https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/reports/infringement

Don’t bother using it, seriously don’t bother. Now, I know many of my readers will not ever have a need for this because your copyrights are on content, not products, but products get copied too. Perhaps less often, perhaps that is the problem.

Amazon’s employees seem to me to be either willfully ignorant or woefully untrained as to the legal requirements put on them by the DMCA. I’m thoroughly convinced their web form is a time wasting smoke screen. Do you remember the TV show Lost? The Dharma Initiative had a monitoring station were people were supposed to watch something and record notes, they would put the notes in canisters and shoot them up an air tube like at a bank teller window. Later it was discovered this tube lead to a pile in the jungle – no one was reading the notes. This might be preferable to Amazon’s situation.

Regretfully as my business has expanded into tangible products I have had need to send DMCA notifications to Amazon, and I have used this form, and I have never had good service. Just about every single time they send me back a reply asking for idiotic additional information. Such as, and I quote:

Thank you for your message. If you have issues related to patent or design rights, please submit a notice of patent infringement using the contact information below.

In your notice, include:

1. The relevant patent numbers.
2. Your contact information
3. The ASIN(s) of the item(s) in question, located on a product’s detail page under the heading, “Product Details.”

Submit your notice to:

Amazon.com Legal Department
ATTN: Patents Team
P.O. Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108
E-mail: patents@amazon.com
Fax: (206) 266-7010

Courier address:
Amazon.com Legal Department
ATTN: Patents Team
410 Terry Avenue North
Seattle, WA 98109-5210

No Amazon, I sent you a copyright notification, I don’t have a patent question. I very clearly said copyright, multiple times, and I was filling out a copyright form. This was, by the way, my second attempt in three days, the first attempt got this wonderful response.

Thank you for the information you have provided in your infringement complaint. However, we still need additional details regarding the items listed at the end of this message.

Before we can respond to your complaint, we ask that you clarify how these items infringe your rights by re-submitting your complaint with your answers to these questions:

1. Are you the manufacturer?
2. Do you believe the offers in your complaint do not match the product detail pages?
3. Do you believe that your trademark appears on products that you do not manufacturer?
4. Do you believe that your trademark is used inappropriately on the product detail pages?
5. Have you placed test orders? If yes, be sure to provide the Amazon order numbers.

You can re-submit your complaint using our online form located in the “Notice and Procedure for Making Claims of Infringement” section of our “Conditions of Use and Sale” page (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/reports/infringement). You may use the Additional Comments field to provide your answers to the questions.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Seller Performance
Amazon.com

Now, I’ve been through this rigamarole before, for some reason they have this fetish for asking “are you a manufacturer” as if the DMCA act has a carve out where Online Service Providers are only obligated to act if a manufacturer sends in a notification. A DMCA notification is a legal document, the sender swears under penalty of perjury they own the legal rights to something, that is all that is required. But yes, I am a manufacturer. So in my original complaint to them, I said, twice, “We are a manufacturer.” So, I go back to the poorly trained employee thought, they are just that bad at reading comprehension?

Then they’re asking about trademark issues, which is just like the first message I quoted above, I say copyright, I’m on the copyright form, and they think I want to complain about trademark. When someone tries to sell a bootleg DVD of Frozen on Amazon does Disney have this trouble? Probably not. They do probably mostly get trademark complaints from places like luxury brands (Gucci, Prada, etc). But when someone is filling out the form for copyright, and say copyright, they probably mean copyright, right?

I’ve even personally got a pretty big gun, a registered copyright. In the US technically every creative work is copyrighted once it enters a fixed form, but if you register your copyrights you can get larger damages in a lawsuit. So when I’m sending in these complaints I send in my US Copyright Registration Number – they can literally look it up at the Library of Congress website and see my copyright filing – and they still ask me about trademarks and patents?

I got this other reply once…

Based on the information you provided in your complaint, we are unable to remove the listings you noted from these detail pages:

ASIN: (redacted)

Amazon respects a manufacturer’s right to enter into exclusive distribution agreements for its products. However, as the enforcement of these agreements is a matter of contract between the manufacturer and the distributors, it would not be appropriate for Amazon to assist in enforcing these agreements.

They thought I was complaining about some sort of contract dispute when I filled out a copyright claim form. It is almost as if the people they hire to answer these complaints have no legal training at all. They don’t realize products other than books, music, and movies can be copyrighted.

This is another one, from last fall.

