Web Listings, Inc – Scam Artists
Posted on | September 3, 2010 | No Comments
This week I got a piece of mail – hardcopy mail – from a company called Web Listings Inc. They made me the exclusive offer of:
DOMAIN NAME SUBMISSION TO 20 ESTABLISHED SEARCH ENGINES
UP TO EIGHT KEYWORD/PHRASE LISTINGS
QUARTERLY SEARCH ENGINE POSITION AND RANKING REPORTS
All for a mere $65. Sixty-five dollars a year, that is. This is a subscription service; if I want my domain name resubmitted next year, I’d have to pay again. Or maybe they’d give me a discount!
Who do you think Web Listings Inc.’s target audience is? People who picked up a book on website marketing in 1998 and fell into a coma? I remember designing personal websites in high school (back before we called them “blogs”) and patiently submitting them to Yahoo!, Hotbot and various other directories. But this was back when having a Geocities website wasn’t a stigma and desktop publishers did their CSS by hand. Things have changed a little in the last 12 years. Or the last 12 months, even.
In case I’m laying it on too thick: Web Listings Inc. is a scam. They are attempting to defraud you of money. Note the following:
You do not need to “submit” your site to a search engine. All reputable search engines work by sending out automated programs, called spiders, to visit your site and see who links to it. This is done without any work needed on your part.
There are not 20 reputable search engines. Really, there are only three: Google, Yahoo! and Bing (and as of October, there will only be two). If you have a site that operates in a particular niche, you might benefit from visibility in a specialized directory, like Capterra or Industry Brains or Business.com. But that’s it.
You don’t need to submit keywords to engines. The engines decide what keywords you rank on. Good SEO can help influence that decision. But Web Listings Inc. isn’t offering you good SEO.
Search engine position and ranking reports are worth something. But given the fraudulent nature of Web Listings Inc’s other offers, I question this report’s accuracy.
You can submit a sitemap to an engine, using their Webmaster Tools interface. But you don’t get to specify what keywords you’d like to rank on in this sitemap. So either Web Listings Inc doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or they are (again) trying to defraud you.
Fortunately, I’m not the only one who noticed this. So it appears that these scammers are just flooding websites with offers. If there were someone with a brain behind this, they might exclude websites run by people like me, who (claim to) know a little SEO.
In summary: Web Listings Inc. Scam. Don’t send them money. Here endeth the lesson.
I would rather be alone than pretend I feel all right
Posted on | September 1, 2010 | 1 Comment
Talking with friends at Cambridge Common last week, someone brought up It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I delivered my stock review of the show: a fantastic Grand Guignol of morality in the first two seasons that went off the rails in the third. In S1 and S2, the protagonists are conniving, their selfish schemes doomed to failure through their own mistrust of each other. In S3, they’re just dumb. Homer Simpson dumb. And just as The Simpsons grew worse as Homer transitioned from a proletarian to a high-functioning illiterate, so too did It’s Always Sunny lose me.
(I’ve been told S4 is better)
Then someone brought up Curb Your Enthusiasm and the conversation ground to a halt.
I need to stress that I love awkward television. I tune in to Mad Men and Breaking Bad every week to watch how its male protagonists will continue throwing away the good, safe things they have. I loved the British version of The Office and the most painful parts of the American version as well. I can watch people screw up their lives and suffer the consequences all day. But not Larry David.
This hearkens back to, and I hate to quote myself here, something I wrote on Overthinking It about Michael Richards’ racial epithet stand-up comedy meltdown:
Michael Richards thought he could get away with the n-word because he thought he was the victim. He thought a room full of black people were out to get him and he was justified in lashing back with the harshest weapon in his arsenal. What Richards failed to realize is that it’s effectively impossible for a successful white male entertainer with tens of millions of dollars in the bank to be a “victim” in a comedy club. He failed to realize the balance of power would never let him be a hustler.
Michael Richards owes every dollar he has to Larry David, creator of Seinfeld. In Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David plays Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld, a man with over $200 million in the bank, a beautiful wife and no self-esteem.
When talking to my friends, I frequently dismiss my own complaints as “First World problems” or “white people problems” – the kind of problems that 90% of humanity would consider themselves fortunate to have. Curb Your Enthusiasm is all about white people problems. Larry David gets invited to a friend’s house for dinner. This friend asks that Larry take his shoes off before entering the house. OH NO! HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY, etc. In later episodes, Larry inadvertently offends black people, women, strangers, etc. Larry feels uncomfortable visiting his therapist after he sees his therapist in a thong; WHAT A TRAGEDY. And so forth.
