Tag Archives: money

Marco Arment streamlines U.S. currency

Like many Marco Arment thinks it is time to streamline U.S. currency:

  • 1 cent: I don’t care whether we keep these. I’ll still keep them in a bowl and eventually bring them to a Coinstar machine for Amazon credit.
  • 5 cents (5x previous denomination)
  • 25 cents (5x)
  • $1 (4x): I don’t care whether it’s a coin or a bill. Just pick one.
  • $5 (5x)
  • $20 (4x)
  • $100 (5x)

My swing at this would involve the same number of currencies but would look slightly different. After spending a few weeks in Ireland last year I grew to love coin money over paper money. So I’d do it this way…

  • 5c
  • 25c
  • $1 coin
  • $2 coin
  • $5 bill
  • $20 bill
  • $100 bill

This would mean that prices would have to change. Gone would be the days of prices that end in .99. I say good riddance to the penny and bring on the dollar and two dollar coins.

Pay with Square

Square is rethinking the card case model and going more for an application that allows you to pay at Square-enabled merchants just by having your phone in your pocket. They call it Pay with Square.

I love the idea. And, as I’ve said before, I really, really want these types of systems to take off and to be able to get rid of the credit card as quickly as possible.

However, the video for this new app first shows off the ability to tell your friend that you’re going to an ice cream shop. I’m not so sure that should have been highlighted first and foremost. I think it is fine they have that part of the system but I’d much rather show how quickly and easily it can be to get in and get out without dealing with cash or cards.

/via The Verge.

Don’t be a free user? I’m not so sure.

Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski suggests demanding to pay for services that you like that might be free. In fear that free services that are popular are not sustainable. It is a great post. But it raises some questions from me.

How would paying for a service ensure it won’t sell out? Maciej suggests that free services are more likely to shut down “Because it’s hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt.” No doubt that is true but when is a big payday easy to resist? If I had been paying Gowalla a few bucks a month would they have turned Facebook down? I don’t know. But if they still decided to sell the company (or, more accurately liquidate the product and move the team) to Facebook I would have been both disappointed and out a few bucks.

In other words, paying for a service doesn’t ensure its longevity or that it will never change.

What about Twitter? I saw many people linking to Maciej’s post as being good advice and some even had shown how they added the ability to pay for their free services based on this thinking. However, no one has mentioned that all of us are using and advocating a free service that fits Maciej’s scheme just perfectly — Twitter is a rapidly growing free service.

Yes, Twitter shows us ads from time-to-time in the form of Promoted tweets, trends, and accounts. But unless you use the Twitter.com site you’ll rarely see these ads. And, I’m sure, they’re making money behind-the-scenes by giving businesses access to their “firehose” and more controls and analytics than traditional accounts get. But it is still free for the public to use.

What would happen if, say, tomorrow Twitter decided that all Twitter clients (third-party and official) had to show some fairly obtrusive ads or you’d need to pay a few dollars per month to use the service? I’d wager many would pay up. Many would leave. And their growth would slow. However, none of that would ensure that Twitter wouldn’t sell out to a company sometime in the future. Revenue makes Twitter look even more appealing to potential buyers than if they weren’t making money. Revenue, it could be said, makes a company even more likely to sell.

This leads to Maciej’s next suggestion. Build it yourself. Obviously not everyone can do that (or should do that). But that seems to be the best suggestion he made in his post. The only way to ensure a service will be around and not change is to build and maintain it yourself. But, what if it becomes popular and someone with deep pockets makes you an offer? Then where are you? Back at the beginning.

The Daring Fireball Recipe

When a recipe works it is generally riffed on by countless cooks. Each riff becoming its own unique dish and, chances are, riffed on once again.

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball is a recipe that is working and the cooks are busy in the kitchen adding a pinch of this, a pinch of that and seeing what works for them.