Hello,

Thank you for your e-mail. Amazon respects a manufacturer’s right to institute policies and rules to manage and control the distribution of its products. However, Amazon considers the enforcement of these policies and rules to be a matter between the manufacturer and the retailers. As a result, it would not be appropriate for Amazon to assist in such enforcement activities.

We do not consider the use of a product’s name to sell that product to in any way constitute copyright or trademark infringement. However, if you believe any of your images or product information is being misused in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, please let us know which listings are of concern.

What you can do

Contact any seller directly though Amazon.ca’s website:

1. Select their storefront name
2. Click on the ‘contact this seller’ link in the lower right-hand corner.

If you believe the sellers you have reported are listing items that are not what they indicate them to be and have proof you’d like to share with us, reply to this message and let us know.

Include this information in your report, as relevant:

1. Explanation of the differences between the item description and what is advertised
2. Evidence in the item’s images or product descriptions that do not match what is being advertised
3. Amazon.ca Order ID of a test buy
4. The ASIN/ISBN of the item’s detail page and the product title
5. The store or business name of the seller you are reporting
6. Any other evidence that supports your complaint

So, what actually works?

One of the parts of the DMCA has online service providers register their registered agent with the US Copyright Office, so complainants need not have to guess where to send the forms. Using any company’s web based form is a favor to them. You can send them a fax or a letter instead. The DMCA Notification Tool on this website can help you make your form, and Amazon is in our database. If you’d rather generate and send the form yourself Amazon.com’s registered agent is:

Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates
Adrian Garver
1200 12th Ave. South,
Suite 1200
Seattle, WA 98144
Phone: (206) 266-4064
fax:(206) 266-7010
copyright@amazon.com

If you really want to get their attention registered mail or a courier with signature required is the way. If they then do not act, and you do have a valid copyright complaint. Get your lawyer ready, you can sue Amazon for copyright infringement (and they have deep pockets), if you have a registered copyright like mine and can show they acted willfully (and after so many ignored complaints, willfully would be an understatement) you can get punitive damages of $25,000 or more per product, and then get what is called treble damages (tripling). So, even more. Plus actual economic damages, court, and legal costs. But I have always had success with faxing this department.

So skip the web form. Make up our DMCA notification and fax it to Amazon, that is the best way to get a result.

[quote]Amazon is always looking for ways to help our sellers grow. We are excited to announce a new service: Amazon Lending by Amazon Capital Services, Inc.

Based on your Amazon selling performance you are pre-qualified for a loan up to $xx,xxx. Use these funds to purchase inventory and increase your sales on Amazon.com.

How the Amazon Lending loan works:

Register for a loan. Sign in with your Selling on Amazon Primary Account holder user id and password.
If approved, the funds will be advanced to your Amazon Seller Account within approximately five business days, and we will initiate a disbursement to your bank account on file.
Your Amazon Lending monthly payment will be automatically deducted from your Amazon Seller Account.
Go to Amazon Lending to complete your loan registration. You will need to sign in with your Selling on Amazon Primary Account holder user id and password. You may also sign into your Seller Central Account, look for the Amazon Lending offer in the right hand column of the home page and follow the links to “Learn more” and “Register.”

If you have any questions, please contact us at support@amazoncapital.com.

This offer expires on February 7, 2013. Registration for Amazon Lending is by invitation only.[/quote]

I find this interesting. As an Amazon shareholder I’m excited for the revenue potentials and it reminds me, quite frankly, of GE Capital. Amazon has gotten famous for getting really good at certain things, such as fulfillment, or Internet infrastructure and data processing, and then farming out their excess capacity. GE is famous for having really low corporate lending costs and then playing arbitrage by relending that money and making a profit on the interest rate spread. Not it seems as if Amazon is taking a page out of their own book and following GE into that same sort of thing.

On the other hand it also reminds me of relatively shady receivables lending. These companies want you to shift your credit card processing to them and then they’ll give you a loan financed by those credit card receipts, the terms are almost always horrible though and I feel as if they just prey on the desperate or the ignorant. What type of program Amazon is creating will depend on the interest rate, which I will check out and report back.

I may actually take advantage of this service. I have a manufacturing business now and while it is profitable it is capital intensive. Making a new product requires hundreds of thousands in upfront costs, and you don’t get that money back until it starts selling, enough capital to cover in between time, especially when you’re trying to do multiple products at once or otherwise expanding, can be difficult.

Update:

So, here are the terms they offered me.

