My friend @MartinVanLonden came through with some serious video gear and technical skills, and together we shot, directed & edited this music video for this collaboration between Chi Duly & PropaneLV. The track samples The Weeknd and is getting a great response.

Shot w/ a T2i and a bunch of lenses in my bedroom.

Download: PropaneLV – Weeknd Romance (Produced by Chi Duly)

I’m trying to figure that out. i really am. i like and appreciate tumblr now, and even use it some… so do i still want/need this? yes. yes i do. i am going to keep this as a blog of real things. what i mean is… twitter, tumblr, etc is a running dialog of bullshit and ramblings. photos, words, videos, etc…

this will be for real things. for real posts of real things. whether it be photos from event x, the most recent OC from Dirty Laces, analysis of this, or updates about that… it’s all going to be real.

and with that! … i commit to update it atleast once a week with something real for everyone out there who doesn’t read it.

am I talking to myself? i think so.

I haven’t written about uLynk at all on here. Hell, I haven’t posted much about anything… but oh well. uLynk is a web/software startup that I’m working on full time with a couple partners.

This is a little video from a client of ours who hadn’t yet used uLynk, was about to drop off, and decided to give it a try. A few minutes later literally 8 people walked up… so I tossed Marques my lil HD camera and told him to go get that shit on tape!

Well, I’ve been very underwhelmed by my Adsense CPC recently. Thats how much revenue is earned, per click. I noticed we were getting a solid # of clicks, but dogsh*t for each one. Adsense breaks its ads up into categories, and then lets you see how much traffic each category is getting (by %), and how much revenue its earning (also by %). You can then block the categories that aren’t doing well, so those ads aren’t displayed at all. If you have a brain, it’s easy enough to understand what is doing well and what isn’t by looking at the #’s. It’s less easy to look at these numbers for all of the 10 or so main categories, and decide which ones to block. So, here’s what I did.

I copy and pasted the data from my Adsense window into an Excel spreadsheet. The pasting was kind of awkward and not pretty, but I got the data I needed quickly and easily. As you can see in the screenshot above, I put the %impressions over %revenue to put an actual number value on how each category was performing. As the ratio suggests, a value under 1 is over achieving… it’s bringing in a higher % of revenue than the amount of impressions it’s getting, the lower the better. Anything over 1 is under performing, the higher it is the worse.

The numbers you have will be completely dependent on your content type and your traffic, but basically the goal here is to block the categories that are under performing. Each category has several sub-cats, so you can get really detailed if you want. I went through each and every category. The only limit here is that you can only block 50. That wasn’t an issue for me, because many of the categories weren’t even really in use.

So, everything over 1 is bad, but it’s not a perfect world so we can’t block it just cuz it’s not over achieving. I decided that any ratio over 1.5 would automatically get blocked, more or less.

Conclusion: As per the Adsense terms of service, I’m not allowed to tell you what my exact CPC was.. but it was low. Not even close to $.10 per click. I did this 6 days ago, and in the days since the change, my CPC is almost 4 times what it previously was. We’re getting significantly less clicks each day, but each click is worth much more. Things are looking MUCH better. I miss the shear volume of clicks, but if a click isn’t making any money… all it’s really doing is taking traffic away from my sites, so whats the point?

Time will tell how much of an improvement this has really made, but the data so far correlates directly with when I made the change, and it makes sense… so I expect to see nothing but the same from here on out.

UPDATE:

Ok, seriously, what the fuck. Literally right after I post this, the next 2 days are exactly back to how things we’re before. So much so that, I’m forced to wonder if I accidentally reset something when I was looking at the categories while writing the post. That’s not the case… and I know that this is just the natural progression of things and that it’ll all pan out in the end.. this is still weird. When I made the change, I saw immediate results as expected.. As soon as I felt that change was consistent enough to write about, BOOM, back to where they were. Bizarre… real bizarre. Makes no sense at all if you actually look at the numbers.

Oh well, I’m just gonna ignore it for a while and let it do it’s thing fora  few weeks before I revisit.

A friend of mine just told me about this film. In typical pirate fashion, I just downloaded it today and I’m looking forward to watching it when my workload slows down, maybe this weekend.

pretty happy with how our interview with wiz came together. i battled idiotic camera men to get this together. whoever would have a tripod > human? we had to kick this guy out of the interview, literally. then the dude who thankfully took over, decided to get artsy and rotate the camera 90 degrees in the middle of wiz giving us a shoutout. that alone made what should have taken me 10 minutes to put together a lil shoutout video, 5 hours.