Category Archives: weather

google, weather, youtube

Bicentennial Post Tuesday

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This is the 200th post here at The Art of Panic. Who would have believed one could write that much drivel in a half year? I certainly wouldn’t have.

The weather here is overcast and in the mid 70s today. What a change from the blizzards of the last couple of weeks. Maybe the snow and blow season is finally coming to a belated end. I can but hope! Since the weather is boring, I will take this opportunity write instead about something that has caught my fancy from the news – Google and its ownership of YouTube.

How many of you have followed all the bruhaha about the amount of money Google is losing running YouTube? If you want to see a really depressing view, read this. The basic factoids are that Google will make about $240 million in ad revenue on YouTube, but it will cost them about $711 million to operate the site. Some simple math then leads to the $470 million dollar loss for the year. No company can long afford to lose a half billion dollars on a single property and enjoy it. Heck, most of us couldn’t afford it even if we moved the decimal point 6 places over.

The most interesting thing to look at is what the effective CPM (Cost Per Thousand) would have to be for YouTube to break even. The estimates I have seen posit about 75 billion video streams being fed this year by YouTube. Even if we are optimistic and believe that Google can find an ad for every video (hard given the idiocy of some of the content) and assume that Google actually gets to keep the revenue on the popular copyrighted works, we come up with something on the order of $10 CPM on average. That is almost impossible to achieve. Add to the dilemma that current estimates claim that only 3% of the available ad slots are sold and you see a real problem.

To quote the Silicon Valley Insider’s analysis:

The economics are hard to overcome. Assuming YouTube delivers the 75 billion streams that Credit Suisse projects for 2009, and assuming YouTube manages to slot an ad for every stream (which is practically speaking, impossible, given the nature of much of their content), YouTube would have to achieve a $9.48 CPM for every video impression shown. Presumably, the videos YouTube is already monetizing represent the best content available, with diminishing returns as they reach deeper and deeper into a repository rife with copyright violation, the indecent, the uninteresting, and the unwatchable. Hulu claims to be charging a $30 CPM, of which roughly 70% goes to the copyright holder. Averages for other proprietary content hover around the $10 CPM mark. CPMs for user-generated content, assuming you can attract the advertisers, tend to be measured in fractions of a dollar.

So the real question for Google is how to find a new way to monetize the ever growing traffic on YouTube. This seems to be one of the better known counter examples to the old adage that “traffic is everything on the internet.” The adage only works when the traffic doesn’t lose too much per visitor. It will be interesting to see what the year will bring for Google and YouTube. Even Eric Schmidt (Google chief) is sounding cautionary about YouTube as a potential loss leader for the foreseeable future. (Listen to Eric here.)

So what do you think? Is there a way for Google to stop the bleeding without killing the site? Do you view things on YouTube? Do you ever click on he ads on YouTube? Do you think Google should do the obvious and kill the amateur video and go to only commercial content ala Hulu? Inquiring minds want to know. (Besides, I’m just plain nosey!)

blizzard, representative, senator, weather

Monday Politics Redux

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I just got back from supper with Representative Markey. She was doing her meet and greet sweep of the area while Congress was out of session and invited local officials to join her for supper. So the county commissioners, representatives of the city council, the city manager and myself sat down to talk and eat with Ms. Markey and some of her staff. She is a real change from her predecessor and seems to be on the right track. Time will tell.

The most amusing part of the evening was at the end when it came time to pay the tab. The poor waitress had to give separate tabs to each of us. It is one of those written and unwritten rules that elected officials cannot pay for another elected officials meal at such events. The rule is another one of those odd rules that have a point in preventing some old time abuses and accusations of influence buying and selling, but which make less sense in practice than might be expected. It took longer than one might have expected to handle paying all the tabs once the dinner was over just for that reason. What is amusing is that every stake holder at the table would have been willing to foot the bill just for the crucial conversations and contacts at the meal. The city and the county since it gave us a chance to lobby for our needs versus the metropolitan areas of the front range, the Markey organization since she sits on the Agriculture committee and needs the input from the area farms, and the the city to lobby for help with the EPA and water treatment issues that Congress could be of immense help on.

On the senatorial side, our new Senator Bennett has already made one stop out here a few weeks ago. He started off on a good foot by retaining former Sen. Salazar’s staff in the area. The area out here really misses Ken Salazaar. He understood agriculture and farming and was involved in the issues of the plains at a grass roots level. When he moved on to Secretary of the Interior for Obama, it left a real gap. Mr Bennett was a highly capable administrator in the Denver Public Schools, but the jury is still out on his effectiveness at representing rural issues with the efficiacy that Ken Salazaar exhibited. So once again we will have to see what the fullness of time unfolds.

(An aside on the effectiveness of Salazar and his staff. After spending months getting the run around from the EPA about the granite decay products in the water here, I briefly spoke to Ken at a meeting on a different subject. The next day I had calls and emails from his staff. Within three days I had the missing answers from the EPA. That is why having effective representatives and senators for an area is critical. It is one of the aspects of the office that many people overlook or just plain don’t understand.)

Enough politcal hot air!