12.9% APR with a 6 month repayment term, or 10.9% apr on a 4 month repayment term.

I do not think I’ll use it, I have existing lines of credit I can tap if need be at much lower interest rates. I also dislike the time limit “You must decide by February 7th.” That seems a bit like a high pressure sales tactic. This program may make sense for many sellers around the holidays, to help buy Christmas inventory, but we’re past that season now. In my opinion, at that interest rate, you need to have a lot more flexibility. I guess if you were a seller with no other access to short term credit it might make sense. I would only consider it if I exhausted my lines of credit and still needed more capital which at this point I do not think is likely.

Then… September 29th.

For the last year or so Google has been in overdrive with doing updates and tweaks. I’m starting to think they might simply have too many employees who feel the need to keep themselves busy. I thought they were fine before, and if they want to work on more features, how about new things, continually tweaking search results that aren’t broken seems wasteful. These changes have hit lots of other webmaster, but not me, my sites were never affected, until now.

So around September 29th two updates happened, Google’s 20th so-called “Panda” update which is supposed to be an anti-content farm update originally targeted against those big content farms who push out mile wide inch deep 300 word articles 10 times a minute, and a so-called EMD (exact match domain) update that penalizes sites with keywords in their domain that are low quality.

First, I find the EMD domain thing stupid, and I really mean stupid. It is like judging a book by its cover or a person’s character by the color of their skin. If a site is quality it should rank well, if it isn’t it shouldn’t. Second guessing your own algorithm by penalizing certain domains is just stupid. The off-page quality score system that gave birth to Google works, no need to second guess it by mere humans making arbitrary decisions on what type of site they think is good.

I do not think I was affected by the EMD though since I can see no pattern with it. I favor keyword rich domains, and always have, but I have not seem losses on exact match searches. I’m still #1 for those on the sites I check. It is other searches for those sites on content pages that I lost rankings on.

Case #1, my gardening blog. Gardening is my #1 hobby, if I could quit everything else and just garden I would be happy. I would sell all my other sites at the right price, but I would keep my garden blog. I started this blog 7 years ago because I liked gardening and could easily write about it, and knew how to start blogs for obvious reasons. 100% unique content written by me (or user submissions for comments/posts). On many of my sites I use a copyright statement footer link, this site doesn’t even have that. It has been #1 for gardening blog for many years, and still is. It has also been #1 for garden blog for many years… but is no longer. Now it is like 5th. Traffic loss on Sept 29th was about 50%. This is pretty much a straight up wordpress blog, not a content farm, how could it possibly be labeled as a content farm? I hate thin short content. All the content is unique and usually at least 1000+ words (I write long posts). So if this was hit by Google’s Panda Content Farm algorithm, what are they doing over there? Honestly? I don’t even try to SEO this site, I just write good content and other blogs link to me. I can’t think of any change to make to this site to make it more white hat, it is a standard blog with unique content, isn’t that supposed to be the ideal?

Case #2, a Google maps mashup site/application I made a few years ago called Wildcrafting.net. This site was so noncommercial it didn’t have ads on it until this week. I finally stuck one ad unit on it a few days ago (after it lost the traffic). This site was an outgrowth of my survival forums (more on those later) so it does have one link to another site, but only on the homepage. It too has no footer links even. The site has some non-unique content in the form in a USDA database, but also tons of unique content submitted by users and all told the content is presented in a 100% unique way. This site still ranks well for the exact match domain term, at #3 behind the exact match .com and wikipedia. But lost 50% of its traffic or there about.

Case #3, my literature site, my oldest and highest traffic content site, 13 years old. Traffic has always fluctuated, but I did detect a drop around Sept 29th as well, it looks to be a 10 to 20% loss. For many many many years I have held the #2 search position with this site for author name keywords such as William Shakespeare or book title keywords, usually only behind Wikipedia. I don’t monitor all 300 authors or 4000 books, but on the ones I do monitor I did lose rankings. For instance for William Shakespeare I went from 2nd to 7th, Wikipedia also went from 1st to 2nd. The new 1st is a previously unknown to me site that I can’t remember ever seeing ranked before. Other authors or books I dropped as well, others I held steady. This site is so old and has been ranked well for so long it has really really really good authoritative incoming links from academic sources, newspapers, magazines, etc. I don’t think it’d seem to be related but I did remove several thousand low performing affiliate links (that were already nofollowed, by the way). We’ll see if that makes a difference. The site, publishing public domain literature, does of course have non-unique content. But I also pay writers to produce author biographies and book summaries, and book introductions are often user submitted, so it does have unique content on what I call the author or book hub pages (unique except for the many sites that steal my content, I could spend weeks on DMCA requests with this site), and those are the pages that were hit it seems.

