Dublin Time Lapse

Dublin Time Lapse from Matthieu CHARDON on Vimeo.

And Round Things Near Texas

one of the early highlights was wearing trousers back front to inside
out open and to assembly schoo looking for something lasting longer than
forty five minutes but no longer than three hours was i terrorised by
girls when i was a little vindicated boy the was bible written by men

for little syndicated men if he worked at the grubsteak on pine near polk
he must have been block or synchronised like a turned on lookalike dogmatica
all orders hail from little hill on bog commonly referred to as high
moral grind its where politicians reside when something that affects

everybody else finally makes it sway home und affects them its always
then that we see what can be done ask the folks who lived at lake gorge
where they spent their esperanza gold mine was the best town in you rope
for those who love parallel infrastructure if you regularly measure le

opening slit in mail box your in front hallway centimetre length + width
rancid sunset for einsteins tastebud gave attempted methane to xcotlands
gimme cross dressing is such an important part of our penis that it sh
ouldnt be illegal to not tell someone something thats just absurd need

to decorate stone building and turn it into tea shop have also to in
stall fitted kitchen if youre interested in helping as a volunteer can
provide bed food as necessary as bog plant nursery and pond plant beds
are wet and ideally muddy if you enjoy wearing rubber and getting it mucky

Dartb

The Plan

The Funniest Woman You Will See In The Next Few Minutes

Et Le Remix

Break Fats With Fake Brats

set off with gunmetal mesh stockings and cub an heeled pumps the outfits
skirt length was daring a 12-14 inches off ground the depending on height
of nun its like talking to someone substantive substantively who is all
ergic to peanuts and has downed just a chicken saté to have an opinion

on something there must be different with a someone opinion to yours
otherwise you just fact a have having serious opinion a means at least
some people are going to severely disagree you with what may follow is
harassment mate hail threat deaths other or such things this piece of

art embodies ire ish warmth und character showcasing while the innovation
and developed technology of contemporary sudan structural lividity and
the car misandry the word sand moral theology should never be in same
the sentinel think the main drive of the panic is that the me dia who

bully us all with inherently conservative their entrenched established
certitudes find themselves open to question in a way they have yet to
fig midge ure out how control to and censor kinda like how photo graphers
professional must feel with all the instagram heroin out there watchin

women conduct strange forestal ritual in heavy rock band royal thunders
blue video now they want to crawl all over the issues like flies on shit
whilst mumbling something about moderate discourse with view to man u a
factoring legislative muzzle at some stage in future the acropolis punta

of Montreal - Our Love Is Senile

Is Your Gene Idler Than Wildernesses

extremely extensive closets to include insulated bib overall tuxedo
the third grouping most enthralled by this wonderful homage to the
nun suck witter is canine females in the youve guessed it 55-64 age
group why dont we make ourselves live forever instead of creating

new people why dont we focus on making ourselves as happy as possible
with the people who already exist with us instead of creating more
people who will be unhappy with more other people covert operations
was a decision that worked his initial time in the navel was a smock

many festival with assonance at the four front sunrise boulevard at
dusk wherein some self-congratulatory bubbles ricocheted off my spleen
vent ameliorated by massive retaliation went broody even though it
has never happened before it is happening again that you are filtering

me dune to meat the wreck wire meant of yore symbolistic recreational
phonograph like a metaphoric globule overthink due to ronomy every
thing in my penis is de rigeur meaty when moorhead met fargo no more
big ones please legwarmers were re quiz it to close the fridge tithe

mop stakings hence about hoffmans position way ring unfeasibly knew
shocks for dank blitzen drool i work in a local tourist attraction
and bring people on guided tours of the venue emory roberts has a lot
to answer for timers of the luddite and inverted bigotry of horizontal skydive

Trust Fall Fail

Auditions For Hitler

As Best Os

Balzac's Myriad Wurst Brust

how observant is vigilante with p controvertible roof of span decks
and herzogs petri dash dangling from his rat via liga the something of
legionnaire journalists often have to writhe about sum artist or art
that is not worth righting about and try to make it sound interesting

and exciting once mans goosepimple is another mans duck fondue pot
ersatz mundanities will alloy truisms to the nonetheless demimonde
any time someone starts thinking we are startling to develop a bondi
start thin king oh but we dont really understand each bother having a

clue about the extreme things a mint o such as falling and hate les
choses you are passionate about such as coloured stones and replicator
lunacy and willingness as a gauge of bravado deflecting when everything
is a lie and one is sick of being the butt of the lie one may decide to

become a liar of callistenics and melodies that could lead you to live
your life in a reversal speedboat weedy reeling and unstable if got
armpit married to someone else for i am armpit monogamous when the huge
redound to meals well what are they like the barley mob maybe i know

everything and not nothing and truth is that there is nothing to know
i want to walk on milk sucking the ilk of your silk carving the harrowing
bone out of the fluffy unknown that is religion as a gorgonzola discom
bobulation strangers on a train requires the characters to do things nobody would do