Curb Your Enthusiasm offends me on every level at once. The character of “Larry David,” as played by Larry David, would be a forgettable shell of a man were he not the creator of Seinfeld. He’d be trapped in a garret apartment in a forgotten corner of Sherman Oaks, too scared to go shop for groceries. But the only reason we even pay attention to this man is because, given his multi-millionaire status, he has famous friends and lives in a wealthy part of the world. As such, you’d think that a life in show business would have jaded him to the excesses of the human species. But it hasn’t! He still can’t function in polite society. How such a man even attended the meetings necessary to make two hundred million dollars strains my suspension of disbelief.
I guess I still believe enough in the Horatio Alger notion of wealth that I can’t watch a man who doesn’t deserve his good fortune. I can’t watch Larry David snarl and rebuff every friend he has. I’m sure it’s funny; it’s just not for me.
oh, if only I could stay awhile; but what am I afraid of?
Posted on | August 31, 2010 | 2 Comments
Penny Arcade followed up their contentious post on buying used video games last week with another post on Friday:
People who buy used games are not pirates, by definition. Used games (used everything, really) are and will continue to be a legal and protected form of commerce. Other industries have done what they can to co-opt, destroy, or harvest those markets, but their existence is settled law. What I have said is that the end result of that purchase from a developer perspective must be indistinguishable. Isn’t it? That is the question I couldn’t answer. I still can’t answer it. And because I couldn’t, I had to change the way I invested my leisure dollar.
People want to talk about used cars, or libraries, or any other thing really, but I’m not talking about the universe in general – I’m talking about the tiny part of it I have any control over. That bit up there is the part I can’t resolve: the moral dimension contained within the purchase. Yes, I’m giving somebody money when I buy used. Is that sufficient? What is the end result, and what systems am I sustaining by doing so?
Also, I got some good comments on my LiveJournal (which mirrors every post here, but gets more comments). The most interesting one was from Dan S., longtime friend of the blog:
What Holkins is taking for granted that his audience knows, and he shouldn’t, is this: GameStop controls 98% of the used games market. So when we say “used games”, what we should be saying is “GameStop”. Also, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars here.
The problem is GameStop will encourage gamers to return new, hot games quickly, and then push the used copies onto people trying to buy the game new. So not only does the developer not see a profit, they’re not seeing a profit on the order of, depending on the game, tens of millions.
This also allows GameStop to artificially inflate the price of used copies for an insanely long time: part of the reason I don’t bother with GameStop is that I can go to Best Buy and get the game new for either the same price or at least ten bucks less than their used price.
This is an important point.
If I buy a copy of HALO Reach at Best Buy for $60, play it for a while, then get tired of it, I can sell it to GameStop. They’ll pay me about $15 for it. They will then turn around and sell it for at least $40. If someone buys it and does the same thing, GameStop can keep collecting $40 for the same disc every time it crosses their counter. And since most people trade in their games for store credit, rather than legal tender, GameStop makes money on every aspect of the transaction.
So, yes: I can see why game developers wouldn’t like that.
How to stop it? Aside from legal obstructions (which wouldn’t work) or some sort of shaming campaign (which has been great at convincing America that our President is a Muslim, but little else), publishers could lower the MSRP. GameStop can only make the profits they do because of the margins involved. If I’m choosing between a brand new copy of a game at $60 and a used copy at $40 – which has a 90% chance of being playable – I might take the gamble on the $40 copy. GameStop’s margin on the game is $25 ($40 retail, minus the $15 credit they gave the person who traded it in), all other things being equal.
But if a brand new game retailed at $40, what’s GameStop going to do? Lower the “used” price to $30? That would lower their margin to $15, which cuts their revenue by 40%. They could also lower their trade-in value from $15 to $5, but then you’d get fewer trade-ins, which would also cut revenue.
Of course, it’s easy for me to say that huge corporations that already spend millions of dollars in developing new games should experiment by slashing prices. That decision’s always scary. But GameStop’s behavior is exactly the sort of rent-seeking that comes from massive margins. So long as there’s room for middlemen to whittle away at the price, you’ll find middlemen whittling.
Plus, maybe it’s not that much of a gamble. As several other commenters pointed out last week (Joel being the first), consumers are willing to pay $60 with the knowledge that they can sell a game used. So they’re already discounting the price of the game in their heads. If you want to be really cynical about it: you’ve already lost that $15 to GameStop anyway. Why not cut it out of the retail price to spite the bastards?
