Octavianworld

500 Mirrors: Channeling Light Into The Business of Virtual Worlds

I connected recently in NYC with my ex ArsDigita colleague and good friend Kevin Kelly.  Kevin is (among other roles) the CEO of 500 Mirrors, an enterprise-class virtual world platform provider, and was in town for the annual VirtualWorlds Conference at the Javits Center.

For the virtual worlds crowds, these are dark days, not unlike what things were like for the web generally in 2002.  After flying high in 2006 -- including making the cover of Business Week -- Linden Labs' Second Life, the poster child for the category, has hit rough patches on several fronts, including usability and, security, and scalability.  Electric Sheep, the leading interactive agency helping corporations build and pimp out their VW experiments, recently cut back its staff significantly.  And as most of us have seen, even mighty IBM, the corporate pied piper of the VW movement, has been advertising against its own efforts.  The remaining bright spots in the "classic" rich-client VW world these days seem to be in applications for kids:  Webkinz, Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel -- virtual babysitters for kids that parents are willing to pay for, perhaps partly as diversions to keep them away from first-person shooters,  MMORPGs, or perhaps as training for earning the big bucks playing WoW.  Though 1300 people registered for the conference, things seemed quiet even for the cavernous Javits, with few attendees from big-name companies/ brands in evidence.

My overwhelming impression remains that this is an industry whose technological reach and ambition greatly exceed its grasp of imaginative use cases for which this medium is uniquely suited.  Kevin and 500 Mirrors' CTO and founder Bob Flesch get this in spades.  Kevin tells a story of a recent conference in SL that illustrates the state of things:

• with a limited number of avatars each island (server instance) can support, the conference inevitably had an empty feeling;
• lots of power and flexibility for moving around means too much power for newbies and the less experienced;
• P-bombings have been an unfortunate reality;
• functionally, the experience's complexity exceeds its theoretical information and communication advantages -- for example, it's hard to read expressions when an avatar -- if human -- is programmed by default to look ironic and bored, if hip.

500 Mirrors' name reflects an approach to scalability it has developed that has effectively solved population limits for any practical enterprise and even consumer scenario.  (Proof comes from production instances that unfortunately Kevin can't disclose without unpleasant consequences.)  On the usability front, Kevin and Bob are focused on providing more by enabling less -- pre-scripting movement sequences to get someone into the right place in the right space, for example, or by turning off flying, or by simply making it impossible to get trapped in a corner.  Finally, since each instance they set up for a client is isolated (whether hosted by 500 Mirrors or installed behind a client's firewall), attendees can't jump out to inappropriate places, and intruders find it harder to get in.

But the biggest insight comes from conceiving of use cases that make sense, and Kevin's got a separate business going that's nailed one of these.  More about this in an upcoming post...

DylanMessaging: Viral Genius

This viral messaging campaign by Ten4 for SonyBMG's release of a collection of Bob Dylan's music last fall was enormously successful.  I've always loved the original video, and harbored ideas of recording my own version of it at home to kick off various presentations I've given in the past, but hadn't pulled the trigger.  Then I saw this (via Scott Kirsner -- thanks Scott!) and was really impressed.  The mind races to all the other similar possibilities, though doubtless there are intellectual property issues that weren't a problem here.

Reminds me of another viral favorite, Mr. Picassohead

An Unevenly Distributed Future: MITX Internet Video Panel

Last night I went to a great MITX panel discussion at MIT on Internet video.  Scott Kirsner moderated a great and diverse group representing the media, CDNs, VC, and agency worlds.  Scott organized the discussion into three buckets:  how are users interactions with web video changing; how is the production side of the business evolving to enable new things; and, the "monetization" of all this.  Here are my notes, and a few ideas:

Expanded Awareness At AOL: MIHOO + eBay? And What About Amazon?

Dave Morgan is a shrewd operator.  In adding buyat to advertising.com, he expands what AOL knows about how surfing ties to buying.  As I wrote here, this expanded awareness of consumer behavior makes it possible to develop better targeting algorithms, raising the CPMs he can charge advertisers or helping him be more competitive at existing rates.

So if a smaller affiliate network like buyat makes sense for AOL, what about two well-known larger networks? 

