Now that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has settled fraud charges that arose from an errant tweet, what's next for the billionaire, his electric-car company, and the many customers and investors who have a financial stake in both?
Musk will stay on as CEO, but he must leave his position as chairman of Tesla's board for three years and fork over a $20 million fine for having made what the Security and Exchange Commission deemed a "false and misleading'' statement when he tweeted that Tesla had enough financing to go private. Under the settlement, Tesla will also add two new independent directors to the company's board.
The ramifications of the deal are likely to be positive overall, staving off an investigation that could have dragged on indefinitely and sapped the relatively young company of car buyers' confidence and revenue.
But it's also a rare loss for Musk, an innovator who's made bold strides in industries ranging from electronic payments to space exploration.
HMD Global introduced the nokia 5.1 Plus from its budget portfolio in India this August. The smartphone marked its entry to the Indian market alongside the mid-range Nokia 6.1 Plus. Both the devices share near identical design with glass surface and run amdroid One-powered Android Oreo OS. The new Nokia 5.1 Plus retails for a price of Rs 10,999 for the 3GB RAM and 32GB internal storage.
Nokia 5.1 Plus features and specifications: 5.86-inch (1,520 x 720) 19:9 display | Android Oreo | MediaTek Helio P60 SoC | 3GB RAM, 32GB storage (expandable up to 400GB) | 13MP + 5MP dual camera with PDAF, LED flash | 8MP front camera | 3,060mAh battery | Connectivity options: 4G VoLTE, USB Type-C port, Wi-Fi, GPS, 3.5mm audio jack
Ever since it was first released almost a decade ago,
Google’s Chrome browser has been the most consistent piece of technology
in my life. I’ve gone through a legion of phones, laptops, and
headphones, I’ve jumped around between Android, iOS, Windows Phone,
macOS, and Windows, but I’ve rarely had reason to doubt my browser
choice. Things have changed in recent times, however, and those changes
have been sufficient to make me reconsider. After so many years away,
I’m returning to Firefox, in equal measure pushed by Chrome’s downsides
as I am pulled by Firefox’s latest upgrades.
If a friend were to ask me what the best web browser is,
I’d answer “Chrome”
in a heartbeat, so don’t mistake this as a screed
against Google’s browser. I still see it as the most fully-featured and
trouble-free option for exploring the web. It’s just that sometimes
there are reasons to not use the absolute best option available. Here
are mine.
The thing that woke me up to my over-reliance on Chrome was when Google implemented an ad blocker directly into the browser.
I’d usually be delighted to have ad blocking automated away, but the
surrounding conversation about Google — an ad company — having sway over
which ads are and are not acceptable to present to users convinced me
there was a problem. According to NetMarketShare,
Chrome is now used by 60 percent of web users, both on mobile and
desktop devices, and Firefox looks respectable with 12 percent of
desktops, but is almost a rounding error with only 0.6 percent of mobile
devices. Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Edge don’t look much better,
even though they’re the default option on their respective OS platforms.
Chrome has outgrown its competition in a way that’s unhealthy. My colleague Tom Warren already detailed the deleterious effects of Chrome’s outsize influence,
with web developers optimizing and coding specifically for Chrome (and
Google encouraging the practice), with unhappy connotations of the
crummy old days when Internet Explorer was the dominant browser for the
web. Chrome came to liberate us from the shackles of IE, but like many
revolutionary leaders, too many years in power have corrupted Chrome’s
original mission.
Before
I settled on Firefox as my Escape from Chrometown alternative, I gave
Safari a solid couple of months as my primary browser. If I were
committed to using only iPhones, iPads, and Macs for the rest of my tech
life, I might still be on Safari. Its performance is great on both iOS
and macOS — though I’d be lying to you if I were to say I could tell a
difference in speed between any of the modern browsers — and it offers a
choice of ad blockers among a reasonable selection of browser
extensions. The options are nowhere near as varied as Chrome’s extension
library, but that’s a non-issue for me since I’ve never been dependent
on extensions in the first place.
But I’m writing this in Firefox today for a very simple
reason: cross-platform compatibility. I recently set up a new Windows
laptop, and having to deal with a browser that doesn’t know me or my
preferences was just an exercise in frustration. Safari’s nice, and I’m
certain it’s good enough to supplant Chrome for Apple device users, but
for me it’s a non-starter. I need a browser that knows me as well on a
Huawei smartphone or Lenovo ThinkPad as it understands me an on iPhone
X.