Of course, as my good friend Jason pointed out, the future of profitable video game development lies in mobile and social, not in the console. Angry Birds took a team of ten developers less than a year to make. It retails at $0.99 ($4.99 on the iPad). It’s now the #1 app on iTunes, with revenue in excess of $4.5 million, and has been optioned into a movie. That’s not the billions in revenue that World of Warcraft clears every year, but it’s not the hundred million dollar bath that investors took on APB, either. Which would you rather take a chance on – that Activision will still be around in five years, or that your Mafia Wars / Farmville knock-off will make you enough money to pay your rent?
The future will not be kind to business models that require real estate. The future will be creative, like Schumpeter said, but it’ll have to be destructive first.
good things come to boys who wait
Posted on | August 30, 2010 | No Comments
Our manager returned from her honeymoon in Shanghai (which should be a Jackie Chan flick, if it isn’t already) with a bag full of local candy for us. She made us all pick something at random first, then dumped the rest of the bag on the table for us to share.
My first pick: a package of cookie sticks with a tiny pocket of strawberry creme to dip them in. The package described them as “biscuit,” and though I typically shy away from European language for its own sake, I feel that’d be most appropriate here. They weren’t as dry or salty as crackers, but they weren’t as sweet as Americans would be used to for cookies. I think that’s the price we pay for being serfs to the corn industry: a surfeit of sweetness. America tried the cookies and dip route and it never quite caught on, though you can still find them on some supermarket shelves. I liked the taste, but found the strawberry creme a bit much after a while and couldn’t finish the package.
My next pick: milk taffy! It came in little wrapped morsels, like the salt water taffy you might buy on the Atlantic City boardwalk. But this had a lighter consistency and was easier to chew. Inside the paper wrapper, the taffy came encased in a little wax shell. It flaked off as you picked it up. I worked on peeling mine but it came off in minuscule shreds. “I don’t think you need to take it off,” one of my coworkers said. “You just eat it.” Figuring the Chinese would never make something I couldn’t safely put in my mouth, I popped the whole thing in.
For my third pick, I selected a small cake wrapped in plastic that looked like a teatime snack. It was white and crumbly, shaped like a symmetrical flower. I took about half of it in one bite. Then I stared at it.
“It …” I said.
“What is it?” my manager asked.
“It tastes like a piece of chalk with a sponge in the middle.”
Imagine a powdered Hostess donut, but caked in flour instead of sugar. The center had a red, porous consistency, like coral, and tasted organic. I know that “organic” isn’t a bad word, but it should have nothing to do with candy. Imagine reaching into a bag of M&Ms and swallowing a handful of stale peas instead. That’s the level of disconnect I suffered.
This thing tasted wretched – it might have been soap – but that wasn’t what made my face go slack. What stunned me was the idea that this would be considered candy. That anyone would enjoy this taste. What was this meant to accompany: sour milk? Pixie sticks? Pulped mushrooms? There was nothing sweet, salty or savory about it. It didn’t have the hardy taste of a fibrous plant or the tartness of nature. I could only attribute it to malice. Forget razor blades in Halloween candy or arsenic in the school milk: this was what children had to fear.
I stumbled to the sink, poured myself a cup of water and rinsed my mouth out. Still the taste lingered. I ate a few more of the biscuits-and-creme to staunch the chalky aftertaste, then dropped some change in the vending machines for a ginger ale and Reese’s. Good, honest HFCS – the stuff I was raised on, like every good American – steadied my troubled stomach.
a little goodwill goes a mighty long way
Posted on | August 26, 2010 | 1 Comment
Yesterday, Jerry Holkins (a/k/a Tycho of the popular video game webcomic Penny Arcade) said some stuff about used games:
In a literal way, when you purchase a game used, you are not a customer of [game developer THQ]. If I am purchasing games in order to reward their creators, and to ensure that more of these ingenious contraptions are produced, I honestly can’t figure out how buying a used game was any better than piracy. From the the perspective of a developer, they are almost certainly synonymous.
[...]
It’s exceedingly rare that I purchase a game from Gamestop these days. I got tired of being harangued for trying to buy products there, or being told that they didn’t have a product when they did, or going across the street to Best Buy or Target or Fred Meyer and finding fifty copies of the game I was trying to buy heaped up like some heathen altar to commerce. There’s more, besides. At some point in the last few years, I became incredibly uncomfortable with the used games market.
[...]
I traded in games for a long time, there’s probably comics somewhere in the archive about it – you can imagine how quickly my cohort and I consume these things. It was sort of like Free Money, and we should have understood from the outset that no such thing exists. You meet one person who creates games for a living, just one, and it becomes very difficult to maintain this virtuous fiction.
Ouch! Harsh words. And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Jerry’s partner on the webcomic, Mike Krahulik (a/k/a Gabe) wrote the following about eight hours later:
My Twitter and my email are both exploding today. People on both sides of the used game debate are crazy passionate about this. If Penny Arcade was a talk radio show this would be a perfect time to “go to the phones”. Since we can’t do that I’d like to do the next best thing.
