Really just figuring out the best size and aspect ratio for embedded videos here. But this is a pretty cool ad for Intel, too.
If you start browsing around on video sites like YouTube, you’ll see all sort of aspect ratios. Not just fullscreen 4:3, widescreen 16:9, and cinematic 2.35:1. You’ll also see any number of sizes that people used to try to compensate for YouTube when they forced all uploads to 4:3. This particular video, a professional clip contracted by Intel, works best, with no black borders, at 533×325, which turns out to be a little bit narrower than 16:9 — 1.640 instead of 1.778. The first player below is 1.640, and the next one is set to 1.778. You might have to hit play to actually see the aspect of the video. See what I mean?
Finally, the third player is the aspect ratio YouTube recommends in their “embed” snippet: 425×344, which is actually narrower than even the narrowest standard, 4:3. 1.235 instead of 1.333. So what gives? Somebody want to explain this to me?
I started an experiment a couple of months ago. I was playing around with Google AdSense and figured I’d give it a try. So I added a 200×200 contextual ad spot to the right column of this site. To spice it up a little, I added a 200×200 image module directly below it, and hooked it up to an RSS feed of the top hotties from Pixnay.com. On every page load, a new beautiful woman showed up directly below the ad. Eyes just had to be drawn in that direction, right? Well, maybe. But none of them were paying any attention to the ads.
My weekly uniques increased 100x, and my weekly page views increased 1000x. My bounce rate dropped from 60% down to 25%. The reports on search terms that led people to my site were becoming more and more vulgar. And the gross revenue after 2 months was $0.01.
So now I’ve pulled the hotties and the ads from the sidebar and this has returned to being a somewhat wholesome blog. And, with the removal of my weekly Twitter summary from the main story line a couple of days ago, it has once again become far less cluttered, though admittedly sparse.
The moral of the story? It’s the same thing we learned ten years ago with Love@AOL, Love@CompuServe, Love@Netscape, and Love.com. You can put all the user-generated eye candy in the world onto a free site, drive traffic through the roof, become the first team in your company to break the million page view mark, but display ads alone still won’t make enough money to cover your operating costs.
It’s amazing how fast two months can fly by when you’re living on panic and adrenaline. This would have been my first week at a new company if I hadn’t jumped to a different lifeboat a couple of aisles over. I’m pleased that some of the folks from my last team managed to make a similar move, because they really love the company enough to stick around and keep trying for a comeback. I’m also just as happy for the folks who took the opportunity to move on to new adventures — from established industry giants to daring little startups.
This new role for me promises to be an interesting change back to my roots in the industry doing B2B work 12 to 18 years ago, blended with community and social networking work I’ve been doing over the past 12 years. The fun part — the learning curve — will be in picking up some new client development skills after so many years of focus on host-side open-source infrastructure architecture. I’ve renewed my MSDN Universal subscription and started playing with Visual Studio for the first time since version 97, and I’ve dusted off Xcode with the hopes of also working on the OS X platform.
Just yesterday I was given a healthy dose of executive vision and I’ve started to come to terms with the nightmarish series of events that started over a year ago to eventually land my portfolio of community products in the hands of disinterested slumlords. Those communities either needed a cash infusion for revitalization or they needed to be condemned, evacuated, and razed. While I still believe our original plans would have resulted in better homes for far less money than the new neighborhood that has since sprung up, I’m relieved to finally be done playing superintendent to the teetering old projects.
So now I’m on a new adventure with a new evolving role. I’ll get to pick up new skills, show my creative and innovative side, and see the tangible results of my efforts. It’s not as much of a change as a move to a new company would have been, but it still promises to be fun and exciting work. Hard work. The best kind.
A few months ago, I added Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin to this site and thought it was pretty nifty. But I allowed it to turn me into a bit of a slacker. As long as I was micro-blogging and had this plugin to automatically roll tweets into a weekly log, I was able to fool myself into feeling like I was properly grooming my blog. But finally I realized how schizophrenic the one-sided conversations really appeared, and made a minor change to my wp-content/themes/themename/index.php file, from:
And now these automatic posts don’t show up on the main page. This reveals how sparse my real blog posts are, so maybe I’ll be motivated to post updates more often. The weekly micro-blog summaries are still here, and still being created every week and added to the Archives, but they’ll no longer clutter up the main navigation.
Just a few words of encouragement for my departing colleagues. I’ve spent a lot of time lately mulling over what I’d really want to focus on next, after I’m no longer bogged down in outdated proprietary technology. So I pulled together some 10-second “statistics” from dice.com and indeed.com I thought would be nice to share.
I should note that the .net results on Indeed are a little off — seemed to be picking up all listings with the word “net” in them. So don’t you worry, Java coders, you haven’t quite lost the race. I should also admit that the search for c/c++ is a little lame — but it really is difficult to get accurate results searching for the letter “C.”
And don’t be too surprised by these growth rates. Percentage growth from “practically zero” always looks phenomenal.
I’ll admit I was a little surprised at how popular .net has gotten. If I had been forced to guess before looking, I’d have placed it around where the red PHP line is. In the DC area, with all the government work, I’d expect .net to be even bigger than the national numbers, but the very last two tables tell a different story. Most of the rest of the results probably won’t be huge shockers to you.
I’ll post some of my interpretations of these trends and some personal and second-hand experiences in the DC area in a follow-up post or two.
