TechnoCloud

Spotify’s new UK MD, Paul Brown, was interviewed just a day into the job by Paid Content UK. Whether a brave or foolish thing to do on your first day, he did have some interesting things to say about the service.

While careful not to reveal numbers, he strongly hinted that the much rumoured Spotify iPhone application would be a premium service as a way to drive paid subscribers in conjunction with access to rare archive material.

“Portability is something we’re looking at - if you get a great execution on a range of portable devices, I think there will be a proportion of the population that will pay for that.”

Given the ease of the payment model of the App Store, many Spotify users would be willing to pay a reasonable price for a premium app in order to stream music on-demand, particularly if they can access their playlists and stream albums.

This would be an improvement over the one-song-at-a-time YouTube application whose catalogue is currently limited by disputes with the music industry or the limited Last.fm artist radio service on their iPhone app.

This blog has been keeping a close eye on Spotify’s attempts to go mobile, but the desktop client is also progressing with news that Spotify have signed a deal with 7Digital to sell MP3 downloads.

The Spotify service is already monetised through advertising, a premium ad-free service for £9.99 a month and limited affiliate deals with Amazon and iTunes on a small portion of the catalogue. More integrated downloads are a natural next step and while the initial user journey involves checking out at 7Digital’s store, they hope to enable transactions within the Spotify client itself.

This will launch initially in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain with plans to roll out to Norway, Sweden and Finland.

The question is will the Spotify userbase embrace downloads, with suggestions that take-up for the ad-free service has been limited?

It certainly makes sense to cover their bases in terms of revenue models and in the absense of the mobile service, this will provide a way for users to take their new favourite tracks and soon albums and playlists with them on their portable media players, particularly if the 7Digital pricing stays competitive with the dominant player iTunes.

Indeed if and when the mobile service is launched, how might this affect the amount of potential downloads, where many may prefer ads on streamed tracks to paid downloads? However, there are significant technical barriers to overcome on any streamed service in terms of bandwidth and of course, for those commuters among us, underground travel.

This story has a way to run yet.

As regular readers will know I’ve been running an ad trial on the site to learn more about ad placement with a view to sharing the knowledge on here and with colleagues.

Having completed a short test of Google Adsense Link Units vs Ad Units, I’m going to follow up with one of the questions I raised about unit type over positioning.

As a result, there are two ad units between the post and the comments to see if the higher click through rates of the link units in that position would result in higher overall revenue using ad units.

I’ll admit that these two ads are more obtrusive than I would like, so I’ll look to change them once I’ve gathered enough data to share.

If you have your own experiences to share, please do so in the comments.

As part of the ad trial I’ve been running on the blog, I said I’d keep readers in touch with progress as thanks for putting up with the ads on a previously ad-free blog.

In part two of the trial, I experimented with adding Adsense Link Units, between the article and the comments on individual posts.

It’s been about five weeks now and I have sufficient data to make a judgement for this blog at least.

The Link Units on the page have been clicked on nearly twice as much, but they have got a much lower CPM (virtually nothing, but statistically 25 times less), no doubt the requirement for the second revenue-generating click on reacing the Google search engine results page playing its part.

This does raise the question about trialing Ad Units in that space to see the relative click-through rates, although I’ll hold off for a while as Technocloud is not a revenue generating exercise.

Needless to say I’m removing the Link Units to declutter the site, but would be interested in hearing about other people’s experiences.

Having never been asked the question before, two separate people approached me today to ask what the abbreviation YMMV means. While the less helpful might have choosen to answer by suggesting the inspired ‘Let me Google that for you‘, I’ll be more helpful and post the answer here for them and others.

While the abbreviation expands to ‘your mileage may vary’ (and has its origins in car advertising), the phrase means simply that ‘your experience may differ’ or in a looser form ‘in my opinion’.

A practical example is reviewing a gadget whereby the reviewer adds it as a disclaimer to what might be viewed as a subjective comment they have made based on their own experience, e.g. the hassle is worth it.

Wordpress plugin Askimet does a great job of catching spam catching over fifteen thousand comments since I installed it.

It allows me to keep comments open to all, saves me the time of administering the spam and spares my blushes from x-rated comments that many spammers use.

However, it’s not perfect. I’ve noticed a wave of what I’m calling ‘vanity spam’ - seemingly complimentary comments, such as ‘Wow… true insight. I didn’t know that… thank you for that.’ At first glance, these seem harmless, if a little naive, and worthy additions to the page.

On closer inspection these usually include a spam url in the website field for comments, despite the ‘no follow’ tag. The thinking is that if you automate these in their millions, then statistically enough people will click through and all at no real cost to the spammer. A familiar problem.

And if they are praising the blogger and the post, then there’s more of a chance that bloggers (an activity which may involve a touch of, ahem, vanity), will leave them in.

Askimet is doing a better job at catching these, but the problem is that these have started building up (I’ve left them on this post on wii cricket as an example) and I now have to spend time each day clearing these out.

As I’ve said before spam will find a way, and maybe blogging is getting the vanity spam it occasionally deserves!