Garth

VHPR Widget Test

2007-11-27T20:13:00.000-08:00

This should show the post list

Intergalactic Proton Powered Electrical Tentacled Advertising Droids!

2007-09-26T20:06:00.001-07:00

Intergalactic Proton Powered Electrical Tentacled Advertising Droids!
Intergalactic Proton Powered Electrical Tentacled Advertising Droids!
Intergalactic Proton Powered Electrical Tentacled Advertising Droids!

Hi, I'm Darth Harrington of Darth Harrington's Intergalactic Proton Powered Electrical Tentacled Advertising Droids Emporium & Moonbase! Due to a garbled subspace transmission, I am currently overstocked on all Intergalactic Proton Powered Electrical Tentacled Advertising Droids, and I am passing the savings onto YOU!!!!!

Google loses their largest customer as ebay pulls all U.S. advertising

2007-06-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

It was revealed today that ebay has stopped buying US adwords from google. This is a significant development because ebay and shopping.com are two of Google's largest customers, and ebay spends hundreds of millions of dollars for the most paid search traffic of any company.

In my opinion the way google's pagerank algorithm is currently indexing and ranking wikipedia in results is what ebay executives have been looking at before making this decision.

Over the past year ebay has released a number of features aimed squarely at improving natural search results and authority. All the new guides, wikis, blogs and myworld stuff helped massively increase the amount of content on ebay that gets linked to and does not expire (auctions) and thus raised their authority even higher in google's ranking.

From merchandise standpoint ebay has the most authoritative user generated content on the internet. hundreds of thousands of sellers accurately describe items including keywords and then millions of people bid on those items until the item ends at a market price.

Just like wikipedia is starting to show up at the top of any search query they have mentioned on one of their pages, ebay has numerous listings for almost any product and tons of static content and is showing up at the top for most product searches.

Why buy stumbleupon for 75 million? Perhaps to replace hundreds of millions of dollars in adwords traffic.

Karl Rove and Dick Cheney on eBay

2007-06-10T15:09:00.000-07:00

On September 9th, 2004 Dick Cheney made a statement about the number of individuals who derived some of their income from ebay:

That's a source that didn't even exist 10 years ago," he said. "Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay." It's unclear how many of those are making enough to support themselves.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-09-09-cheney-war_x.htm

Now, Karl Rove, the master of data for the republicans, has almost doubled the numbers used by Cheney:

There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture,” he said. “One of them is the power of the computer chip. Do you know how many people’s principal source of income is eBay? Seven hundred thousand.” He went on, “So the power of the computer has made it possible for people to gain greater control over their lives. It’s given people a greater chance to run their own business, become a sole proprietor or an entrepreneur. As a result, it has made us more market-oriented, and that equals making you more center-right in your politics.

So according to the republican leadership in less than two years the number of people whose job it is to sell on ebay has almost doubled, and has gone from “unclear how many of those are making enough to support themselves.” to “ people’s principal source of income is eBay”

Let’s take a look at the numbers available from ebay and see how close they are to reality.

First I took the ebay Gross Merchandise volume for each quarter since 2004.

Then I used the Net Transaction Revenues (Marketplace) to get an estimated GMV percentage for the US only

Next I multiplied the Gross Merchandise volume times the percentage of transactional revenue derived from the US to get an estimated US Gross Merchandise volume

Finally I divided the estimated US Gross Merchandise volume by both Cheney and Rove’s seller numbers.

These numbers are widly optimistic as they assume there are no sellers other than those mentioned by Rove and Cheney are part of the GMV.