Like Chrome and Safari, Firefox has a built-in password
manager that saves my logins and passwords as I browse, which I can then
protect with a master password. One password, I can remember. Dozens of
weird alphanumerical concoctions? That’s where I need the browser to
step in and help, and Firefox has been great in that respect. With
Safari, I had a couple of occasions where the browser would either
forget a password or get confused about where to save it when, for
example, I’m logging into more than one Google account. Firefox keeps
all this stuff straight and, so far as I can tell, secure. (Security
pros will tell you that a dedicated password manager is best, of
course.)
In pondering my browser switch, I did the obvious thing
and looked at benchmark comparisons among the most popular browsers,
while also reading up on real-world experience with regard to battery
life and other less obvious impacts. That piqued my interest in Opera,
which has a built-in VPN and, like Firefox, plenty of privacy protection
and anti-tracking options.
I like the philosophy embodied by Opera, but I don’t like that the
Android versions of its browsers serve ads on my lock screen.
After spending some quality time comparing the actual
experience of using Chrome, Safari, and Firefox across a variety of
websites, I’m confident in saying browser benchmarks are profoundly
uninformative. The truth is that performance differences are not
substantial enough to be noticed. If anything, you’re most likely to
clash with “only works in Chrome” incompatibilities, but that’s kind of
the whole reason for me to avoid Chrome: someone has to keep using the
alternatives so as to give them a reason to exist.
But I’m no martyr sacrificing himself for the common good
here. Firefox is a legitimate, high-quality replacement for Chrome.
Ever since its Quantum engine overhaul,
Firefox has been garnering plenty of praise from satisfied users, and
though I’m only just starting to get into using it full-time as my main
browser, everything I’ve seen has been encouraging. Firefox has
certainly grown far beyond slow memory hog that I remember from a few
years ago.
The main thing I’ve learned from migrating between a few
browsers over the past couple of months has been that the design and
performance differences between them are smaller than ever before. If
you’re like me and want to strip your browser down to a bare address bar
and a couple of arrows, you can do that as easily with Chrome, Firefox,
Opera, Safari, or any of the other alternatives like Edge and Vivaldi.
Your bookmarks can travel with you across operating systems and devices
with most browsers. Keyboard shortcuts like Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + T to
revive the last-closed browser window are approaching universality.
Chrome and Firefox both have a “close tabs to the right [of this one]”
option. You can mute individual tabs in both browsers.
Eventually, I may find myself forced to return to Chrome,
perhaps by some clever ecosystem integration Google adds or the latest
lovely Chromebook (I really think Chromebooks are underrated as basic
getting-stuff-done computers). But until that time comes, I’m happy to
support Firefox in its efforts to provide a genuine and viable
alternative to the browser juggernaut.
Facebook
founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is testifying before the House Committee
on Energy and Commerce today, fresh off the heels of a grueling
five-hour joint session before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce
committees yesterday. In total, Zuckerberg will face questions from
nearly 100 legislators, and many of those legislators have received
thousands of dollars from the company Zuckerberg runs.
Over the last 12 years, Facebook has spent $7 million in
campaign contributions. Historically, Facebook has donated slightly more
to Democrats than Republicans, but overall, the platform’s political
footprint is small in Washington, DC relative to its market cap, which
is currently calculated at about $400 billion. That’s not unusual for
technology companies: Amazon
spent $4 million in campaign contributions over 20 years, and it has a
market cap of nearly $700 billion. (Note, however, that Alphabet, Inc.,
with a market cap just over Amazon’s, appears to be outspending Facebook in DC by an order of magnitude.)
According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics,
since 2014, Facebook has contributed a total of $641,685 to the members
of Congress that Zuckerberg is facing this week. The top recipients of
that money include Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA),
and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA).
The amount of money received didn’t necessarily correlate
to the hostility of questions asked by the legislators in Zuckerberg’s
first hearing. That said, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) did make a somewhat
bizarre pro-Facebook comment, saying, “Some have professed themselves
shocked, shocked that companies like Google and Facebook share
user data with advertisers. Did any of these individuals stop to ask
themselves why Google and Facebook don’t charge for access? Nothing in
life is free.” Hatch has taken $15,200 from Facebook since 2014 — the
sixth largest amount on the combined committees.