If you are a developer or a gamer or both I’d like to hear your thoughts. Shoot me a mail and let me know how you feel about this but try and do it in a paragraph or so if you can.
So I took him up on it, sending Gabe an abridged version of the following:
Selling used games doesn’t cheapen the developers’ product. If I buy a copy of Dragon Age: Origins for $60 when it’s first released, play it for a few months, then give up in frustration (as I have done), I have a couple options. I can let it sit on my shelf and gather dust, benefiting no one. Or I can trade it in at GameStop for store credit, where someone else can buy it for $40. I haven’t magically created a second copy where the developer only intended there to be one. I’ve put it out of my hands and into someone else’s. In fact, by putting it into the hands of someone who’ll play it, I’ve done the developer a favor.
Of course, Bioware – the developers of DA:O – don’t get that $40 from the resale. GameStop does. That can rankle some developers. But there’s no alternate scenario in which the developer gets that $40. The alternate scenarios are:
- The game sits on my shelf (to no one’s benefit);
- I give the game to a friend (I get some goodwill; the friend gets the game);
- I sell the game myself, on eBay or Amazon, to a friend or stranger (I get some cash; someone else gets the game);
- I turn the shiny plastic disc into decorative jewelry or a mural (to no one’s benefit).
People get tired of the games they buy. They want to make room on their shelves for new games. Trading in a game disc for cash or credit doesn’t water down the developer’s intellectual property, since I stop having it the moment someone else does. And it doesn’t take bread out of the developer’s mouth.
I know that Holkins isn’t proposing a buying cycle where buying a video game is a sacred trust – where the purchase of EA or THQ’s latest offering means you become custodian of a product that you must guard for all time, bequeathing as a rich legacy unto one’s issue. But there’s no other logical conclusion to his complaint. If the idea of people reselling games bothers him so much, what would he prefer? Some ridiculous new law? Some bizarre standard of behavior which applies to video games but not to bicycles, cars, leather jackets, books, houses, DVDs, cameras, lamps, unlocked phones, bed frames, coffee tables, curtain rods, vases or collectible plates?
One thing that might keep the discussion from getting too rancorous is separating the idea of buying used games in general (which is harmless) to the practices of Gamestop (which are sketchy and questionable). Shopping there becomes less fun every time I go in, as the staff aggressively hypes their magazine, their frequent buyer programs, game protection, pre-orders and every other possible way to extract money from me without adding much value.
But I don’t think selling a game, or buying a used game, takes money out of a developer’s pocket. I don’t know as many developers as Jerry and Mike do, but I know a couple. And I don’t think they mind.
tonight wyclef, akon, weezy on the bill
Posted on | August 25, 2010 | No Comments
I wrote my longest Overthinking It post in years – perhaps ever – giving a deep read of Wyclef Jean’s three-year-old pop hit, “Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill).”
Wyclef makes use of a triple-antanaclasis here with three different meanings of the word “bill.” The first, the most common one throughout the song, is a bill as in currency — the “dollar dollar bill, y’all.” The second is a bill as in an invoice for services, like a water bill — “if they got to pay the bill.” The third is the bill as in the marquee of performers — “Tonight Wyclef, Akon, Weezy on the bill.”
What’s the effect of this identity rhyme? It ties into the theme that we’ll explore later in the chorus — that the presence of cash in the world is inescapable. Every aspect of your life touches on a bill. Wyclef, Akon and Lil’ Wayne are on the bill tonight (the marquee). Why? So they can make the bills (dollars) to pay the bills (invoices). It’s almost as if this single syllable rules everything around them.
I’ll pretend my ship’s not sinking
Posted on | August 24, 2010 | No Comments
Oh, dear. Someone take Eli Manning’s last known photograph:
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning said he will play Saturday against the Baltimore Ravens.
Manning will practice Monday afternoon but will wear a baseball cap instead of a helmet. The quarterback is not to be touched in the non-tackling practice. He expects to be able to put on a helmet for Wednesday’s practice.
Manning had 12 stitches removed from his forehead on Friday and sat out Saturday’s preseason loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers.
“It feels fine, the stitches are out,” Manning said while wearing a Giants baseball cap prior to practice. “I’m not wearing a helmet today for practice, will be in a hat, but it feels fine and is not hurting. It’s exposed, as long as I don’t get hit in the head, it will be all right.”
“As long as I don’t get hit in the head.” Wow.