Case #4, my second oldest site at 11 years Wilderness Survival. It has a mix of public domain and proprietary content, but the most popular stuff is all public domain, it has been #1 for wilderness survival for over a decade, lots of user submitted content too, lots of good incoming links. This site showed no traffic decline at all. Very steady. It does have a footer copyright link.

I had other sites that either held steady or lost traffic as well (such as the site you’re reading, it lost as well, I’ll admit I don’t write here much anymore, but please, this is no content farm.), but these 4 illustrate… well… nothing. The two least commercial most unique got hit the most, the two most monetized hit the least. It seems unrelated to uniqueness of content, and in truth, it seems the more unique the content the worse the hit was which is weird. I’ll do nothing to the survival site, because it is fine, apparently. For my gardening blog I’ll probably do nothing, because I can see nothing that is bad. Maybe I’ll go through the code and make sure I’m not missing anything hidden. Wildcrafting I’ll leave as is because again I see nothing that should be done. My literature site, being so huge, also could do a looking over. I already removed those (previously nofollowed) low performing affiliate links, maybe I’ll do more of that.

Ironically, the two sites with a footer copyright link lost the least traffic, so maybe I need to add an off site footer link to the other two.

Mostly, I’m hoping Google realizes this change, whatever it was, did not actually accomplish anything good and they roll it back.

WASHINGTON – Federal regulators are proposing to create a “Do Not Track” tool for the Internet so that people could prevent marketers from tracking their Web browsing habits and other online behavior in order to target advertising.

The proposal, inspired by the government’s existing “Do Not Call” registry for telemarketers, is one of a series of recommendations outlined in a privacy report released Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission. The report lays out a broad framework for protecting consumer privacy both online and offline as personal data collection becomes ubiquitous — often without consumer knowledge.

This is one of the stupidest ideas I have ever heard.

What can you track online? Cookies and IP addresses. Cookies are fully 100% in the control of the individual user, if a user does not know how to block them in their browser settings they need eduction, not legislation. I cannot fathom that anyone would actually propose a law to limit the right of a website to read and write cookies to a browser if the browser software is set by the user to explicitly allow it.

So, I can only think that they believe that we need some sort of IP based do not track list.

The problem is that people can share IPs (to the tune of thousands on one), that one person can have more than one IP, and that IPs can and do regularly change.

So if paranoid Bob adds his IP to the “do not track list” he is also adding it for Shopper Susan who happens to like getting relevant and tailored advertisements, because they share an IP. Or perhaps one day the ISP switches IPs and suddenly George, who never signed up for the same reason as Susan, is on the list because he has Bob’s old IP.

What is perhaps more interesting is the fact that to sign up you would have to claim your IP address via some government database. So the government would have a free database of people and their related IP addresses. Right now the government can only get that data from ISPs with a court order. And, in general, unless you give a website your personal information, they will never know the name behind the IP.

So paranoid Bob who signs up with the big government do not track list is actually REDUCING his privacy because now his name and his IP are on a list. Could be that this information is then made public. So you go from an anonymous number on the Internet, to a name. Privacy this does not make.

People, if you really don’t want to get ads for stuff you might actually want to buy, turn off browser cookies. If you don’t know how to do that, ask a teenager. If you still can’t figure it out, pay some overpriced security company for their software to do it for you. Then tell your government to deal with real problems, like the economy and North Korea.

And another thing… how would you even tell if someone violated the “do not track” list unless government is looking over the shoulder of every Internet business in the world and requiring daily reports? You know when the Do Not Call list has been violated because you get a phone call. How do you know when the do not track list has been violated? “Hello Government, Bob here, yes again, I just saw an ad that was just a little too relevant if you ask me. Do something about it.” Really you’d need to legislate companies do the reporting, probably by filing out some form outlining compliance practices, with random audits. Lovely.

I can see a lot of false positives too. Poor old Bob is going to get confused by IP geolocating when he stumbles upon an AdultFriendFinder ad for “Hot girls in Springfield” and panic “Oh my god they know where I live!”

I had hired through elance a company called Value on Web to do some programming for me last year. They had good feedback and lots of completed projects, including one just like what I wanted. Their bid was not even close to the lowest.

