Is online poker dead? No. However, it’s future remains greatly uncertain here in the US.
The card game Poker, particularly it’s Texas Hold’em variation, have become insanely popular over recent years. Yet, September 30th 2006 saw the passage of a bill in the United States that was aimed at providing port security. However, the ugly politics of Washington reared its head: a real douchebag included an amendment to the bill that restricts sending money to and from gambling sites.
Never mind the hypocrisy of the amendment which provided a safe harbor for Horse Racing, Dog Racing, and government sanctioned lottery. Never mind the amusing fact that disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff was actually fighting to suppress the passage of this horrible piece of legislation before it was passed. The end result was that most of the top online sites stopped allowing US players on their sites.
For those players who took the time to read some of the great books out there concerning poker, and really practiced and honed their craft, playing poker online was a very profitable avenue. There is hope: with the new congress in session, many groups like the Poker Players Alliance are working to propose legislation that will give safe harbor to Poker. When this happens (when, damnit!), this method of online profiteering will once again be a very valuable tool.
February 8th, 2007
Youtube is one of the most popular websites today. In fact, Alexa is showing that is among the ten most viewed sites on the web. There has been lots of talk lately about the profitability and future of the website. Searching the blogosphere from the cushy comfort of Corporate America, I ran into these two posts.
First, Mark Cuban, of eccentric billionaire NBA team owning fame, posted this in his blog Blog Maverick:
…Youtube’s rapid ascension to the top of the traffic ranks can be attributed to two and only two reasons:
1. Free Hosting from any 3rd Party site
Hey, why pay for bandwidth for a video if you dont have to ? A blog, a myspace page, an email, any website. Just throw in some html in Youtube.com foots the bill for bandwidth. Sure you are limited by size of file, but so what. Just chop it up into parts 1 through N. Its fast, easy and free….
…2. Copyrighted music and video.
I dont have a count, but i bet Daniel Powters’ Bad Day is attached to some video snippet of every sporting event ever played , with links sent to fans of every losing team. PIrates season, You had a Bad Day. Spurs vs Mavs. Mavs vs Suns, Mavs vs Heat , Yankees vs Red Sox, etc, etc, etc. Bad Day, Bad Day , Bad Day. If Daniel had a nickel for every time his song was used in a YouTube sports video, he would be a much richer man.
This so reminds me of the early days of Napster. They were the first to tell you it wasnt illegal. They didnt host anything but an index to link to all the illegal downloaders. Youtube doesnt upload anything illegal and will take down whatever you ask them to….Considering the RIAA will sue your grandma or a 12 year old at the drop of a hat, the fact that Youtube is building a traffic juggernaut around copyrighted audio and video without being sued is like…. well Napster at the beginning as the labels were trying to figure out what it meant to them….
Cuban’s insights are usually right on, and I think he understands a lot of the potential pitfalls of the site. However, consider this succinct post from Markus Frind, CEO of plentyoffish.com from his blog Paradigm Shift:
Youtube has been running adsense on nearly every single page of its site for a while now. I was able to do a test campaign that ran on Youtube and was displayed at the rate of 500,000 pageviews an hour for the average price of 30 cents a cpm.
This article says youtubes pageviews are around 250 million a day. If that is even remotely accurate youtube is making a LOT of money. Lets say only 200 million pageviews a day can have ads. That gives you $300/million * 200 = $60,000/day or $1.8 million a month in revenues from adsense.
I guess everyone at youtube wants the world to think they aren’t making any money so that all the people whose content they are stealing won’t come asking for money.
Basically, this site will continue to print money until the copyright holders rise up. Until then, $$$.
September 19th, 2006
Here is a short list of some of the blogs that I read for inspiration and news about how people are making money online:
Techcrunch
Web Worker Daily
Make Money Online
ProBlogger
Steve Pavlina
Blog Maverick
Preview for next week: Look for posts on social bookmarking, press releases, and investing.
September 15th, 2006
Over Labor Day weekend, I had the chance to read the book Play Money by Julian Dibbell. His book is centered around an experiment that he conducted to see if he could make money by playing Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG’s). The premise was simple: in these games, there are items (like in-game currency, armor, a house, etc) that usually take many hours (and oftentimes, days) of game play to acquire. So what do people do when they want an asset? They buy it. Now with in-game currency mind you, they fire up the ‘ol Ebay machine, and buy these in-game items. For real money. Julian was able to make thousands of dollars by selling virtual goods on Ebay.