Here are the 2004 Numbers:
Annual Gross Merchandise Volume $34,168,000,000.00
Net Transaction Revenue US $1,399,848,000.00
Net Transaction Revenue Intnl $1,155,805,000.00
Total Transaction Revenue $2,555,653,000.00
US Transaction Revenue % 54.77%
Estimated US GMV $18,715,375,860.49
Cheney Ebay Sellers Estimate 400000
Avg Annual GMV Per Seller $46,788.44

Here are the 2005 Numbers:
Annual Gross Merchandise Volume $44,317,000,000.00
Net Transaction Revenue US $1,737,039,000.00
Net Transaction Revenue Intnl $1,665,262,000.00
Total Transaction Revenue $3,402,301,000.00
US Transaction Revenue % 51.05%
Estimated US GMV $22,625,969,120.02
Cheney Ebay Sellers Estimate 400000
Avg Annual GMV Per Seller $56,564.92

Here are the 2006 Numbers:
Annual Gross Merchandise Volume $52,473,000,000.00
Net Transaction Revenue US $1,798,196,000.00
Net Transaction Revenue Intnl $2,103,547,380.00
Total Transaction Revenue $3,901,743,380.00
US Transaction Revenue % 46.09%
Estimated US GMV $24,183,225,168.44
Cheney Ebay Sellers Estimate 400000
Rove Ebay Sellers Estimate 700000
Avg Annual GMV Per Seller - Cheney $60,458.06
Avg Annual GMV Per Seller - Rove $34,547.46

Here are the 2007 Numbers for the first quarter
Quarterly Gross Merchandise Volume $14,281,000,000.00
Net Transaction Revenue US $449,549,000.00
Transaction Revenue Intnl $630,003,400.00
Total Transaction Revenue $1,211,545,000.00
US Transaction Revenue Percentage 48.00%
Estimated US GMV $6,854,880,000.00
Cheney Ebay Sellers Estimate 400,000
Rove Ebay Sellers Estimate 700,000
Avg Quarterly GMV Per Seller - Cheney $17,137.20
Avg Quarterly GMV Per Seller - Rove $9,792.69

First, if you are a fantastic ebay seller with great merchandise you will pay ebay 10% of your gross revenue, take 10% away from the gross revenue number.

Second, retail establishments with great margins mark their goods up 100%, ebay margins are generally much lower, but we will use 100% markup for a 50% merchandise cost, takeaway another 50% away from the gross revenue number.

So we assume that with no other costs (Postage, computer equipment, auction management services) each seller will get to keep 40% of their GMV.

Here are the net income averages for both Cheney and Rove’s seller estimates:
Cheney 400,000 Sellers
2004 – Monthly $1,559.61 Annual - $18,715.38
2005 – Monthly $1,885.50 Annual - $22,625.97
2006 - Monthly $2,015.27 Annual - $24,183.22
2007 - Monthly $2,284.96 Annual - $27,419.52
Rove 700,000 Sellers
2006 - $1,151.58 Annual - $13,818.98
2007 - $1,305.69 Annual - $15,669.30

Having sold on ebay for 4 years at my last job, I can tell you that the realities of selling on ebay are much less rosy than these numbers, which already look bad for Rove and Cheney.

Some things not accounted for in these numbers are:

In reality the GMV percentage is not evenly distributed among sellers.

Much of the GMV on ebay is from sellers who do not support themselves with ebay

The largest GMV sellers on ebay are corporations like Sun, IBM, and eforcecity whose volume is included in these numbers.

There are costs of doing business other than ebay fees and merchandise.

In many categories the sell through rates do not allow for ebay fees of just 10%

Credit card payments average ~3%

Cheney’s number of sellers estimate from 2004 was used for all 4 years

If I had to guess I think maybe 200,000 people, half of Cheney's numbers might be close to an accurate number of independant sellers. I am positive very few of these people are getting rich.

Creating a wood frame for my projector screen

2007-03-09T08:42:00.000-08:00

I have an Infocus IN72 projector that I have been very happy with, in my old apartment I mounted my screen made of Do-Able board to the wall using industrial velcro and was happy. When I left my apartment, the industrial velcro removed the paint and a pretty substantial paper layer from the drywall.

Since I now own the walls I will be mounting the screen to I decided to figure out a more visually apealing option that would not create so much damage if removed.

My screen is 65" by 37" and my new house has a similar sized area, so I am keeping the Do-Able board as it is already cut. I decided to add a frame to the screen to make it match the living room better. Having discovered the DoAble board on AVSForum, I decided to see if anyone else there had built a frame for their board. Quite a few people have built frames for their board, but all of the pictures I found used felt to wrap the material and butted the corners together. I wanted to use a dark brown matte paint for the frame and miter the corners.