Look at this code they did:

if ($_POST['submitForm'] == "yes") {
if($_FILES['store_image']['size'] >0){
$image1 =date("Ymds")."_".$_FILES['store_image']['name'];
move_uploaded_file($_FILES['store_image']['tmp_name'],'../store_pic/'.$image1);
//@resize_img('../store_pic/'.$image1,150,100, false, 80, 0, "");
copy("../store_pic/".$image1,"../store_pic/thumb/".$image1);
//@resize_img('../store_pic/thumb/'.$image1,52,100, false, 80, 0, "");
}

This is a bit of a script to handle an uploaded image.

These so called professionals thought this was good enough, can anyone see the problems?

You absolutely always need to check what sort of file is being uploaded when you accept uploads or you could unwittingly allow people to upload malicious scripts and code. You can check the mimetype of the file, and definitely the extension. If the file is not an image mimetype, reject it. If the file does not end with (not include, but end with, otherwise someone could upload image.jpg.php) .jpg (or .gif or .png, etc) reject it. Also, have the system generate the filename randomly, so the user cannot access it after upload.

This isn’t a secret, this isn’t complicated code, had they done a basic google search for how to do a php image upload they would have found numerous examples of code that they could copy and paste that would do this. They were just lazy, or they didn’t know any better. I’m not sure which is worse.

I expect when I pay thousands of dollars to a company I don’t need to go over every line of their code to make sure it works, if I need to do that, I might as well just code it all myself.

So, my server was hacked, website homepages were defaced, and I spent an evening cleaning it up. The extent of the infiltration was such that I am no longer comfortable with this server, it is tainted. So I’ve decided to get a new server and migrate all sites. Thankfully cPanel/WHM has AWESOME migration tools that can move a site in minutes instead of the hours it used to take me manually. This is hugely beneficial when you have many sites. Also, the server was 4 years old so probably about time to get a new one anyways, and because of Moore’s law and whatnot, my new server will be 3x more powerful for the same monthly price.

Don’t think that this can’t happen to you, it can. Botnets scour the Internet for insecure forms, no matter how small and insigicant your site is you can and will be targetted because everything is automated. I believe most servers end up probed within minutes of being hooked up to the Internet.

I invest a lot in real estate, and of course in websites, and I see a lot of parallels. They are both properties that can provide almost completely passive income.

Where they differ is in price, and real estate, even today, after the crash, is far far far more expensive than a website, on an income valuation basis.

Even if you consider all investments, a website is one of the cheapest.

Now sure, some people will claim websites are cheap because there is risk. Well, where have you been the last two years if you don’t think there is risk in real estate, bonds, or equities?

Others will claim that managing a website requires time, and that is true, but how much depends largely on the type of website. A blog will languish without regular updates, and that will take time, a generic resource site though can coast on autopilot for years, earning you passive income.

A typical yield on a corporate bond might be 5%, a yield on a US Treasury bond is too low to even consider right now. A bond provides no protection from inflation, but also very low risk. A yield on a higher yielding equity can also be 5%, and that does include some protection from inflation, but the yield can also go down, so there is added risk. But you also have the chance for capital appreciation. The highest yielding equiting, REITs and MLPs and some Preferreds, might yield 10%.

A yield is how much of your initial investment you get back each year. So on $50,000 at 10% you would get $5,000 a year, at 5% just $2,500 a year.

There are also tax implications, the tax code is scheduled to change a big deal in regards to most of it so it probably isn’t worthwhile for me to give specifics, but if you’re in a higher tax bracket, in a couple years you may end up paying 44% of your dividends in taxes. It makes very little sense for investments to be the most highly taxed form of income (because then you’re just discouraging investment, which hinders job growth and business expansion) so I’m sure congress will act, but right now, that is what you’re looking at (before any state or local taxes too).

Now, with real estate. Most banks require 25% down for an investment property, and it is hard to make a profit on rent unless you’ve owned the property a long long time. So in general you break even on the rent and your profit comes from the equity you’re building as your tenants pay down your mortgage.

If your property costs $100,000 and goes up in value at 2% a year you’re gaining $2,000 a year (the first year) in additional equity. Meanwhile, if you’re on a say 30 year mortgage (at $75k) you’re also gaining equity of, on average (I don’t want to figure amortization for this example) $2,500 a year, as your tenants pay down your mortgage. Meaning your total equity gain is $4,500, or 4.5% of your total house value.