Granted, the New York Football Giants are a better team than the Deadskins, so I’m not expecting the same 23-3 mudfest that we saw last weekend. Perhaps Elisha will only be sacked once, as opposed to McNabb’s two visits to the ground on Saturday that left him limping onto the bench after the first half. Manning only got sacked thirty times last season, which makes the Giants’ pocket protection more porous than the 3-13 Tampa Bay Buckaroos but sturdier than the Stillers (sorry, IOZ). In 2009, Ben Wafflespurgisnacht got jacked up fifty times – an average of 3.125 sacks per game. Actually, that should be 3.33 sacks per game, since Big Ben sat out the Baltimore game in Week 12; something about his head hurting.
But I digress! This isn’t about Pittsburgh. This is about the Giants, playing the Ravens in Baltimore. Perhaps things won’t be as bad for the lesser of two Mannings as they were for Donovan McNabb. After all, Terrell Suggs was going up against rookie offensive linemen last Saturday – no match for a ferocious Pro Bowler. Fortunately, the Giants are … what’s that? They’re on their second and third-string guards? Oh. Oh, dear.
Well, there’s always Jim Sorgi.
baby won’t you try to find me
Posted on | August 23, 2010 | No Comments
click for full screencap
I suppose it’s not strictly an SEO fail. Technically, Jetblue.com is in position #1 on Google for “jetblue all you can jet.” But you’d think they’d have a better page in the top slot. Sorry.
That search was performed on Wednesday August 18th, the day the sale was announced. I performed another search this morning and found the same results.
SEO: not for the weak.
a piece of me will always be inside of you
Posted on | August 20, 2010 | No Comments
Question regarding the new Jennifer Aniston / Jason Bateman comedy The Switch:
Kassie [Aniston], on her own but eager to have a baby, has personally selected her donor, a square-jawed surfer-blond dude named Roland (Patrick Wilson). To toast her impending pregnancy, she throws a party in which Roland is asked to leave his crucial sample in the bathroom. He does — but Wally [Bateman], in a drunken haze, pours it down the drain and leaves his own sample instead.
Cut to seven years later, when Kassie is living in Colorado with her 6-year-old son, Sebastian (Thomas Robinson), who unbeknownst to everyone, is really Wally’s son. Even Wally doesn’t know it; he has no memory of that fateful night, or of the switch that he drunkenly, passive-aggressively instigated.
Is what Bateman’s character does:
- Worse than rape;
- Just as bad as rape; or
- Actually rape
# # #
The gym near my office has a whiteboard at the entrance. The staff regularly updates it with health tips. For the past few weeks they’ve had a paragraph of text which reads (paraphrasing):
Desk jobs are bad! Sitting all day puts an unnatural strain on your back, core, knees and hip flexors. Talk to a personal trainer today for ways to recover.
About two weeks ago, someone erased the word “desk.”
Someone replaced the word “desk” last week, using a different colored marker. I don’t know if that was done for emphasis or just because no one could find the original color.
As of this past Wednesday, someone had erased it again. The Cold War continues.
# # #
Use as needed.
a woman is a woman and a man ain’t nothing but a male
Posted on | August 19, 2010 | No Comments
I tell myself I don’t like swing dancing. “I don’t like swing dancing,” I told myself, Sylvia and several other people on Tuesday. This was at the Yelp Elite event in Charles Square near Harvard.
It’s not that I don’t like dancing. I love dancing. Ask anyone who’s seen me at a wedding, or in a club, or driving in the car when my jam comes on. I just don’t like dancing with rules. I feel the same way about line dancing, Irish step and polka. Fuck you for telling me when I get to stomp. I’ll stomp when I damn well want to.
But I can’t hear a tune and not dance, so I ended up in the center of the floor against all sense and reason. “I keep dropping the beat,” I said, stumbling back into the one, two, rock-step rhythm. “I can’t hear a 4/4 song and dance in 3/4 time.”
“You’re thinking about it too much,” Sylvia said.
“That’s what I do,” I said.
But the free booze and support of my friends helped. I turned a corner with Yelp this year. Now I can show up at an event and point to half a dozen people I can count as friends. Plus, Yelp events are always a good source of cocktails and flaky, cheesy hors d’oeuvres. Everything a growing boy needs.
Paying The Bills
Feed
Search This Site
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Sylvia on I would rather be alone than pretend I feel all right
- Perich on oh, if only I could stay awhile; but what am I afraid of?
- UnSub on oh, if only I could stay awhile; but what am I afraid of?
- oh, if only I could stay awhile; but what am I afraid of? | Periscope Depth on a little goodwill goes a mighty long way
- Jacob Patel on open up your eyes just to check that you’re asleep again
Archives
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008