. Asia is definitely not close to Southamerica, and air tickets are so expensive we really need to do as much as we can during our trip.

During 2007 I earned something around 70.000 miles (that includes 25% bonus, and doesn´t include a couple of trips I didn´t do on OneWorld), I expect next year to earn at least 100.000. So it will be a pretty busy year =)

BlogPower

The 1st of december we are having a blog conference in Santiago, Chile. It´s name is BlogPower and it´s supposed to be the first out of many events the people behind this are planning. I´m invited as part of one of the roundtables, which will be moderated by my friend Manuel.

On related news, I had a late meeting yesterday which was quite succesful. I will have great news in the short term, which unfortunately I cannot disclose now. We still have to fix some stuff and I´m in negotiations with a domain owner.

AMD screw it bigtime

You can love it or hate it, but you can´t live without it. AMD is a small company, but the one in charge of driving innovation on the x86 arena. If it wasn´t for AMD, we would be still stuck on Pentium 4. Here is a little resume of what AMD did today:

Scenario 

– AMD is loosing 500 million each quarter aprox.

– His last big launch was in August 2005 with Athlon X2.

– Intel is 18 months ahead on their productive technology

– Intel is 15 months ahead performance wise.

Their answer

– Launching a monolithic quadcore with horrible yields and that doesn´t tolerate frequency called Phenom.

– Doesn´t ship Phenom to hardware review sites and magazines.

– Instead it makes an event at Lake Tahoe, where press can benchmark their product under their supervision, on frequencies they are not currently shipping. What type of people losses 10 million dollar a day, and invites other people to a trip on their wallet, when their whole market capital is just 6.5 BN U$?

– Doesn´t brief anyone else other than Europe and North America.

Possible reasons to act this way

– There are no Phenoms around. No volume just vaporware.

–  Doesn´t want everyone to know their product is clock to clock slower than Intel´s 18 month old product. BTW Wallstreet already knew about it, and their stock was almost 5% down today.

– Doesn´t want to spend more money. Chile a small 16 million people country received eight samples of Radeon HD3800 series. This is something around 1,2k in videocards, a Phenom processors has a MSRP less than 300 bucks.

– There where no motherboards to ship with the CPUs. Phenom runs on AM2 or AM2+, there are plenty of AM2 motherboards around, on the other hand MSI already has it´s AMD 790FX AM2+ motherboard ready and we have a AMD 770 motherboard in our lab.

–  AMD doesn´t believe in written media, they will stick to analphabet countries, which they suppose have lots of money to spend on quadcore CPUs.

Ok, AMD screw it bigtime, know it´s time to see what type of hat trick will they develop to leave out of this mess.

Back to Argentina

I just finished a pretty weird monday. Anyways, my weekend was great, on Friday we went to Creamfields, where Chemical Brothers and Carl Cox did their thing. A friend gave me some VIP tickets, and for our luck, it had a full open bar, so we had a great time and of course the night end up quite crazy. On saturday I went to a BBQ where we had a great dinner, and after ir, we had a special guest, our old friend Jack Daniel.

Tomorrow I´m heading back again to Buenos Aires, Argentina. This is time I´m atttending Intel Editor´s Day which will be held in Rosario, Argentina. The event starts on Wednesday and our bus to Rosario departs very early, so we are leaving one day before.

I will have to go back to Buenos Aires on the end of this month, 29th and 30th, and if things go well, I should go in between this week and the 29th trip.  Because Chile is so small, many manufacturers decide to throw their press events at Buenos Aires, which is a bigger market, and fly journos there. It´s a good trick, an probably cheaper, although we´ve arrived late to more than one. That´s why it´s always better flying the day before.

PS: Slashdot only moved something around 2000 uniques to our site. Not too bad although less than we expected.

Slashdotted

Getting Slashdotted for an english written technology site, maybe not too dificult, but for a spansih written one, trust me, it´s almost impossible. But miracles happen, and today we got slashdotted for an article that includes a confidential AMD AM3 diagram, a blueprint of a motherboard that´s yet to come for processors that are due in at least one more year. In this type of situations is when we are very pleased to have chosen a webserver with overhead. Now it´s time to see if the Slashdot effect has a big impact on our traffic.