However you didn’t pay cash for the entire house, you used leverage, debt, to get it. So to calculate your true return on investment you take the equity gain vs. your downpayment or whatever you put into the property and that gives us an 18% yield. Way better than stocks or bonds.

You of course have to deal with being a landlord, which isn’t for everyone, but the potential for returns is much greater (so long as you don’t overpay in the first place, which is what so many people did during the bubble).

On the tax front, real estate acts as a tax shelter for people with lower to middle incomes, and even people in the highest tax bracket can still use it to shelter some income. So long as you don’t sell the property your tax exposure will be very limited to nothing. When eventually your loan is paid off you can even refinance and the bank will hand you a big fat check, which you can just pocket as return of capital, no tax required.

The big downside of real estate is that your money is locked up for decades, it isn’t a liquid investment.

So bonds get us 1-5%, stocks 5-10%, and our real estate example nets us 18%. What about websites?

Well, think of a website as a rental unit where you have no tenants to worry about, never have any vacancies, and where the rent is paid to you by advertisers or consumers doing shopping.

The typical valuation tossed around is two years of profits, which I find ridiculous for all but very speculative websites, unoriginal ones, ones just this side of copyright law (or breaking it), websites that have only existed for two years or less. 90% of websites you see for sale fall into this category, I don’t bother with them in general, but I suppose that valuation is fair for them.

But for legitimate unique established websites that valuation is way to cheap.

I recently bought a website for $50,000. The website should make at least $20,000 this year in profit, which is a little bit better than what the previous owner was getting but I added some content and some ad units (and will be doing more). In the end I paid about 3x yearly profits of what it was getting for him, or 2.5x what it will be getting for me. This website is a passive resource site that requires no regular updating or maintenance and that has been around for almost 10 years, with wide and varied sources of quality incoming links.

It is very easy to figure that I’m getting a yield on it of 40%, which kicks the pants off real estate and stocks. Why would my yield be so much higher? Because it is a riskier investment? If this were a bond and it was yielding 40% that would mean that most investors were predicting the bond issuer would go bankrupt within 3 years. What do you think is the chance that my website would lose 100% of it’s value in 3 years? There is hardly any one force that could remove 100% of a website’s value, even an across the board Google ban will still allow you to get traffic from MSN and Yahoo and whatnot, the website might still make money. And, since you’re buying a well established site, and assumingly not changing it a whole lot, what would be the risk of suddenly now for no apparent reason it gets a ban?

I got a good deal, and there were other bidders, who refused to pay more than 2x annual profits, they needed a 50% yield or nothing.

I regularly get offers to buy certain of my websites and they often limit themselves to this stupid metric as well, and I tell them no thanks. You have to think of opportunity cost. Suppose I own a website that makes $100,000 a year, and I’m offered $200,000 for it. Since I am not in debt and needing a bailout or otherwise am I distressed seller I have to think about what I could do with that $200,000. Leaving taxes out of it, I could invest that $200,000 in real estate and make a 20% return, but my money would be tied up in it, still, it’d be $40,000 a year in equity, and all the headaches of being a landlord. I could invest it in a bond or equity or something yielding say 5% and make $10,000 a year, completely passive, no work on my part, and some chance for capital appreciation.

Or, I can keep the website, let it yield 50% for me, and have chance for further capital appreciation.

This is not a hard decision, especially when the website in question doesn’t require regular updating (which is the case for most of my websites).

Even a dropship ecommerce business might not require more than 30 minutes of work a day, which is certainly worth maintaining a 50% yield.

I can’t explain the prices some websites sell for, my only thought it is must be a combination of distressed sellers, and of the fact that buyers need to be specialized. Anyone can buy a website, but 99% of the population doesn’t understand how to run one, so there is a knowledge barrier, and that allows investors to get a massive yield premium.

So, as I said in the beginning of this post, if you know how to do it, investing in websites is a good idea.

Oh, before I forget, on the tax front, websites are much like real estate. Assuming you have a logical business formation like an S-corp you will not need to pay medicare and social security taxes on your business income. You will also be able to depreciate the cost of your website purchase over time. The fact that the website is bound to make more money than the depreciation (which is unlikely with real estate) does mean it’ll increase your yearly tax burden, but that should be seen as a good thing, not a bad thing. The biggest difference is you’ll probably be unable to find a bank willing to finance the purchase of a website, so you can’t use leverage to goose your yield.