So far none of these recipes have become better, in this blogger’s opinion, than its master recipe but several have certainly managed to create their own dish that works well enough to feed their own mouths.

What is the Daring Fireball recipe? It consists of the following:

  • 1 multiple-times-per-day updated link log.
  • 1 not-so-frequently updated blog with longer, well-written posts.
  • 1 (or two) audio podcasts (to taste).
  • 1 weekly RSS feed sponsorship.
  • 1 well-curated image-based ad on each page view.

From outward appearances this recipe nets Daring Fireball a very decent sum – which is why the cooks are in the kitchen. With no inside information here is what one can surmise based on what is public knowledge.

The three main ways Daring Fireball generates revenue is through its weekly RSS feed sponsorship, The Deck Ad Network, and sponsorship of 5by5 Network’s The Talk Show. Daring Fireball also uses affiliate links and sells Tshirts from time-to-time but I do not believe these to be major contributors to its profit. They may both contribute to its ability to generate revenue but I believe the bulk of its profit come from the three channels I’m covering here. Without knowing more about how The Deck Ad Network and The 5by5 Network distribute revenue it is impossible to know exactly how much revenue goes to Daring Fireball but we can do exactly what the other cooks are doing; make assumptions and get close.

Daring Fireball currently charges $6,500 USD per week to sponsor the RSS feed. This recently increased from $6,000 within the last few weeks, and increased to that not too long ago from $5,000 USD and so on. So to figure out the yearly revenue generated through this single sponsorship program would depend on where you start and end the year. But, lets jump out on a limb and say that a weekly sponsorship has cost at least $5,000 for the last year. That’d be about $260,000 USD per year from the RSS feed sponsorship. At $6,500, should it maintain or go up higher from here, it’d be $338,000 USD for the next year.

The Deck, of which Daring Fireball is only 1-of-52 members, has a current cost of $8,300 USD per month. Or, sponsors can pay to buy a day, called a “roadblock”, for $8,300 per day. With 27 sponsors in the month of September that is about $224,000 USD generated. (Assuming The Deck had sold absolutely no “roadblock” ads. If they had it’d be significantly more.) I’m assuming that The Deck distributes revenues based on a traffic-based model of sorts (more page views == more moolah) but I don’t know exactly. But even if you were to split this revenue evenly among all parties that’d be nearly $8,300 per month for Daring Fireball. Based on nothing other than my gut Daring Fireball’s 4M+ page views per month make up a fair amount of The Deck’s overall traffic and so, one could assume, that Daring Fireball gets a slightly larger share than my math suggests.

5by5 is currently charging $3,000 USD a month for its Livestream sponsorship (which The Talk Show does each week) and $3,000 for its bandwidth sponsorship as well as individual show sponsorships which they don’t publicize the price for. It is very difficult to tell how 5by5 would distribute this revenue but, again, I’ll make some assumptions. I assume that a bandwidth sponsorship is all for 5by5. Bandwidth is a bill that goes to 5by5 and not the hosts. Bandwidth for a show as popular as The Talk Show could easily be a few thousand dollars per month (not to mention editing costs, etc.) So if we take the bandwidth sponsorship off the table I can only assume that The Talk Show generates about $9,000 USD per month. $3,000 for the Livestream sponsorship, and $6,000 for the two episode-based sponsorships that are within the show. Plus donations, Tshirts? I think I’m underestimating the revenue-generating power of The Talk Show but I can’t be sure.

Not counting the revenue Daring Fireball generates with its affiliate links and tshirt sales; it is my assumption that Daring Fireball could generate upwards of $550,000 USD per year (going forward). And I believe I’m underestimating because my assumptions are probably low. Again, the affiliate links and tshirt sales are probably fairly good revenue generators but the bulk of Daring Fireball’s profit likely does not come from these two channels.