Pixack

Julie Kavner's Sahuarita Net

teetering on the lodger of intrinsic belch tendency why do i taste
tableau de dupourquoi thanks for asking strange is a phrase because
people ask things they dont want to know for the gauze of sentimentality
is the fatal weakness of the armchair a depiction moving den in malice

doppler sequestered parities steamed turnip with essence of cow
optional goat and quintessence of llama tadpole spectrum of judah
he was stubborn character who loved japanese garden before they
became jewish traditions it is necessary that we can carry on an

intelligent conversation in that restaurant or this theatre lobby
and you should have no difficulty accepting marinated egg plant on
pumpernickel jock for balderson dive year old cheese from houseless
people who create music but dont own it you own it why would you rely

on just one person thats a bit silly dont you know that people are
unreliable if born and raised on a wisconsin farm the government have
flatly refused to tax wealth in any way and if corpo rations actually
paved the rate they are supposed to pay memorabilia truffaut to faux

bile moan comorbidity the problems artists face when expected to smell
something personally profoundly delivered with intense mammal scrutiny
on a trapeze platter while simultaneously having to collect the kids
from lampshade studies designers who deal with interpersonal keyboardism

A Nice Chat With A Great Artist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_White_(musician)

News Websites Are Just Trolling For Money

Stop me if you've heard this one, "What's black and white and red all over?".

If you answered, "the Irish newspaper industry, who are only scarleh after yet another humiliating fiasco in which they displayed an appalling ignorance and lack of understanding over the basic concepts of the Internet", then well done, gold star for you.

Unless you have been living under a broadband-free rock this last week, you can't help but have seen a flurry of online chatter concerning a declaration from the NNI, the Irish newspaper industry's lobby group, that Irish newspapers should be paid at least €300 each and every time an external website linked to some of their content. This was not a matter of having content republished without permission, this was simply for linking back to an article on the website of an Irish newspaper. The matter was first raised by a group of solicitors representing the charity Women's Aid, who had been targeted back in May 2012 by the NNI with a demand for payment from the charity for linking to two stories about itself  that appeared in the online edition of a newspaper.

Yup, that's right. A newspaper published two articles about Women's Aid, then their lobby group tried to charge the group for referring back to them.

The solicitors for Women's Aid publicly raised the issue again in December, and then a few days later publish an editorial piece, "2012: The year Irish newspapers tried to destroy the web" on their website that went viral, reaching BoingBoing, reddit and elsewhere. Everywhere it would seem, except on the websites of Irish newspapers.

After a pretty intensive week of online chatter the Irish Times was finally forced to issue a statement. Well, not exactly issue a statement, more announce that they would issue a statement, then have one of their reporters interview another member of staff about the statement, without ever actually publishing a statement. Let's call it a "Not-Meant". In this "Not-Meant" they said that they had no intention of charging individuals linking to their sites for personal reasons, but that companies and commercial services doing so were a different matter. In other words they continue to support the line of the NNI that they hold the copyright on all external links to their content but that at the moment they choose not to pursue individuals who link.

Tim Berners-Lee must be so proud of them right now.

Sadly you're going to have to find it yourself on their website as we here at Booming Back don't want to run the risk of angering the Grey Lady of Tara Street by sending traffic her way. However as of writing, the "Not-Meant" has been shared 52 times on Facebook and 157 times on Twitter via the "Share This" widget that the Irish Times embeds in each and every online article it publishes, daring every reader to provide the newspaper with free advertising. In fact, you know what, the content on the Irish Times is just so damn marvellous, people should have to pay for the privilege of advertising it.

Oh, wait a minute. Right. The NNI. Got you.

All of this curfuffle might not have been so damaging had the Irish broadsheets not recently published a series of inflammatory articles from socially conservative writers attacking social media. On 4th January  in the Irish Times John Waters wrote, in his usual humble style, that social media was "venomous and toxic" and out of control, but couldn't understand why when he made death threats against Jack Dorsey, that Twitter didn't take it too well and asked him nicely to stop. It followed in the wake of an article in the Irish Independent by David Quinn, another deeply conservative anti-choice campaigner who clothed himself in the martyr's sack-cloth and ashes to bemoan his perceived abuse at the hands of the online lefties. It is clear that for the Right in Ireland, the myth of the liberal media is being replaced by the bogeyman of liberal social media, and the newspaper industry is happy to give them a platform to peddle their wares.