Here are the materials I bought at the ace hardware down the street:

3 1/4 8' Hardwood boards
1" Corner Join pieces (these handy deals pull the mitered corners together for a good fit)
5/8 wood screws
4 18" hangman picture hangers (these came from Lowe's)

Glaziers Points
Mitre Box and saw

After routing out the inside of the frame for the do-able board, I used wood glue and the corner join pieces to put the whole thing together. If your screen is large, you are going to need a big area for this to sit for at least a day while it drys.

Upon reflection, I think Part of the reason that there were not any mitered corners in any of the projects listed at AVSForum is because building a large frame with mitered corners is hard!! In order to get clean corners, the entire frame must be assembled at the same time, and the size of the frame makes each corner pretty fragile. I did have to use a little wood filler to take up a corner that did not quite fit properly.

Yesterday I was in a conference room at Microsoft where they had a projection area, and the border was thin metal covered in felt, while it did darken the small areas of light leakage, it was only slightly less noticible then the matte brown paint.

Here is the finished frame:

Here is a corner:

The Chilli Pepper's playing Brandy

2007-02-15T15:20:00.000-08:00

What could be better than RHCP playing my favorite song by one hit wonder Looking Glass

TechCrunch posting "me too" articles to drive traffic from TechMeme

2007-02-12T17:20:00.000-08:00

This is what Michael Arrington previously said about exclusives:

we certainly do not require exclusives, although they are often offered to us. What we don’t do is cover news when it has been given to others exclusively, then a couple of days later the company approaches us to write about them. I think the best thing is for a company to announce news to all journalists at once.

Mike must have changed his tune recently as he now seems to be posting articles after news he did not initially report, designed to drive traffic to TechCrunch. In one case he followed up on a story given exclusively to VentureBeat twice and achieved a top TechMeme post in the process.

TechMeme has a sweet feature which allows you to view the site as it appeared at a time in the past and the following links were created using that feature.

First on friday at 11 am PST Microsoft announces that they are keeping the name Hotmail:

We Heard You Loud and Clear

TechMeme picks it up at about 4:00 PM Eastern Time

http://www.techmeme.com/070208/h1600

A few hours later, a new post by Arrington with a fancy chart is now the first link about the hotmail announcement.

http://www.techmeme.com/070208/h1900

Eventually he gets his own branch

http://www.techmeme.com/070208/h2100

Later that night comes the real exclusive, Matt Marshall from VentureBeat has a an exclusive article about a linguistics search startup called Powerset

It is late and it hits TechMeme at about 1:00 AM Eastern

http://www.techmeme.com/070209/h0100

At 5:00 AM eastern time comes a bitter response from Mike where he calls Matt Marshall a "Cheerleader" admits the article "appears to be an exclusive" and pleads with Powerset to return his emails!

http://www.techmeme.com/070209/h0500

Then he is tired of the powerhype

http://www.techmeme.com/070212/h2025

What we don’t do is cover news when it has been given to others exclusively

Using TechMeme for free job postings

2007-02-09T12:45:00.000-08:00

I thought this was interesting, today on techmeme there is a post from Jeremy Zawodny on his blog where he posted a job listing and it made it on to techmeme.

Jobster may be free now, but I bet Yahoo gets a lot more traffic from that listing.

One sale and I am done with google checkout

2007-02-07T10:25:00.000-08:00

I used google checkout since I could save $10 on something I was already going to buy, while there is nothing wrong with the interface and things worked out fine, I use my yahoo account more than my google account and the order status and shipping messages wound up in my gmail account which I never check.

Now that I have saved the $10 I am not sure why I would ever use it again.

Faceman

2006-05-30T01:56:00.000-07:00

DSCF0013, originally uploaded by garthvh.

Beautiful autographed photo of faceman from a bed and breakfast in park city

2004-04-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

Does my blog work?