For example, when does Microsoft add eBay to Yahoo!? Like Yahoo!, eBay's stock is down 30% from last fall.  The premium over the market price that Microsoft is paying for Yahoo! represents only about 5% of Microsoft's market capitalization, arguably leaving plenty of room for another deal of similar scale without stockholders getting nervous about excessive dilution -- and eBay's market cap today is only about a third bigger than Yahoo!'s was pre-MIHOO.  Amazon, with a market cap of $30 billion, is in essentially the same position. (And maybe since it's a neighbor of Microsoft's, it might make more sense?)

This idea isn't that radical.  Yahoo! and eBay already had a partnership.  Google gets the value too, though it hasn't made much progress with its own services, Froogle and Base.

Some will say another deal soon is practically impossible, because integrating Yahoo! will consume Microsoft.  I believe that's a red herring.  The value in the MSFT/ YHOO deal will be created by a better advertising capability: better reach, better data, better targeting.  It won't come from integrating media properties.  If you believe this, it suggests that this is where the integration focus should be.  This  simplifies the integration challenge, and allows Microsoft to turn its attention to the next move.  Also, the current economic circumstances favor further consolidation, especially in a market (digital marketing) with longer-term fundamentals (growth, returns to scale) that remain strong.

New Rules of Engagement: Context Is King

For a flavor of some of the issues we help clients with, here's Andrew Heyward at iMedia's Agency Summit:

http://www.imediaconnection.com/summits/coverage/17494.asp

The River of Time(s)

The New York Times has graciously allowed Dave Winer to innovate with their content.  The result is http://nytimesriver.com, an alternative presentation which is halfway toward a branded reader.  I like the outline view especially, since it dynamically sorts out topics, in a way that subscribing to fixed tags or categories in an RSS reader wouldn't.  Judging from the traffic, it will be a bit before we see ads here, but I'm impressed it registers since it's so new!  I think the bigger point is the happy result of this open-minded partnership.

Domain Farming: This Is Clever

From Seth Godin:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/10/farming-domains.html

Neat.  What other domains have this potential?  Sure beats simply parking them.

Branded Readers

Reading news and blogs through an RSS reader has been great for me.  I can get through a lot of stuff in very little time:  I'm guessing I'm 4x as productive going this route.  (I've tried a few different readers -- FeedDemon, Thunderbird, Newsgator, and I'm currently using Google Reader, with mixed results.)  Despite the clear benefits of these tools, few people outside my friends in tech use them.  I've been wondering why, and what opportunities the answers might mean.

Online Video: That Sound You Hear Is The Dam Bursting

By various measures there are some $500 billion spent globally on advertising.  About 40% of this goes to TV, which is why Oxygen is worth a billion dollars to folks like NBC.

Yesterday I saw a press release in which Sony announced more content partnerships, with folks like CondeNet and Sports Illustrated, for the "Internet Video Link" service it packages with its BRAVIA high-def television sets.  Sony gets unique content it can sell ads against.  The online publishers presumably get a rev share on video assets they've already produced, and extra traffic going back to their sites.  If I understand how the service works, this completely bypasses the cable TV infrastructure by using whatever broadband you have available.   Memo to cable company, re: $100/month digital cable subscription:  "Ask not for whom the bell tolls..."

(Ok, you say, but why buy an HDTV if all you can watch is low-res Flash clips?  Not so fast.  See this interesting announcement from Brightcove and BitTorrent yesterday?  How long will it take Sony to add BitTorrent nodes into the   Internet Video Link modules on its sets?)

So, how do we know if Sony's video content bet is ultimately better than NBC's?

NBC paid $12 per Oxygen channel subscriber.  According to news reports, there are about 300k Oxygen viewers in prime time.  Let's assume of course that different people watch different shows each week, and that prime time is as popular as all other times combined.  So I figure that 300k prime time viewers translates into 1.2 million unique viewers per month (cross-check: Oxygen.com has 1.2m uniques).  OK, so $900 million (Oxygen's acquisition price), divided by 1.2m = $750 per unique viewer.  (NBC also has to continue producing programming and pay carriage fees to cable networks to continue to reach those viewers.) Against this up front and ongoing cost, Oxygen gets about $7/unique (per month of course, ~$100M in sales/ 1.2m uniques/12 months). Figure a 15% margin, and NBC's netting $1/unique out of that top line (Oxygen Media LLC didn't disclose income AFAIK).

