Sparter CEO Dan Kelly Interview
Sparter doesn’t usually put up blog posts so when this one came through I thought it was an interesting read. Its an interview of CEO Dan Kelly of Sparter done by Usable Markets Alex Kirtland.
Some interesting information from the interview for me was these points from Dan Kelly:
Globally there is a 2 billion dollar per year business for digital items in all the online games, from World of Warcraft to Maple Story, mainly centered on games in the Korean, North American and European markets.
Imagine that, a whole economy worth 2 billion dollars that could basically be erased if someone formatted each game company’s hard drive.
A typical seller makes enough to play World of Warcraft for free – about $200 a year – but some make a lot more than that.
I chuckled at this one since I find making gold fairly easily. Why would someone just make a few hundred, and leave? I guess the answer to that is that I know a lot of people who stop playing wow, and just sell off their gold/characters never to come back to the game again.
Some guilds in WoW, for example, only want to raid. They prefer to buy the gold they need and focus their time — 20-50 hours per week — on the parts of the game they love most. This is not a bad thing.
Desperate times call for desperate measures I guess. I remember raiding with a not so full guild, and we were always hurting for certain classes or consumables. While hard core role players hate people who just buy a lvl 70 character or buy gold just to get mounts or gear instead of instancing. There are times when those people just shut up just to have that extra player or character around. This way the whole guild can experience end game raids, and get further ahead. The 20-50 hours a week raiding adds up, and when you have to farm for repair costs or consumables you either have to play WoW full time, make a lot of gold efficiently, or straight up buy gold to stay ahead in progress.
We think that online communities will continue to grow at very attractive rates. As they get bigger, more people will want to trade. And the secondary markets will have to be there because otherwise they’re absence will hold back the growth of the primary markets.
The black market for gold in World of Warcraft or currency in other games will always exist as long as it takes a certain amount of time required to maintain a character. The key is the time required to acquire those items. There’s no black market currency for games like Dota, Team Fortress, Counterstrike since all players start out equal with items being reset at each session. However once you start involving time or ranks a market will appear to sell that service to save you time. Even if one were to try, and stop a virtual black market. They would just find another way to sell the services without getting caught.
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WoW Season 3 Brings Great Gold News
Today and yesterday was a good day for many people in World of Warcraft. While people were hoarding arena points to get their new Season 3 pvp gear. The smart ones were hoarding materials to sell for today. Here’s the WoW Professions thread in which some people claim to have made up to 58k gold. Many Miners, Jewelcrafters, Enchanters and even some Tailors/Leatherworkers were marking up their goods.
While I thought I did well cashing in at 1,600 gold today, I guess I was beat by those people who prepared in advance for this. I apparently didn’t follow my own WoW Auction House Gold Tips regarding preparing for Tuesdays. Don’t mind the Earned/hr part of the screen shot since I only logged in to check my mail so not very accurate on that part. Also my Titan Bar money mod is a little screwed up ever since Patch 2.3 came out, and I haven’t bothered to fix it since I only look at it when I log in/out.
Anyways I want to know if anyone of you readers were able to cash in on this last update with some impressive numbers. Let me know, and good luck to you all for when the next Season’s arena gear comes out.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Contest – Would You Do With $25?
$25 dollars doesn’t do much now a days. It can’t get you a pizza delivered to your house in Maui. It can’t buy you a full tank of gas (unless your driving a moped). So why am I asking this question? Shai at JMMO is running a contest for $25. So this post is my entry ticket to the contest. By the way if you haven’t read my free blog traffic tips, you’ll find that holding contests are a great linkbaiting method to gain back links as well as exposure for your blog.
Anyways back to the subject matter on what I would do with $25. Since my blog is still rather new, I would use it to gather some exposure. What would be the best way to get some exposure for $25 though. I could:
Purchase a link for this website
With all the Google Page Rank penalties being sent out recently about paid links though I don’t think I’ll go with this one. Also sidebar or sponsored posts don’t really do great for traffic unless its from a very high traffic source anyways. I wouldn’t be able to purchase a good spot for $25 so nope.
Use Adwords or other Pay Per Click(PPC) advertising.
While this might be a great way to bring in targeted traffic, I would rather spend PPC money to a landing page that sells a product over just sending to my website. I guess this one won’t work for me either.
Buy a gift for Shoemoney
Yup, its decided. I’ll use my Cafe Press account for once, and make a T-shirt with my site on it for his Free T-Shirt Friday promotion. I think in my position this would probably be the best bet, since it’ll get a link from a high PR site, and hopefully some traffic. Worth a shot right?
So what would you do with $25?
Interested in participating in the contest? Read the post here for the entry rules. Its free so why not. If you don’t want to make a blog post, you can leave a comment with your answer to participate as well.
Popularity: 1% [?]
RssHugger Some Lovin For Your Feed
Last month I mentioned that I was going to try to add myself to more directories to generate visitors for this blog. On my list was to submit my blog to directories which bring me back to the subject of this post. RssHugger.
What is RssHugger?
Lets take a look at their about page.
“rssHugger is a unique website that aims to bring bloggers and readers together. rssHugger aims to provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader.”
Why should I join now?
Its FREE now, previously rssHugger was a pay to join directory. (you may still join by paying $20 if you wish to skip the write a post about rssHugger part of application, and receive a manual review).
What are the benefits to me as a blogger?
Besides just a directory how does it help get me more traffic?
The more visitors you send to your rssHugger page, the higher you will rank on the Top 100 page. To keep everyone on an even playing field, the Top 100 blogs page resets everyone back to zero on the 1st of every month. This will allow those that actively participate or promote their page on rssHugger to receive much more promotion in return.
How does one send visitors to their rssHugger page?
Your page has the following address:
www.rssHugger.com/YourBlog.com
For example my page there would is:
http://www.rsshugger.com/moneyne-ws.blogspot.com
So if you go to my page you raise monthly votes by 1, which will then hopefully raise me up a rank or two in the listings.
A free service that gives you backlinks to your posts, and more exposure for your blog. If you think that’s a good deal, sign up with rssHugger now.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Cyber Monday Myth or Now Internet Genre?
Happy Cyber Monday to you all. What is it? In 2005 Shop.org coined a new marketing phrase called “Cyber Monday“, based on some data in 2004 about the Monday following “Black Friday” being the biggest online shopping day of the year. Shortly afterwards, and after some actual research they found that it in fact didn’t measure up to the hype. The term came under some harsh criticism, and even Rob Hoff posted a retraction of sorts to his article in Business Week. However as most advertiser’s know there is no such thing as bad advertising, and many people follow the ideology of bad press is better than no press.
Fast forward another year to 2006. Again more people downplayed the term Cyber Monday. However with each article posted, each comment created the term spread throughout the internet. Shop.org persisted in marketing the term as well as their website CyberMonday.com was launched. Even though many people said that the day was just hype, there were still a few companies that reported great earnings like Ice.com.
Fast forward again to 2007. The term that only showed 779, 000 results in 2005 now pop up almost 2 million results today in Google. Currently as I write this Shop.org’s website went down for unknown reasons. Maybe just my connection since I can’t find other reports about the site’s statistics. While there are some that say that Cyber Monday is a Joke, it can’t be denied that this phrase is taking root in the American language. Market Watch, InformationWeek, TechCrunch, and CNet are expecting better results this year compared to previous years.
Their persistence paid off. While this is only the third year that the term has been around, it may become a day similar to “Black Friday” which major businesses aggressively target sales.
Morale of the story? Don’t give up, even if you get a bad review. Bad press isn’t bad since its always going to get you more exposure (unless of course your Britney Spears [NSFW]).
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