Why go through all of this to figure out how much revenue Daring Fireball generates? Because it is exactly what wannabe-pro-bloggers are doing every single day. They do this math based on the information they can gather and decide to take a stab at it themselves. And with Daring Fireball’s RSS feed sponsorship increasing every few months why wouldn’t they? And good for them. The more the merrier. I just have one request.

I hope that those that decide to use Daring Fireball’s recipe decide to do whatever they can to make it all their own. Don’t just add a little more salt and pepper – change the main course from fish to beef. Make every ingredient from your own garden and don’t use the same brand ingredients Daring Fireball does. Make something unique that will inspire others to do the same. Be a good cook not a copy cat.

Refacing Government Tender

This is great.  Joe D!, as he is known on Flickr, decided it’d be neat to deface, I mean – artistically improve U.S. paper currency by adding some doodles.  He managed to create an entire Flickr photo set dedicated to this hobby.  Here are a few samples:

Some of my favorites (pictured) are the Spartan, Gene Simmons of KISS, and a Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle.

So far Joe D! has published 75 peices of his art work, which have received a total over over 500,000 views.  He is as surprised as anyone about the attention they are getting.

“wow, i’m surprised how much everyone likes this. it’s just something i’ve been toying around with every now and then, it all started when i would draw glasses or beards on money with the counterfeit pen on the registers at work and just grew in to a hobby.”

 I wonder if he takes requests?  A Mr. T version of Lincoln might be a good place to start.

Source: Refacing Government Tender.
Via: Boing Boing: Hilarious Money Doodles. 

Please use the suggestion and money boxes

Help expand my echo, echo, echo chamber, please.  I try to link to things I find interesting in hopes that you too will find them interesting.  However, my view of the world is as narrow as my own two eyes – and so I’m hoping you’ll help me find even more interesting things to link to.

You’ll notice that after each link on my site, I have the following text:

“Have a recommendation? Do you have a link, product, service, book, or something you think I’d be interested in linking to? You can write me an email and let me know about it.”

If you find something interesting, please let me know about it!  If I find it interesting, I’ll post about it here on my site and give you credit for the find.  Oh, and I don’t want this to be limited to virtual things, quite the contrary.  If you let me know about a physical “thing” that I might be interested in, I might just beg you to send me one so I can try it out for myself and then write about it.

Buy! Buy! Buy my photos!  I am not sure why I haven’t done this sooner but you can now ask to purchase any of my photos.  You can request the original digital file or a print!  Here is the text that appears below each photo here on the site.

“Please note: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. If you would like to buy an original copy of this, or any of my photos, please contact me.”

I’m mainly doing this for anyone that would like to use my photos commercially, obviously.  The license that I’ve decided to use, for any content on my site, pretty much states that you are free to use my “stuff” non-commercially so long as you give me proper attribution.  If you want to use it commercially, you’ll have to throw a few dollars into the tip jar.

So please, use the suggestion and money boxes.  I’m excited to learn about interesting things that you come across in your lives.  So get started!

Billionaire College Dropouts

This list of college dropouts is particularly interesting because every single person on the list has an estimated net-worth in the billions. Most of the people on the list are vested mainly in the technology space while the only guy I don’t immediately recognize deals largely in Las Vegas real estate and hotels/casinos.

“On the other hand, these examples prove that for the truly intelligent, motivated, and brave, there may be better ways to spend several youthful years than sitting in a classroom.”

In other words: There is hope for me yet.

Source: Billionaire College Dropouts — Twin Commas.

Royal Mint: New coin designs revealed

The Royal Mint, responsible for the management of the monies created for the Royal Crown, held a competition in 2005 where they had received 4,000 unique entries to redesign their coins.

The new coins

The winner, Matthew Dent – graphic designer now based in London, had designed each coin in such a way that when lined up properly (pictured) the coins would display the Royal Arms.

Brilliant.

I also appreciate the tag-line on their front page: “Your Change is Changing”.

(Source: The New Designs Revealed)
[Via Coudal Partners, Jason Kottke, and We Made This]