posted by henry | 11/17/2008 02:59:00 PM| (1) comments

Friday, November 14, 2008  

If you like baseball, and hate assholes, but are also sort of an asshole, today is a sad day for you: Fire Joe Morgan has closed up shop. It's hard to blame them -- these are people with jobs, and lives, and if I decided I wanted to try to be that funny, it would probably eat up most of my day and i'd probably fail anyway.

Still, it's sad, and it's a major event if you're a certain type of person. FJM was funny, and fucking obnoxious, and attracted a bad element, and was also really smart and said things that no one at the time was saying. They brought shitty commentary into the light, and that's a public service, whether you liked the food tag or not.

The defining moment of FJM, if you ask me, is when they opened comments. It lasted like, a minute before it got out of hand and was shut down, and they never opened it again. That's a baseball community I want to be a part of.

I'm going to miss them. I hated Joe Morgan before I started reading FJM a couple years back, but I didn't know quite how much, or exactly why. Thanks, guys. It's sort of a bummer that JM has yet to be fired, but at least he knows he's a fucking idiot. Something something Manny Acta.

posted by henry | 11/14/2008 10:09:00 AM| (0) comments

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Segmentation and Revenue per Visitor 

Monday, November 10, 2008  

I don't know if everyone knows this -- I certainly didn't before last week, and neither did anyone here. I haven't been able to dig anything up on Google, but would love to read it if there is anything.

Basically, something you sometimes do in web analysis is say, "How did people who saw a particular page do in terms of money per visitor?" This is a common way of (supposedly) determining the influence of particular pages on success, and on determining whether a page is working. It turns out, except under controlled circumstances, this is a totally invalid question.

The way to think of it is, pick any page on a site -- revenue producing or not -- and think about all the people who came to your site. How likely is it that each person saw that page? Well, it depends on how many pages each person saw -- and that, in turn, is closely related to how much they spent. Those people who saw a lot of pages were more likely to have seen your page, and they were also more likely to have spent a lot of money.

In fact, logic says that the less busy a page is, the higher the revenue per visit will be for people who saw it, because statistically, the people most likely to see it will be those inclined to do a lot of clicking around. If it's hard to find, only people doing a lot of looking will find it, and those are the people who buy the most.

And when you simulate, this hunch is confirmed. The graph to the right is for a website with 11 pages. Each page contains a product with the same price and the same likelihood of purchasing once you've seen it. They all have different likelihoods of being viewed, from 0.001 to 1. I ran 100K visits with varying initial interest in purchasing (applied as a multiplier to the viewing likelihood), and what you get is this curve relating revenue per visitor for the visitors to each page against the (unadjusted) likelihood of seeing that page.

To sum up: the less likely a page is to be seen, the higher value the visitors to that page will seem. But this is a figment of the probabilities involved, and the fact that high-value visits will fall into way more segments than low-value visits. It means that the value of every single segment you look at could be higher than the site-wide value per visit -- which seems like a paradox, until you get your head around this.

It also means that you really shouldn't take the performance of your shiny new page compared to the rest of your site as evidence of anything. Of course it's doing better than average: it's harder to find.

posted by henry | 11/10/2008 02:38:00 PM| (0) comments

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The People Have Spoken! 

 

As I feared, poor people have made themselves clear, and they don't want my help. The deal was, if 9 of the 10 poorest states (by median HH income) voted against Obama -- whose desire to spread the wealth was made abundantly clear by McCain -- I was going to take this as an indication that they didn't want my money, and stop insulting them by making donations to American poverty causes.

Well, thanks to SC, TN, OK, LA, AL, KY, AZ, WV, and Mississippi, the American poor person's dignified rejection of my desire to give them some of my money has succeeded! The only one of the bottom 10 states to go blue was New Mexico, and if you want to find a second state that went for Obama, you have to add the next 5 poorest states until you get to South Carolina.

So, I no longer care about the poor in America. When you think about it, they've got it better than relative rich people almost anywhere in the world, and they overwhelmingly rejected the candidate who wanted to take money from people like me forcibly, and give it to people like them. I respect that. If I were poor, I'd want help, but apparently I don't know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, best of luck with the poverty. Laura and I finally got notification of our $1,200 tax refund over the weekend, and we're sitting down to make our final 08 giving decisions over thanksgiving. Nothing But Nets and National Endowment for the Arts, you're in luck: Kentucky didn't want my money.

posted by henry | 11/10/2008 12:56:00 PM| (0) comments

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