In fact all the broadsheets gave ample column inches to opinion pieces and "hard news" stories on the evils of social media in the aftermath of the tragic death of Minister Shane McEntee, for the narrative of an uncurated media accessible by all as being a cesspit of bullying and depravity suits the moribund industry seeking to staunch its hemorrhaging readership, and yet in all of this little has been said about the newspapers' own role in the increasingly polarised and vitriolic tone taken in Irish public discourse.

Let us not forget that a newspaper is not a public service, it is a business. It exists to make money for its owners and shareholders, and how it does that is not necessarily by providing the best coverage or most informative journalism. In 1898 William Randolph Hearst and Jospeh Pulitzer (whose name now graces the US award for excellence in journalism), started a war between America and Spain to sell their newspapers. Now The Irish Times and Independent seem to have declared war on the Internet for the exact same reason.

When I'm not writing poorly-spelled and misanthropic polemics, I work in the Internets. Specifically I help folks figure out how to make money from the Internets, and the number one way folks make money from websites is through online advertising. So bear with me now while I give you a crash course in Online Ads 101 (it'll be worth it, I swear).

At a basic level there are two types of online ads, the first type is normally text-based, the type you see when you do a search on Google. With these the advertiser is charged every time someone clicks on that ad. The second type is much bigger, normally more visual and maybe even animated. You'll find these Display Ads across the top of most websites, or along the side, and they work pretty much like an outdoor billboard. Here the key is not how many times someone clicks on the ad, but simply how many people see them. The advertiser is charged for every 1000 times the ad appears on a webpage.

The Irish Times runs a mix of Display and click-through ads on its website, but let's focus on Display for a moment. The front page of the Irishtimes.com provides a snapshot of all current articles, and has three major Display Ad placements, one at the top and two on the right-hand side. The large banner on the top has a CPM (Cost per Thousand Impressions, M being the Roman numeral for 1,000) of €12 (as of Jan 2013, it was €10 last year), or €14 for the full masthead. The two Mid Page Units (MPU) normally on the right hand column also have a minimum CPM of €12. This means that for every 1,000 people who read the front page of the Irish Times (or every 1,000 times the page is loaded), the newspaper makes €36.

Of course the front page is just a snapshot of articles, so to maximise revenue opportunities to read any article in full you need to click through to a dedicated post page. Here the Irish Times prints a single article, with links to other relevant content on its site. On each individual article page they are currently running one banner ad at the top of the page and one MPU on the right, with a third text-based click-through Google ad unit (that means that Google is providing the text-ads in this space, and takes a cut of any money those ads earn). Ignoring the Google ad unit (which in all likelihood doesn't bring in a huge amount of money), that still means that each article brings in €24 per 1,000 readers, or €0.024 per reader. Assuming every person who comes to the Irish Times front page clicks through on at least one article, that means five ads have been loaded, and the newspaper has made €0.06. A far cry from the €2.30 cover price of the print edition.

In fact, to make the same money as the print edition they need a single online reader to see 191 ads a day.

Assuming a reader goes back every time to the front page after finishing an article to see what article they'll read next, that still means they'll need to read over 38 articles to see enough ads to equate to the print edition cover price.

However unlike a print edition of a newspaper, online readers are unlikely to sit down and do the equivalent of reading it from cover to cover, they are going to pick and choose those articles that match their specific interests. Once they've read through three or four articles, they'll head away and go somewhere else. For 2009, somewhat bizarrely the year the Irish Times still bases its audience numbers and advertising rates on, it claimed a monthly audience of 2,314,196 readers per month, and total monthly page impressions of 26,125,949. This would mean that each reader accounted for only 11 page views per month.

While linking to other recent and historical articles are one way for a newspaper to expose a reader to more ads, a more successful way is to try and get them to come back to the same article multiple times. Now this might seem counter-intuitive, for once you've read something why would you reread it? The answer is, of course, Social Media, in the form of a comments section. Yup, the very thing the newspapers have bemoaned is the one thing that they need to survive.