The weekend blizzard is now mostly a thing of the past. It warmed up today and the snows began to melt fast. The weather people are forecasting highs near 70 tomorrow, so most of the rest should melt in short order. The interstate and other highways finally re-opened on Sunday, so L could return to the mountains for work. The Denver Sunday paper got delivered this afternoon since they couldn’t get the paper out here over the closed roads on Saturday/Sunday.. The parts of town without electrical power on Saturday were all back up and running by late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. Sunday was also the day that the county started sending crews out to clear the rural roads. Reports were that there were 9-12 foot high drifts in places that made road clearing a bit of challenge. Overall we only got about 8″ of snow, but with the winds scouring the open fields, it wasn’t deposited uniformly. Some fields were left bare of snow to contribute to the drifts where the wind eddied.

Well, I’m off to read the Sunday paper. Gotta get that funnies fix! (BTW, I have been reading your blogs, I just haven’t had time to comment. Hopefully that will get better soon.)

weather

Saturday In The Howling Silence

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It is quiet around here. The town was almost deserted when I was out to shovel walks earlier. It was strange to see the streets so empty. No traffic, no cars, and no one out and about. Of course that may be connected to the 50 mph howling winds and the snow and ice covering everything. It might also be due to the fact that the interstate and several highways were closed at various times during the day as well.

It started snowing around 6 am and kept it up for a good part of the day. The addition of the winds just made it all more harsh. The only thing keeping it from being a total white out was the fact that the snow was so wet that it stuck rather than blew once it hit something. At around 1pm this is how it looked:

 

Nothing like a little wet snow on top of some rain that was freezing as the temperature fell. When I went out to shovel, it was slicker than the proverbial snail’s snot. The winds were howling enough over at MIL’s house (it is more exposed on the edge of town than ours or Mom’s) that I had to shovel facing one direction only because if I lifted the shovel the other way, it caught the wind, and I started sliding down the street. Sort of like an oil tanker under sail power.

After warming up and fixing supper, I sat down with L for a quiet meal and listened to the wind howl through the trees. I plan to stay inside in the cozy warmth and recover from the cold for the rest of the evening. Nothing like listening to the wind howl while you read with the dog sitting at your side. L has a bad cold so she is getting ready to veg out and drink some more tea. I figure I’ve got another 8 hours before the 48 hour incubation period is up and I find out whether L has given me her cold. I sure hope not!

I have but one final thing to say – the weather critters got it right this time!

blizzard, weather

Late Friday

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L and I went over to the house of some friends for an evening of good food and conversation, so I am a bit late with this. Oh well. It was totally worth it to participate in the spur of the moment gathering. We don’t get a chance to see these friends that often, so when we do it is an opportunity to be enjoyed.

This afternoon/evening L and I went to the store and it was amazing to see all the people scurrying about in the 65 degree weather getting ready to batten down the hatches. (It was at the store that we ran into the above mentioned friends and the impromptu get together was hatched.) Why were the crowds frenziedly shopping on Friday afternoon? The prime impetus came from this little note and its predecessors:

Issued by The National Weather Service
Denver/Boulder, CO
9:34 pm MDT, Fri., Apr. 3, 2009

… BLIZZARD WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 AM SATURDAY TO 6 AM MDT SUNDAY…

SCATTERED RAIN AND SNOW SHOWERS WILL CHANGE OVER TO ALL SNOW BY DAYBREAK SATURDAY. THE SNOW AND WIND ARE EXPECTED TO INTENSIFY THROUGH THE EARLY MORNING HOURS SATURDAY. NORTH WINDS OF 20 TO 35 MPH WITH GUSTS IN EXCESS OF 50 MPH WILL PRODUCE BLIZZARD CONDITIONS AND NEAR ZERO VISIBILITIES… ESPECIALLY IN OPEN AREAS. TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS BY LATE SATURDAY EVENING ARE EXPECTED TO RANGE BETWEEN 4 AND 8 INCHES.

So now you know – the weather people are predicting yet another spring blizzard for the plains. Right now as I write this at about 12:45am, it is still in the 40s and raining a tiny bit. So they have a few hours to get the snow and blow going or they will miss yet another forecast. At least we have gotten .02 inches of precipitation thus far. That is better than many of the forecast accuracies out here! It was amusing – L likened the crowds to the Christmas shopping crowds in a really good year. It’s been a long time since I have seen the parking lot that full, let alone on a Friday evening.

Time to mosey off into the land of nod. Take care.

Molly, weather

Over the River and Through the …

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Yesterday it snowed a bit. Then it snained a bit. Then it snowed a bit more. All of it didn’t amount to a hill of beans, but it sure raised my hopes while it was happening. The dubious weather people have once again predicted snow and wind for the weekend, so we’ll see if they come close to getting it right.

Molly enjoys any occurrence of snow or water, so she was once more overjoyed to get outdoors to play as it tried to snow. She likes to go out and jump around trying to catch the snow flakes as they fall. When there is enough snow on the ground, she likes to burrow into the drifts and then come exploding out like she is a hunter in a blind. But that means she gets all that long fur of hers wet. And muddy. And then she comes inside and tracks the water and mud all through the house. She knows it is wrong, but she just has to do a few victory laps on first coming back in and can’t be bothered to wipe her paws. After the victory laps, she retreats to the back porch and gives me a look that screams:

 
“Don’t look at me, I don’t know who left those puddles on the floor.”
But the flattened ears signal guilt as clear as day. So she then looks at me and says:
 
“Well, are you going to forgive me?”
And to seal the deal, she moons me with those big eyes as if to say:
 
“Come on, you know you want to!”
Which is immediately followed by the look that says:
 
“If you don’t, I’m going to feel soooo bad.”
So of course I forgive her and we resume our normal daily routine (with a bit of added mop action from time to time to get the worst of it off the floor.)