I don't know the terms of Sony's rev share, or how they are placing those ads with advertisers.  Let's assume the overall split is 1/3 to each party (Sony, content partner, video ad network).   Let's assume a $30 gross CPM for the premium content.  So  Sony's getting $10 CPM.  If  I assume each unique is good for 25 impressions per week, this translates into $1/unique, but that's essentially cost-free (no programming, no carriage fees, no amortization of acquisition costs) if you ignore the cost of the Internet Video Link network infrastructure.  So, Sony's getting the same $/unique.

Now for the sound of the dam bursting:  if I'm an advertiser and I can pay an ad network $3/unique (split three ways between publisher, ad network, and Sony) to reach my audience of women watching TV via, say CondeNet content, vs. paying NBC $7/unique, and get better targeting and measurability (remember, this is *Internet* video), which do I prefer?

Seems to me Sony's got the better growth/ scalability story, though reach is more limited in the short term.

I'm not criticizing the Oxygen deal;  there are sure to be cross-promotional opportunities with iVillage that add to Oxygen's value to NBC (if a small fraction of iVillage's 15M uniques go to Oxygen, that's a huge leg up).  And of course, there are near-term limitations of Sony's Internet Video Link value proposition to advertisers: low reach (the number of people with Internet-ready HDTV sets), and low availability of content from its partners.   Plus, there are a number of apples-and-oranges problems with my analysis (like, are these ways of reaching viewers really the same?  Do they ultimately reach the same viewers?  Are viewers in the same frame of mind?). 

The broader point, though, is about the significant arbitrage that is appearing for advertisers between reaching TV viewers the old-fashioned way and the new-fangled way, and about the dramatic shifts in fortunes that will occur over the next couple of years as dollars flow accordingly.  It's a good time to be long high-quality video content, and to be aggressive about getting online with it.

Beyond The Click-Rush Climax: Content As The Once and Future King

Following last week's post, this week's news:

AOL buys Third Screen Media, WPP buys 24/7 Real Media, and now MSFT buys aQuantive for an 85% premium (congrats to my old Razorfish friends).

VLCK's out there if you have, oh, $4B lying around.   However, I'd be surprised if we saw another 2x deal, since it takes a lot of cash and a big market cap to absorb that kind of dilution.  OMC's a possibility given the logic of the WPP-24/7 deal, though it would be a more complicated deal, and like WPP, OMC might be tempted to look "deeper in the draft".

These moves by the big portals clearly raise the stakes for the big online publishers.  Not only do the portals control how traffic gets to them, but now they control even more of how ads are placed on them.

The Great Click Rush of 2007

Ad networks are hot, and in many cases highly-profitable businesses right now.  On the heels of Google's snapping up DoubleClick for $3 billion, Yahoo! bought (the 80% it didn't already own of) 4 year old  online display ad exchange Right Media last week for $680 million.  So, a logical question to ask is, who buys whom next?

Media as Software: A Conversation With Doug Turner

Kiki Mills at MITX introduced me recently to Doug Turner, whose past includes eight years as a member of the 3D graphics research team at Apple's Advanced Technology Group.  Doug and I met for breakfast and talked shop about digital media.  One of Doug's ideas, which I found particularly interesting, is (his words) the concept of "media as software".  Right now rich media streams are largely analog audio and video once they are "published".  (If you've composed or edited a digital video "project" and then converted it into its final form, you know what I mean.)  Doug describes this  as publishing digital media as platforms on which other people can add/edit their own stuff. 
 

Think Viral, Act Tribal, Part II: What, Why, and How Memes Propagate

A while back I wrote down some ideas about viral marketing prompted by a meeting with an entrepreneur who was having some trouble executing a campaign.  Today, I came across a really interesting research paper, "Memes and affinities:  cultural replication and literacy education", by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, presented in November 2005 at the National Reading Conference annual meeting.  The paper is here: http://www.geocities.com/c.lankshear/memes2.pdf.

Update: Gotuit Media and Video Search

Recently I wrote (http://www.octavianworld.org/octavianworld/2007/02/gotuit_video_se.html) about cool stuff going on at video search service Gotuit Media, where my friend and former colleague Patrick Donovan is a senior executive. 