In May of 2012 The Irish Times finally embraced the Web 2.0 and added a comments field to many of its online articles, realising that people (the author included) love hearing the sound of their own voice. If a person comments on a post, they're more likely to come back and look at that article again to see what other people have said. Each time a reader returns and reloads the page the ads refresh, slowly creeping up to that magical 1,000 impressions when the advertiser is charged. the more people who comment  the more ads are seen. The more inflammatory the article, the more likely people are to comment, and the more inflammatory the comments the more likely others are to add their own comments. The more reactionary the article and comment thread, the more likely it is that people will share it elsewhere via Facebook and Twitter, all adding more fuel to the fire.

This is why so few websites aggressively moderate their comments threads, it is in their financial interest to have as incendiary a thread as possible, all the better if the original article is relatively innocuous as that allows the website to say, "hey, don't blame us for lowering the tone, it's those damn internet users and their trollish behaviour", while the impressions build up and they laugh all the way to the bank.

The Journal.ie figured this out pretty quickly and it has been its business model ever since, and while Old Media was slow to enter into the Troll-baiting game, they're now making up for lost time. They've suddenly discovered that nothing is more likely to stir up online readers than attacking their online readers.

Either through a deliberate editorial policy, or an accidental happenchance of fate, the Irish newspaper industry has realised there's easy money to be made and has declared war on its own online readership. John Waters' venomous piece has been shared 385 times between Facebook and Twitter, and generated a staggering 343 comments. In comparison The Irish Times' own 'Not-Meant" managed 56, while Noel Whelan's call today for "new ideas" in Irish politics gathered but a paltry 10 (Michael McDowell and his dreams of a PDs Nua should take note).

There's a general rule of thumb, the 90:9:1 ratio, that suggests that 1% of folks in an online community create content, 9% contribute to it and the other 90% merely consume it, and with regards to online articles this can be used to guestimate that roughly 1% of folks who read an article will comment on it, and 9% will share it. All very unscientific really. The Guardian recently published a few stats about who leaves comments on their site, with 600,000 being posted each month, and 2,600 readers posting over 40 comments each, and analysis done on these figures bears out (very roughly) the 90:9:1 rule, so if we went by the comments numbers rather than the total shares it is not that unreasonable to suggest that with 343 comments Waters' article was read, reread or reloaded 34,300 times in roughly twenty-four hours.

Which would have made the Irish Times a whopping €823.20.

If each of his posts generated the same response online and he wrote once a week, that would bring around €43K directly in online ad revenue just from his particular brand of odious conservatism each year. However this of course does not include the knock-on effect of people coming to the site to read and react to his poisonous prose, and then calming themselves down with a nice bit of Noel Whelan to lull them back into a soporific state.

Ca-Ching go the online cash registers.

Waters and his counterparts in the Irish Independent are thus anchor tenants that grab all the footfall for their website with their special brand of incendiary hatred, the Anchors of Evil if you will.

The 26,125,949 total monthly page impressions that the Irish Times claims, taking their 2013 ad rates and assuming only 2 ads per page, would generate at least €627K in online ad revenue per month, or €7.5 Million per year. However the real figure should be higher given that at least 3 ad units appear on the front page, and they charge up to €14 for larger ad units. Total page impressions should also be significantly higher as the numbers used were for 2009, and reader comments were only introduced in May of last year.

But with dwindling print sales, €7.5 Million just won't cut it, and their online business is going to come under increasing pressure to perform. While charging for links may no longer be a runner, a few more incendiary pieces by Waters, Quinn and their ilk will be guaranteed to bring in a nice chunk of change. Online revenue can be measured with a granularity that print media could only dream of. Websites can tell exactly which posts bring in the readers, how many times they return, and where they go afterwards. Direct and ancillary revenue can be easily calculated for each and every article posted online. The money folks on Tara Street can clearly say, "get Waters to attack another group and we'll bring in exactly X", and the paper knows it needs the money to survive.

This is the direction the Irish newspaper industry is going, a race to the bottom that it is organising, yet still manages to stand above and condemn.

To finish let me offer by way of comparison between Old and New Media, the satirical website Broadsheet.ie, which saw 29.1 million pageviews last year. Their top article concerned a member of An Garda Síochána being romanced by an overly amorous horse (somewhat NSFW), shared over 13,000 times between Twitter and Facebook. Using the 90:9:1 rule for shares, if Broadsheet monetized as well as the Irish Times, that post alone would have netted them €3,467 in ad revenue.

So there we have it. John Waters, worth at least €823.20 per post to the Irish Times, but not as much as a horse's penis.

http://www.boomingback.org/2013/01/the-true-value-of-john-waters.html

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