kinudo

I love this cartoon by Hugh. I find web advertising 99% offensive – especially the sort that deliberately distract’s your eye’s attention on each page. As far as I know, during > 12 years of using the internet, I have clicked on banner ads fewer than 10 times. And most of those were not to make purchases, but simply to find out where the banner led.

I used Ad Block Pro in Firefox (it’s a free plugin that blocks most banner advertising – especially the annoying Flash and animated ones). This works fantastically well and is one of the few things holding me to Firefox at this point (I’d otherwise dropped FF since it regularly seems to crash or become unresponsive these days).

I have tried using an extension in Google Chrome (AdSweep) which claims to do the same thing – but this hasn’t been so good thus far – it seems to slow sites down and makes requests to it’s central servers all the time (which worries me – what other data is it sending?)

Anyway: note to all web advertisers: your approach is not working -> try something different. And stop trying harder and harder to distract me, I’m going to find ways around it.

I’m not against purchasing your stuff, I just will do it when I want to and when someone else influences me to do so. That might give you a clue as to the other methods you might need to try.

Tip: having a really good product helps.

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So I read today that the Times plans to begin making “24-hour subscription” payments for access to it’s current daily edition online.

The Guardian reported it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/17/times-editor-james-harding-online-charging

The decline of newspaper economics has been well reported and I guess I’m one of newspapers’ “worst customers”. I occasionally buy a Sunday Times – almost never a daily paper – but I read the Guardian UK pretty much every day because they are “enlightened” enough to publish their full content via RSS feeds. I read these feeds on my phone – whilst travelling or otherwise in need of content – and the good thing about the Guardian feeds is they are complete (not just a synopsis, requiring a visit to the website to read the rest like most other papers) and don’t contain any advertising.

I was thinking though about the Times’ editor’s comments – that it costs money to do high quality reporting and despite the “democratisation” of journalism in the form of blogging and amateur reporting online, this will never fully replace high quality newspaper journalism for reach, depth and fact-checking. I’ve never really thought about paying for my daily news, but after his comments I figured, maybe I would be happy to pay for my Guardian (or Times) RSS feed access – a small fee per day – to go towards keeping the high quality and unbiased reporting.

After all I happily pay the BBC license fee which covers my (well used) Radio 4 Today programme daily listening, amongst others.

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Posted via email

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Posted via email

Posted via email

Posted via email

I was in a charity shop a few weeks ago and came across a biography of the McDonalds founder. It was an old book – but I always think that if a book was good enough to be bought, read, kept on a she, then sent to a charity shop and finally makes it out onto the shelves again, then it stands as good a chance as any of being worth a reada

I’m not a McDonlad’s fan – I have studiously and literally avoided eating in one for at least the last 10 years. In fact it’s one of the only things that I truly boycott.  I’m  sadly not a fast-food avoider by all means – I have been known to frequent Burger King quite regularly in the past… But the story of how McDonalds came to be one of the most significant and successful global businesses over a period of about 50 years is still quite remarkable.

The best bit is that the reason it has been so successfully is simple: a focus on two things – value and hygiene. The founder was almost-religious about making sure the stores were clean to the extreme. And the most significant key ingredient to the business was the innovative franchise model which allowed franchancisee owners of individual McDonald stores (if they succeeded) to be more financially successful in the first decades than the executive team at McDonalds’ itself. The latter knew that if they stacked the odds in the favour of the franchanisee, that franchanisees would ultimately deliver the explosive growth and “local autonomy” which was ultimately critical for McDonald’s success on the world stage.

It’s a very unusual structure for a corporate company- especially one as apparently uniform and standardised as McDonalds – and made me think about how you could apply these learnings to other businesses. Of course McDonalds benefited from the fact their product was a commodity (the burger) and that that commodity could be sold, repeatedly at huge scales provided the quality was high enough (the ingredients), the stores prepared them in the right way (clean) and if the price was right (low). The franchise model fitted perfectly and they charged very little for each franchises so the barrier to entry for “normal entrepreneurial people” was low. The beauty of the model they settled on was that although store properties were negotiated with fixed-rate leases by McDonalds, those same properties were leased back to the franchisers on a percentage of profit basis, which meant success of the franchiser always meant success for McDonalds. This financial relationship also avoided some of the legal rights which franchanisees would have had if they had used a franchise agreement to make a similar profit share – and McDonalds ended up owning the property in most cases too.

In fact property was the main reason for McDonalds’ eventual financial stability and might.

Incredible book – read it, even if you don’t care for their burgers.

I’m fairly fortunate to be so far mostly unaffected by the financial turbulence of the moment. I’m not sure how long my smugness will last – I think we’re due a decade of sobering up after the (relatively) “party years” – but as one who thinks the last decade encouraged reckless financial behaviour from people who were either too greedy and misread the signals or were exploited because they didn’t know any better, I’m fond of the famous phrase of Warren Buffett, who said “You only find out who has been swimming naked, when the tide goes out”. Well the tide is out and there seems to be plenty of blushes.

As usual, there’s safety in good old fashioned common sense. If you live by a mantra of investing where there is value, never living beyond your means and ensuring your portfolio is balanced, then chances are the crisis will be kind to you and you’ll arrive the other side of it in fighting form to take advantage of the new tide. If you’ve spent the last few years living off borrowed money, it’s going to be rather harder. Of course keeping a job and owning property are going to help.

On my journey north this weekend I sat near a group of wealthy friends discussing their various ventures and how they were being affected. The banker was relieved that his £10 million portfolio had only lost 5% overall, compared to friends of his who had lost 40 or 50%. This, largely, because he’d sold all his positions and moved to cash his entire fund at the end of last week while he took a week out to visit a new nephew. That one piece of caution saved his job and his fund. The others still saw mostly opportunity in the current climate – when there are few safe investments, those who have a geninely valuable investment proposal with solid foundations ought to be well placed to benefit.

So: the flight to value. And watch out for the “double bounce”.