Patrick got in touch the other day to pass on some great news:  Gotuit is now supporting the NFL "Film Room" at Sports Illustrated's si.com (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/nfl/specials/draft/2007/video/) and at the National Hockey League's video site (http://onthefly.nhl.com/index.html). 

For the NHL, Gotuit transforms what used to be a 60 minute linear viewing experience to one that can be sliced and sequenced in a variety of ways, without having to cut, splice, or otherwise edit the underlying video asset. 

Here's a review of Gotuit at latimes.com that does a good job of explaining the potential of this service: http://opinion.latimes.com/bitplayer/2007/04/gotuit_and_web_.html

Good Luck Patrick!

Clouded Vision

My new colleague Steven Forth, who is CTO of eMonitor (the content technology arm of Monitor Group) referred me last night to Many Eyes (http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home), which is a social data visualization and interpretation service developed by the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research Group at IBM's Watson Research Center.   As the intersection of social software and content analysis is currently a high-priority professional interest, I decided to try it out. 

Among other visualization approaches to structured data sets, Many Eyes generates tag clouds from free text files.  Steven noted that in particular, the two-word view seems like a very powerful 80-20 cut at inferring predominant meaning in a body of text. 

I experimented by exporting the contents of this blog as a text file, progressively scrubbing useless Typepad artifact words and html tags that appear frequently (like "title", "breaks", "comments", and my name) out of the source file -- to do this I simply ran "edit/replace/'word', '[]'" in Windows Notepad  -- and then publishing the file on Many Eyes.  Here's the result (click on the image to manipulate the cloud on Many Eyes):

The two-word view does a pretty decent job of communicating the themes I write about, I think.  Unintended side benefit:  highlights recurring cliches and verbal tics I need to purge from my writing, like "drive higher" (argh).

This whole effort took about 30 minutes, from registration to pasting the syndication html into this post.  Two-thirds of that time was spent scrubbing the data iteratively.  This could have gone faster in one of two ways.  First, Many Eyes could provide a custom scrubbing interface where I could register multiple words to be eliminated or replaced from a text file.  Second, and better, they could allow users to share not only comments, but scrubbing filters that would be applicable to data sets coming from common sources with common problems, such as Typepad exports, or government information.

Beyond this, I can imagine a thematic matching capability -- "based on two-word 'keyphrase' frequencies, this data set seems to have lots in common with these other ones..."  Such a capability could be further enhanced by ex-post user rating,  so people could confirm whether, for any given algorithmically-suggested match, the result was actually good, a la "was this useful to you?"  This, like the "Graphic Friendships" idea I wrote about a while back, could help to make the web browsing experience more productive.

Nice job guys! 

"In Their Tribes", Or, "How Do You Handle 10,000 Tech Maniacs' Votes?"

Dell  got a lot of press recently for launching its new Digg-knockoff "ideastorm" site (http://dellideastorm.com) for receiving and prioritizing customer feedback on its products and plans.  Right around the same time, The Wall Street Journal pointed out that on Digg itself, there's an extreme power-law distribution among contributors:  one guy, "Stoner", accounts for 13% of posts that got voted onto the Digg home page recently, and only 30 of the 900,000 registered users account for a third of Digg home page posts.  The bias that such extreme concentration can create is immediately apparent on the ideastorm site:  Linux (or more-generally, open-source)-oriented suggestions account for 18 of the 30 highest-rated suggestions on the first two pages of the site's list.

Set up this way, where so many "precincts" vote in the same general pool, voting sites like ideastorm can quickly alienate folks that don't have time (or money) to organize support for their ideas. Erick Schonfeld's post, here on Rojo, suggests what sites like these need is a "trustworthy reputation system" where people can disclose more fully who they are and who, if anyone is paying them to place stories there.

I come to a different conclusion.  I believe voting sites, like other forms of "structured collaboration", are best managed in subgroups, defined by shared interests, and coordinated through active moderation by volunteer "editors" -- much as Wikipedia has evolved.  From direct experience in managing a social bookmarking application, I can foresee (in fact we've specified) several specific administrator-defined (subgroups, categories, recognition and networking opportunities for volunteers) and user-defined (e.g., tags, profiles) mechanisms to make this work. 