So, anyways, I’ve struggled for many years to get my literature site to run smoothly. I think there are three articles on this site about caching php pages that were born out of me needing to do that. The site is my oldest, 10 years, and very popular, with unique monthly visitors measured in the millions, but it is also a beast to run.

Currently it is on a pretty high end dual dual-core (thats 4 total cores for you math majors) server with 12 GB of ram. And it was still having problems. All the heavy hitting non-forum non-search page was cached as plain HTML, and it was still having problems, then I cached all the deep content pages as well, and it was still having problems.

Awhile back I had it set to use Apache’s worker module, as opposed to pre-fork, because I heard it was better, I believe I was told so in a vbulletin.com forums server optimization thread. Regardless, still problems. Though, I’m not entirely sure, the new configuration of Apache 2.2 in cpanel servers is a little more confusing to handle how all the config files are spread out and the need to distill and whatnot (Sorry if you have no idea when I mean with that last line).

Now, PHP was compiled as an Apache module. I’ve done this and requested this for years going back to when I was first doing search engine friendly URLs (and popularizing the practice through my articles on Sitepoint about it). I always thought PHP as CGI ran slow, and more specifically it had a bug where a few of the search engine friendly URL methods would fail. That was in 2001, and in the intervening years no one had bothered to change my mind, and, because I’m not an Apache guru, I don’t keep up on developments unless I have a problem I need to solve.

Then last Thursday and last Friday night my site started crashing every 2 hours. Looking into the log files I couldn’t detect anything weird except that I would get a warning about Max Clients being reached and it’d crash. The thing is though that Friday the site gets about half as much traffic as any other day of the week. So it made no sense.

Looking at current activity it seemed like MSN and Yahoo (why do they both need to crawl still?) and an obnoxious VoilaBot were all crawling my site at the same time, that might have done it, but I banned VoilaBot and throttled the other two and it was still crashing every two hours.

I still don’t know for sure what was causing the problems, but in my search to find a solution I came upon some information about when to use Apache’s worker module, and when to use pre-fork, and how worker really isn’t helpful when PHP is compiled as an Apache module, and how running PHP as CGI, specifically FastCGI (or fcgi) is better in a multiprocessor environment (such as I have). The reasons are a little more technical than I want to go into, but maybe someone who IS an Apache Guru will comment and explain if they like, I don’t want to because I’m afraid I’ll get it wrong.

So, I load up cPanel’s EasyApache (Apache configuation and upgrade utility) which is wonderfully easy to use (cPanel is so much better than other server management software I’ve tried), and make the selections.

Now my server runs differently. Instead of PHP existing within Apache, it exists apart from it, and so when I check current processes and performance data I can see PHP’s usage outside of Apache (turns out, it must have been the lion’s share of Apache resource usage). This, I believe, lets me monitor things better.

But more importantly, the site is as fast as I ever remember it being, like wicked fast. The change was immediate, and awesome. The crashes stopped.

Traffic increased 15%, thats right, 15% more visitors & page views a day, roughly. It is not apples to apples because February 22nd was not exactly February 18th. But my site is typically very consistent (and on a large sample size) and I can see no other reason for the higher traffic plateau I’ve seen this week. I also noticed active forum users on at any one time has increased (a faster forum means more engaged users). Additionally, of course, over time more traffic will beget even more traffic like compounding interest works on your bank account.

The server isn’t even crashing in the middle of the night when it does the MySQL backups (which are huge, and which used to almost always cause a 10 minute “crash” (not really a crash, but unresponsiveness).

This setup is definitely working for me. So, if you’ve got a similar problem, try giving it a go.

I am reminded all the time of that episode of “That 70′s Show” where Jackie falls for a modeling agency scam getting her to pay $200 for headshots and consulting. Jackie only realizes it is a scam when the agency gives Donna the same pitch (Jackie believes she is far better looking than Donna and if the agency is also interested in Donna, it must be a scam). Funnily enough my brother and his wife fell for this same scam in real life.

Anyways, I digress, late last night and then again today a company called eWeb Financial called me about a work from home business opportunity. They said I filled out a survey saying I was interested in such things, when pressed they could not answer where or how I filled out said survey. They called my home number in an obvious violation of the do not call registry which I am on. Of course, I know I would never fill out such a survey, I already happen to make quite a bit of money. I decided to be a little snarky and rather than just hangup I laid the sarcasm on the salesman pretty thick explaining how successful I am and he kept pushing, saying “You can always have another poker in the fire.” and whatnot. It was funny, really, how hard he was working, and I was just messing with him.