But other senators who have received even larger campaign
contributions from Facebook didn’t hold back. Cory Booker, who has
received $44,025 from Facebook since 2014 (the largest amount),
questioned Zuckerberg on the 2016 ProPublica investigation
that showed Facebook allowed advertisers to target by race. Kamala
Harris, who took the second largest amount ($30,990) grilled the CEO on
why Facebook did not notify users in 2015 that Cambridge Analytica had
misused their data, causing Zuckerberg to squirm uncomfortably.
If any senators pulled their punches, it was along party
lines, when small-government Republicans like Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS)
or Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) questioned the necessity of additional
regulation. At one point Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) held up a tablet and
pointed at the Facebook “privacy” tab, blaming individuals for not
properly reviewing their own settings. Wicker has received $10,000 from
Facebook since 2014, Tillis has received $7,500, and Sullivan has
received a whopping $2,500.
The campaign contributions from Facebook to all the
legislators who posed Mark Zuckerberg questions this week are listed
below. The list includes the members of the Senate Judiciary and
Commerce committees and House Committee on Energy and Commerce are
listed in full below, and dates back to 2014.
You have managed to get your website to that magical point where you have established popularity, traffic, loyalty and a community of fans. Your site contains a wealth of information, resources and services that you provide free because that’s just the kind of person you are. You may not have intended to make money from your site but now that you have an audience you realise that it’s possible, or perhaps you have to start thinking about generating income because your costs to manage the site have increased and it’s starting to hurt.
You have been diligent over the years to build up your community, but now you wonder how to go about making some revenue by leveraging this audience (as the marketers would say, you want to monetise your site). Maybe you have some big dreams and plan to one day generate advertising income from your new web project. This is a very common plan for online business given people tend to expect information and services to be free on the web. Advertising may be one of the only revenue generation strategies available to you.
How much traffic do I have to have to make money?
In my experience once you have about 500-1000 unique visitors per day to your site *at least* before you can start to make real money. You can make chimps change from day one from your 50 hits, but this article is targeted at those that have a larger audience, or perhaps are constructing a business plan (either real or in your head) and would like to know how to go about monetising your website. If you get more then 1000 unique visitors a day chances are you already make money from your site (if not you should be!) but my points are still relevant.
As per usual I will illustrate my article using real world examples from what I did to make money. Over about five years I managed a hobby site that started off as a very local site focusing on people in my area that played the game Magic: The Gathering. I wrote reports and did news coverage for the game. Later I expanded the site to Australia and eventually opened it to the world although it remained mostly Australian with a good chunk of Asians and New Zealanders.
Banner programs
At around the time I was getting 500 unique visitors a day I decided to start playing with advertising methods. This was before the advent of Google Adsense(more on this later) but there were many banner programs available that paid either on cost per click (CPC) or per impression basis. An impression is a banner being displayed to a user once, a click is someone clicking the banner and visiting the site being advertised.
These networks act as a middle man between business that want to advertise and people like me that have an audience and want to make some money by displaying banners. Unfortunately these programs display banners that often don’t match your audience. I tried a few but it was a short lived experiment that made me a few dollars if that.
I recommend you avoid any banner programs. If you are confused about what I am talking about regarding banner programs take a look at Burst Media to get a grasp of how they work. For small sites they just don’t make much money. For large sites there are much better ways to make money. I’m sure there are people out there that make good money from these programs (I’m sure the program owners do!) but in my experience a little effort to find the right type of advertising can yield much better results.
I decided the best way to make money was to really leverage the demographics of my audience. I had a fairly focused niche, card game playing young males. I started by emailing all the local and international card game shops and asked if they were interested in exposure to my market. Instantly I had responses but I had to come up with a pricing structure first.
How much should you charge?
By this time my site was getting close to 1000 unique visitors per day, with about 300,000 impressions per month. I had done my research and I knew that advertising on websites was usually via a standard 468×60 banner so I would start with that. I also knew that many companies charged by what is called CPMor cost per 1000 impressions. Back then this was by far the most commonly used scale for pricing of web advertising and you could expect to earn anywhere from $0.10 to $10.00 CPM. I never liked this method of advertising because it didn’t guarantee any visitors. Charging by click-throughs is a far better method, but didn’t become mainstream until later.