On ideastorm, which takes the trouble to tell you how many people have endorsed a particular person's (in this example, Gautam's) idea, it would be especially useful to publish a page that ranks submitters by the number of endorsements from unique others.  These listings might include links to these submitters' profiles (including addresses for blogs if they have them, or perhaps at least bios).  Dell could then draw its volunteer moderators via further screening of this pool, maybe offering a piece of equipment or some public recognition as a thank you for assiduous moderation. (Reddit provides a stats page that's sort of like this, though its "karma"-based rating -- explained here -- isn't particularly intuitive, to me at least.)

More generally, I think there's lots of room for "shades of gray" models between "fully-edited" and "fully-user-generated" content that would provide more transparency about how members of a group promote submissions.   Think in terms of "concentric circles of delegated moderation", where trusted insiders recruit trusted outsiders from a pool of folks who have demonstrated passionate, constructive participation.

Gotuit: Video Search, and its Implications

A couple of weeks ago I had breakfast with Patrick Donovan, and old colleague from when we worked together in the early 90's at a Lexington, MA consulting and software development firm called Symmetrix.  These days Patrick is VP of Product Development at Gotuit Media.  Gotuit provides technology that allows users to "deep-tag" a slice of a video they look at on sites like YouTube and Metacafe. 

Here's a slice I made of a four-minute video on YouTube about the BT around the world sailing race.  I wanted to highlight what I thought was one of the more "that's gotta hurt!" moments in a video otherwise full of them:

 

Here's the url for this slice on Gotuit: http://www.gotuit.com/player/index.html?c=SM_Entertainment&t=8503&s=59028

Gotuit doesn't actually rip and store video itself; rather, it's an interface through which you create a data layer (on Gotuit) that identifies and describes (with title, tags, and a free-form text field) slices of videos hosted elsewhere.  Gotuit provides a browser toolbar with buttons that make it easy to quickly deep-tag a slice of a video and then share it via embedding or a hyperlink in a blog or other web page, or by simply emailing it to one or more friends.

So what?  Search is already a killer app on the web.  Video is exploding on the web.  Ergo, search for video will be huge.  Since video (and audio) is consumed linearly, meaning you can't browse it the way you can browse text, simply tagging and otherwise describing a source file on YouTube or somewhere else is only partially helpful to getting you to what you're looking for and helping you consume it efficiently.  Being able to deep-tag slices becomes really useful particularly for form factors and contexts -- like mobile -- where efficient use of limited resources (time, bandwidth, and memory) are more important. 

It doesn't stop there.  Of course, if you can tag inside a video, and you can sell ads against tags, you can advertise inside a video, in a highly targeted way.  And if you can tag inside a video, you can also string together slices to create what we used to call "highlight reels", but now would call "tag-dimensional mashups" I guess, allowing "omni-directional re-purposing" of content.  Videos of NFL games could be sliced and mashed up to create "best touchdowns", "hardest hits", "ugliest players" series.  Again, particularly interesting for mobile applications and contexts.

While I'm not sure that Gotuit in its current business model incarnation (today's separate service vs. a licensed, embedded capability in major video sites) or UI expression has reached its final stage, this is a really interesting company, and Patrick is a very smart guy.  Check them out.

The Case For CPM (And Other Digital Media Learnings)

From a July survey of 6,000 people by DoubleClick, via November 20th's NYT:

About a third of consumers sometimes click on banner advertisements on the Web. But twice as many consumers sometimes respond to such ads indirectly, avoiding clicking on them but later visiting the Web sites advertised...

DoubleClick makes its living serving ads, and obviously has an interest in making the case for all those ads that people don't click on.  Nevertheless, it's useful to have some numbers here on the relative impact of CPM-based online advertising.

Here's the study:

http://www.doubleclick.com/us/knowledge_central/documents/RESEARCH/dc_touchpointsIV_0611.pdf

Surprisingly, the Times omitted mention of the word "sometimes" that DoubleClick had used in the study to describe the behaviors above.  So, as I read these results, folks are twice as likely to sometimes visit an advertiser's site after seeing its web ad as they are to sometimes click on the ad itself.

The rest of the study has some very interesting findings about the relative importance of different media channels to different stages of purchase decision processes, across different industries.  It's worth a look.

