Beyond ADSL - Fiber to the Home (FTTH)

Were you one of the first on your block to ditch your dial-up modem for ADSL broadband? In this case, you may also be one of the first to switch from ADSL in favor of FTTH (Fiber-to-the-Home). Some of us have been fans of ADSL for eight years or more now, but it is starting to seem frustratingly slow given all the new high-speed applications available online.

Korea and Japan are way ahead of most Western countries when it comes to broadband penetration. And a recent study conducted in Japan predicts that ADSL will be eclipsed by FFTH (and be the choice of more households) within just four short years.

In Japan, ADSL is already much faster than in North America. Data transfer rates (downstream) are usually higher than 20 megabits per second (Mbps) and 40 Mbps is very common. Compare that to most DSL services here where we are happy if we can secure 3 Mbps from our DSL provider.

Despite this the competing FTTH system started to take-off in Japan in 2002. FTTH can be had for almost the same monthly fee as ADSL over there! And this enables people to enjoy a 100Mbps service (for both uploading and downloading).

But for now, you'd have to live in a few very select communities to be able to access FTTH from your home anywhere in the U.S. Verizon is the one company going after FTTH in a serious way in the States. Expect to hear a lot more about FTTH in the next couple of years.

Source: Hitachi Telecom and Tech On!

An Online Content Goldmine

There are thousands of sites out there with more than a million page views. But how many can boast of revenues of more than a million dollars per month?

As far as content-based sites go, the most profitable ones are probably those who can charge a fee for the privilege of interactive participation.

The South Beach Diet site is a good example. It has 350,000 subscribers who each pay $5 per week for the privilege of participating in conversations with like-minded dieters and for getting regular updates about diet-related information.

This works out to $90 million a year in revenues; amazing money especially considering there are no inventory or production costs and the marginal costs for each additional subscriber are practically nil.

The South Beach Diet book came out in early 2003 and soon became a big hit. But the publisher had nothing to do with the money-making website. This was created by a different company, Waterfront Media, who pay royalties to the author and help sell more books for the publisher.

Waterfront was not shy with their advertising budget. I recall that back in 2003 and 2004 I saw a lot of South Beach diet ads even though I wasn't visiting any diet-related sites. There was one ad in particular I remember, with a woman's slim waist and a tape measure wrapped around it. I never clicked on the ad but I sure got the impression the South Beach diet must be something very huge and popular. It turns out that during this time Waterfront was buying about half a billion ads per month - and spending about $1 million per month for this type of banner advertising.

The South Beach Diet book stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for at least 24 months, in no small measure due to this massive online advertising campaign.

I've tried to dig up some current information about how the subscription numbers look now - almost three years since the book was released. But Waterfront is a private company, not subject to any disclosure requirements, and I haven't been able to find any news about the company since mid 2004. Perhaps the book and the website have seen their peak earnings and it is all a downhill slide for now.

But it's also possible the website continues to grow and be so lucrative that Waterfront would rather stay under the radar and not publish updated information about their growing subscriber and revenue numbers.

With their growing stable of successful self-help author sites, Waterfront is on to a very lucrative formula for making money with online content and forum participation. It's probably a leading example of what we can expect in the future as the publishing and newspaper industries move more of their activities and money making opportunities online.

For more good examples of money-making models for online content see a recent article at Dot Tactics.

Update March 28th: Waterfront Media has just announced they've received $6 million in a further round of venture capital funding. The press release mentions they are planning to move into television and radio and that they plan to launch a major new 'consumer health initiative' later this year. They note they've had over eleven million people create profiles for themselves on one of their sites.

Look for this company to go public IPO'ing soon...

Beyond Link Building - What's Next

Link building strategies have been the most effective way to optimize a websites search engine rankings. This has been especially true with Google's search engine algorithm.

But link building strategies are losing their importance. They will soon be superseded by a much better indicator of how a site should truly rank in the search engines. This indicator is no less than the most sophisticated one which attempts to calculate how actual visitors truly value a website. The site visitors will be the voters who decide the true credibility of the site for any given keywords.

This will be measured by how much time they spend on the site, whether they clickthrough to other sections of the site and if they like it enough to want to come back for a return visit by placing this site in their bookmarks or feed readers.

This is truly novel stuff for the science of search engine algorithms and it's great news for all of us who want to find the best information on the first page of our search.

This new capability is coming about via new tools such as the Google Toolbar and Google Analytics. These will be the key search engine algorithm formula tools in the near future.

Links are dead - long live links! is the best write-up I've seen about the changes brewing now at the major search engines. Whereas links were once king, now it is a user activity, christened as 'clickstream' by the author.

If you have a website and want to maximize your search rankings based on these new criteria, check out their informative article at Platinax about this.

Google's New Trap for Spammers?

It didn't take long. Google Base has already been taken over by spammers. Surely Google knew this was going to happen and have some plan for cleaning this up?

There is a very interesting post over at Got Ads? about how Google could easily clean up the spam in their general index just by checking who has posted more than fifty entries in Google Base so far;

Google should basically take the logins of everyone who's uploaded more than 50 items, do a big WHOIS grep through their registry database and penalize every one of the websites of the uploaders in the main search index.

In other words, the only people using base so far are affiliate and porn spammers. Google could use that knowledge to increase the quality of its index spam filtering.

If you haven't seen Got Ads? before, I'd highly recommend it. The quality of insight and writing about Google is superb.

Google has been doing a massive and effective clean-up of spam within their Blogger offering. They've probably got similar plans for Google Base. But in the meantime it just may serve as the honeypot they need to find the Internet's biggest spammers.


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The above fine art print is "Honey Bees" by Martha Burke Anderson