Anyways, doing a little research with Google I find their website, ewebfinancial.com, which is a great example of frontpage-template-quality design. And a few other complaints such as this one here.

As near as I can tell this company sets up turnkey affiliate shop sites and then charges you a few hundred dollars for them. For anyone interested in this work from home opportunity let me set a few things straight for you.

Marketing thin-affiliate sites no longer works, hey, I used to do it myself, I made… I don’t know… $40 or $50,000 doing it over the years, but it hasn’t worked in awhile. It worked for a little bit when only a few people were doing it either because only a few people knew how to do it or a few people had the technical knowledge to do it. There is even a tutorial on this site on setting up Amazon.com affiliate sites. But then, everyone started doing it, and the search engines reacting by hitting all sites doing it with bans and penalties, and algorithm shifts, and now it just doesn’t work.

Even if it did work, these aren’t the types of sites you can just “build and they will come” you have to have some way to direct traffic and link-weight too them. Ask yourself, do you already have link-weight you can send to such a site? Do you even know what link-weight is or how to get it? If so, you have no business even trying these things. But, of course, they don’t work anymore anyways.

If you want to make money with affiliate merchant datafeeds you gotta do something other than just duplicate the product catalog on a dummy site. You need an angle, and there are only so few, and most require advanced programming.

I figure if these guys call me twice in an 18 hour period, they gotta be hitting up others too, so let me save you some money, just say no. There are far better, easier, cheaper, and more reliable ways to make money online. Pick a topic, get a free blog from wordpress or blogger, and start writing.

Just remember this, if there is an easy way to make money online, a million Indians and Chinese are ALREADY doing it, and they’re willing to do it for a few dollars of profit, you will never compete.

Most license owners felt like they were being forced to pay for software that they’ll never need or use (project tools, and maybe CMS), just to continue using their blog software.

It is a valid complaint, project tools are a niche product that only applies to work environments, most communities are not work environments.

However, they have since seemingly fixed thing, smoothed things over. For one, they changed the licensing scheme, probably for the better. You now only buy the license once, and it is good until the next major release. So if you have a vb 3.1 license, and two years later 3.9 comes out, you can upgrade. Currently you need to renew yearly. So instead you’re just renewing if you have 3.1 and 4.0 comes out (major release).

Now…they could do what Interspire has done in the past and make major releases that aren’t seemingly major and force you to upgrade, and that wouldn’t be good, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Secondly, until Oct 30th they’re running a big sale on licenses. Just go here and get your 4.0 VB Suite license for only $130 (if you have an existing license) that is cheaper than a standard forum license, and it includes the CMS and blogs and whatnot, and that gives you free upgrades for the life of 4.x. But only until Oct 30th. Not a bad deal at all.

“We are pleased to introduce ourselves as programmers and coders…”

They’re all the same, they’re all from India, even the ones that say they’re from the US are from India, which annoys me to no end.

I’m not xenophobic, but I prefer to work with people from more developed countries. I don’t know if it is a cultural thing or what, but in my experience most Indian programmers lack intuition to do small things that are needed to improve efficiency and user friendliness. They also seem to have a problem grasping the big picture, or understanding what your goal is for what you need. The end result is needing to micromanage them to the nth degree, which requires so much time you might as well do it yourself.

Whereas people from western cultures, you can tend to tell them what you want to accomplish, and they can fill in a lot of the blanks without input from you.

I tend to only consider Indian programmers (or other foreigners) for tiny jobs then, things that I can very discretely define. I have a job right now, directory website, very simple, small, and they’re having the hardest time getting it. Additionally, I’ve gotten 30+ Indian bids, but not one from North America, normally I get more than that. I post a very very specific brief, and they come back with a list of features (shopping cart? Hello?) I didn’t even ask for. It is almost as if they assume I want a directory just like their last job, whatever that may have been. Or perhaps they simply don’t care enough to read my brief and instead are just replying to as many as possible in hopes of finding work.

The problem is there is just so many of these misunderstanding bidders, that I am just completely turned off from Elance at this point and am just thinking about doing it myself. I did a little php last night and this morning, and it was nice to do that again, I haven’t programmed in awhile. Fun even. I could probably crank this job out in 8 hours or less, of course with the Baby that equates to 3 days, but still, I could do it.

Maybe I will, but I think it’ll be awhile before I post on Elance again. If I wanted a bunch of form letters from foreigners wanting to do business with me I could just open up my junkmail folder.