Adify: A First Step Toward A Multi-Tier Online Ad Network Ecosystem

Yesterday I posted ideas about the likely emergence of multi-tier publisher aggregation mechanisms for the online ad market.  Things move fast.  Today, via TechCrunch, I learned about Adify, one of 13 firms selected from over 200 to present at today's Web 2.0 conference in SF. Adify allows publishers to set up their own virtual ad networks to market ad space they have to sell on their web properties.  Translated:  it's sort of a specialized eBay or Amazon storefront for online ad space.

So, now advertisers can search and browse these storefronts to buy space at retail in highly targeted ways.  But we can also predict that new intermediaries will emerge to package and broker value-added bundles to advertisers who lack the time or the sophistication to do the shopping themselves.  These intermediaries could be new services provided by the traditional ad networks, or they could be new players entirely. 

More broadly, what we're seeing is the predictable exploitation of the big arbitrage opportunity in online advertising.  Rough numbers:  a $20 billion online ad market, with (conservatively) a 15% margin*, featuring (my guess) a 50% arbitrage opportunity =  a >$1 billion market available to the quick and the clever.

(*Prior to its recent stumble, Aquantive's March 10Q reports that, excluding consulting by Razorfish and DNA,  revenues and pre-tax profits were $37 million and $15 million, respectively.  After a share of corporate G&A and taxes, I make that a 15% margin more or less.  Of course one company's profit margin is only a vague, flawed proxy for the industry profit pool, but it gives you a feel for how lucrative this business currently is.  I'd guess Hellman & Friedman have done very nicely after taking DoubleClick private in 2005, what with lower overhead and tax-deductible interest on buyout debt.)

Related:  Madhens

De-Optimized

Follow-up to my post on MegaKarma: traffic to my blog doubled (rough estimate), and a couple of people voted my post up on Reddit.  But then I got voted back down into the dark hole I came from.  Oh, the humiliation.

Moral of this story:  Just as is true in the real world, there's no substitute for personal networking.  Send your posts to others, ask them to comment constructively on their blogs and link to you if appropriate.  Services like Megakarma might be helpful, but only on the margin.  Anyone have a different experience?

MegaKarma: Social Media Optimization

Via an ad on Adverblog, I learned of MegaKarma.net, a service that helps you game submissions to social bookmarking / voting services like Digg and Reddit.  The basic idea is "you scratch my back, I scratch yours":  once you've submitted your link to the social bookmarking services, you submit it to MegaKarma, which then emails it to a list of other members of these services who vote it up (if they like it) after it's posted.  I'm just trying this service now (with this post!), so I can't say yet whether or not it seems to be effective.  But it does seem like a way around the "credibility power law" effect that emerges in systems like these, where "power posters" have disproportionate clout in the algorithms the services (properly) use for rankings.  Just as we had PR firms to spread the word and build buzz in Old Media, we now have services like these for the New.  Technology changes, but socioeconomic dynamics remain the same.

Postscript:  Mike-O-Matic's take

"Monetizing" The Blogosphere: Networks of Networks

Typepad users like me who loggged in today saw Typepad plugging Bayraider, a new shopping blog from Shiny Media, which seems to be trying to follow in the wake of PopSugar.  With the entry costs being so low, a few motivated friends can get together and put together small networks that collectively improve their ability to sell ads.  This makes me think that we'll see more entrepreneurs putting together such networks, following in the model pioneered by Federated Media.  Of course, with the A-Listers snapped up already, I think we can expect to see a multi-tiered market aggregation market emerge: 

Have Your Cake, And Eat It Too

Via the IWantMedia Newsletter and CNET, word from Disney that delivering programs free (ad-supported) via the Web doesn't cannibalize TV viewership.  This data point will certainly get more play in the coming days.  Expect the hole in the wall between TV and Internet programming that "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" created to get bigger.  Smarter firms will think harder about how to do this -- for example, is there a "digest version" of a program or a series that makes sense in the "lean-forward" Web medium to complement the longer-form "lean-back" TV experience?

Flipping this on its head, I keep waiting for some smart network executive to aggregate a bunch of web videos into an "America's Funniest Home Videos"-style program.  Access to rights would seem to be the only stumbling block, but there's enough content out there to keep rights-holders honest and cheap.  Besides, an appearance on a network TV show could send their web traffic (and AdSense payments) into the stratosphere -- maybe enough to cover the hosting bill!