Kudos to TSCM for moving to flash, rather than that crappy WMP video, they used to use. (Hey Bloomberg! How about you?)
I’m told that’s been running a couple of months, which shows you how often I’m at that part of the site.
Let’s pull a random, video to show — hey, how about this one? We showed you the ad for "Buy One House, Get One Free" on Tuesday; Later that day, TheStreet.com had an interview with my friend, Paul Kedrosky — who not only is a Real Estate guru (WTF?!) but loves the smell of Napalm in the morning !
Aside from that slight shift in title (from college professor and VC to love guru, here’s the accompanying video:
California: Buy One House, Get One Free (June 03, 2008 | 09:00 AM) http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/06/california-buy.html
Maybe Paul lives in NorCal (I honestly do not know)? Even the homeless are real estate gurus out here.
I feel like I’m always being negative or a jerk when commenting here, but that never stopped me before so…
I’m curious what kind of readership numbers TSCM gets? I enjoy your web/tech and pop culture influenced pieces here on the blog, but this item screams out a “so what?” or “who cares”. I know you are a contributer to TSCM and understand the desire to plug them, but in years and years of reading and/or participating in online market/financial blogs, websites, etc I’ve never seen anyone besides you reference TSCM. The few (less than 5 times) I’ve read things on the site it suffered from extremed forced-ad-itis. By this I mean they split page-long stories/articles into five or six pages to keep you clicking to a new page which loads different ads.
Of course this is a common thing in journalistic type content driven sites, but TSCM had taken it to the point of absurdity. Read five sentences then click, wait for a page to load, repeat until you find yourself saying “WTF?! I clicked through all that for this insight-free, banal piece of garbage?”
Honestly I’m surprised that TSCM still exists. Maybe it’s like the old quote about Nixon (parpahrased: how did he get elected, I don’t know anyone who voted for him) but that’s my take on TSCM: How do they survive, I don’t know anyone who reads the site.
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BR: Not at all —
I posted for all of the above reasons — I discussed the ad Tuesday, my friend Paul is in it, and the change to embeddable video is big deal.
TSCM numbers are probably about 250-500k per day (about 5-10X TBP).
Lately, I contribute there much less frequently, as I have been buried with work, writing, Fusion, and travel. I get nothing out of promoting them, so I don’t for its own sake.
But I thought this was newsworthy, and hence published on it.
Do you think its a safe bet that Paul Kedrosky received roughly the same email from Michael Crews that Barry received from Ron Stenger a couple of days!
“Its a 100 degrees fahrenheit and prone to igniting on a seasonal basis, but if thats your thing, then maybe this deal is for you.”
In your capacity as embedded video guru, perhaps you could prevail on CNBC to do something to fix their video section.
I take the home-builder’s spokesperson partially at her word — it’s an attempt to have something different to talk about, a different promotional angle — but mainly I think it is a last-ditch attempt to keep the builder’s high-end home prices up by sacrificing the lower-end houses which can’t be sold in any case because the middle- and working-class market space has largely disappeared.
I’ve seen that in a number of areas — higher-end homes tending to move a little faster and/or lose less value because potential buyers are still in a position to obtain leverage and/or supplement deals w/ cash — but in an era of stagnating wages and troubled credit the lower-end areas just aren’t low enough any more.
Aside from the very wealthy no-one is immune of course because expectations have changed and the food chain has been badly damaged: Hard to justify a move up if you can’t sell the previous home and that damage starts w/ the family that can’t afford a row-house or small existing home as a starter and moves most of the way up the line.
Great – they can successfully deploy new technologies but their “sr.” technology correspondent (Gary Krakow) has got to be one of the more clueless people around. How does someone get that position without knowing one thing about technology?
Fair enough Barry. I’m very surprised by those numbers (and even moreso that it gets more traffic than TBP).
Flash video is much better medium than just straight video and faster download times.
You guys must have fast download speeds, mine just keeps stalling