I decided that in order to keep my advertisers I had to offer value so I went for a blanket approach. I started charging a flat rate of $30 per month to have a banner on my site which offered as many impressions that my traffic could provide. I signed up my first few advertisers at this rate.
Banner management software
In order to “rotate” different banners across my site I needed some special software that would dynamically place banners. This allowed me to have more than one advertiser banner in a single location so I could optimise my adspace and make sure my audience didn’t get too bored from seeing the same banner over and over again.
Let me save you some time, phpAdsNew is the best banner management software out there. It’s under an open source license and has all the features you could ever wish for at a price you can’t beat, it’s free. If you don’t believe me and absolutely have to try searching elsewhere try this category at the PHP Resource Index.
There is a learning curve with phpAdsNew and you do have to install it on your own server. If you are like me and you do things like this yourself most of the time you shouldn’t have too much trouble. Otherwise you might try contacting your favourite ITGeek and get them to give you a hand.
Statistics are important
The best feature with phpAdsNew is that it allows you to provide a unique user login for your advertisers to check their banner statistics in real time. This means at any point in time they can learn how many impressions and clicks their banners are receiving from your site.
Before you start searching for advertisers you should be very familiar with the statistics of your site. Do you know how many unique visitors you get? How many hits you get? How many impressions? Do you even know what the differences are between these? Try this stats terminology primer on for size if you don’t.
Most web servers come with a statistics package. Ask your web host if you don’t know. The most common are Awstats (demo) and Webalizer (demo) which often are preinstalled on many hosting packages. Become familiar with these packages so you can accurately assess your site traffic.
Increasing ad revenue
I now had the foundations laid and was serving the ads of my first few advertisers. From the point onwards I went to work attracting more advertisers by directly emailing North American online card stores and other related sites. I kept an excel file to track which websites I had emailed and their responses so I could follow up in a timely manner.
I created new banner positions and started initiatives like a newsletter to generate more revenue. I created monthly packages that combined newsletter advertising and different banner positions and offered them at $500 per quarter. I increased the top prime banner position fee to $50 per month and started offering a tower banner position for $50 as well.
Eventually I had to limit the number of banners I could take in the prime positions to avoid dilution. I had a guarantee in place that offered at least 30,000 impressions per month (averaging 40,000-60,000) to advertisers so that they always received a good equivalent CPM rate. I even had some advertisers purchase the rights to “own” a position for a certain period to make sure no other advertisers banners would be displayed.
Eventually I reached a point where I was averaging $500 per month and peaked at $1000 in one month. Some advertisers came and went quickly but many stayed loyal and in fact still advertise today though I sold the site a long time ago. The niche for the site was so focused that it became the pre-eminent site for Australia in it’s marketplace and consequently some Australian advertisers simply stuck their banners up as a branding exercise. They knew that the exposure from the site would help to align their business as one of the pre-eminent retailers or event organisers for the game. Some advertisers stopped caring about click through stats and kept advertising purely for the branding exposure.
Google adsense
At some point Google Adsense popped up and I was in with other early adopters to try it out. My results were okay. The money wasn’t nearly as good as the established relationships with advertisers I had, however the ads being displayed were a lot more targeted than banner networks I had tested early on.
I eventually stopped using Adsense because I could better monetise the adspace with my traditional advertisers. However that was before Google went to work providing such a variety of banner sizes and display options. Nowadays Google Adsense is a viable income source for many websites so I definitely suggest you look into it as a possible option for generating revenue, but remember it’s not the only means and you can earn more if you get busy chasing targeted advertisers.
Ongoing maintenance
I wouldn’t call web advertising income passive, but it sure is close. The systems I had in place handled everything automatically. While I did have to manually create advertiser accounts, pursue advertisers and control billing, once the systems were in place, in particular phpAdsNew, I didn’t have to do much. Of course depending on your website often the maintenance of your community is were the labour is involved, but chances are if you started the site you either enjoy it or have plans in place to eventually remove yourself from the maintenance role.
In the end I sold my site but if it wasn’t for the advertiser revenue my asset would not have been valued nearly as highly as the final sale price. Investing in advertising is like investing in any asset, the time and labour you put in today will lead to benefits in the future.
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