His game of choice during his experiment was Ultima Online, but the model he followed could be used in any of the modern MMOG’s. The biggest of which these days is World of Warcraft. When Julian was playing Ultima Online, the in-game population was about 250,000 users (which typically pay $12-15/month for the honor to play these types of games). By comparison, World of Warcraft now has 7 MILLION(!) worldwide users
Let’s get down to it: how can we make money exploiting this market? Can it be as simple as fire up World of Warcraft, kill some monsters, and start an Ebay auction? Sadly, not easily. To even put yourself in a position to be able to produce enough wealth in-game, you need to level your character up to level 60, which can take you about 360 hours of in-game play to achieve (the game is so kind to tell you exactly how much play time you’ve had by typing ‘/played’). Even at this level, you have to employ certain strategies that ensure you are making the most wealth. Since the best items in the game don’t allow you to transfer them to another character, the wealth that you need to accumulate is gold. I would estimate that even at an advanced level of play, the most you could be generated in actual wealth is $2-3 dollars an hour.
That $2-3 dollars an hour is simply not worth it here in America. You can do to McDonald’s and make fries for at least twice that. Now, somewhere like China, there very well may be people willing to work for that, since it may actually represent a livable wage in their economy. This fact isn’t lost on the many operations that have already taken up shop in China, hiring workers to play MMOG’s in 8 hour shifts around the clock.
Here’s the plan. I want to talk to my Chinese readers for a second. (or readers from other countries that this may be a feasible solution). I purpose that we start a business that hires workers for the sole purpose of playing World of Warcraft (and potentially other MMOG’s), with the intent of selling the virtual gold and items generated by their play. Your role will be setting up an office building in your local area with all the required computers, hire and train the workers, and supervise their play. My roll will be to scout MMOG’s for the best money making possibilities, write the training and manuals needed to teach the workers how to play and be effective, and advertise, market, sell and deliver the virtual goods to customers. If this looks like something you’d like to do, please email me to discuss this further.
For more information about MMOG’s and virtual worlds, check out the excellent blog Terra Nova, which analyzes virtual worlds at almost a scholarly level.
September 13th, 2006
One of the ways that I plan to experiment with creating wealth online is through the monetization of this blog, alteredwealth.com. A quick word on that this does not mean: It is not charging money for access, nor will it ever be. This site will always be completely free to access. In fact, I don’t plan on ever requiring users to register for an account to read any of the content.
The plan comes from generating as much traffic as possible, then creating wealth out of those visits. The most obvious path is advertising, which I have already to begin testing in limited spots. This advertising will have to not affect the usability of the site, as this could negatively affect traffic. Pop ups are a definite no-no. So are ads that greatly reduce the view port of the browser to decrease the viewing experience. The idea is to offer up ads, in a non-intrusive way, that contain links to products and services that may be of interest to my readers.
There are other ways to monetize this blog. You may have noticed in a previous post that I included a link to Mansion.com. Well, this link is actually a special one given to me by Mansion.com that tracks the users who came from alteredwealth.com to create an account at Mansion.com. If you created an account by clicking on that link, then I got a little money for it. (thanks!)
Since this blog is still brand spanking new, how much money do I plan on making from blog monetization? Not much. In fact, I would expect that it would take at least a year of constantly updating the blog to make more than my hosting fees ($9.71/month) per month. I find that there will be even more value initially by researching the different blog monetization techniques, and reporting the most effective, which should benefit us both.
A note about the blog: I plan on fully disclosing the traffic metrics and any amount of money made or lost with this blog (and the techniques discussed within) in future posts. However, it will probably be months before I have anything of substance to share, but I will once there is.
On a personal note, I am fighting with the usage of the third person. By its nature, I….err TheAbettor feels that referring to oneself in the third person is a simplistic exercise in ego masturbation. Yet, I feel like I want to use it. TheAbettor also feels like he shouldn’t mix the usage of the first and third person to confuse TheAbettor’s readers.
September 11th, 2006
As I chronicled in a previous post, I had the opportunity to make $1000 by betting on the Pittsburgh Steelers on Mansion.com. Instead, I ended up with $350. Here is what happened:
I fully intended to do the guaranteed $1000 bet on Mansion.com, and then hedge my bet by betting $500(ish) on another sports book to guarantee myself ~$500 no matter the result of the game. To do this, I would have needed $1100 for Mansion, and about 600 for another sports book. Last week, I was able to scratch together the $1100 for Mansion through money already in my Neteller account, my poker site balances, and a Neteller instaCash transaction (which my limit was $750 every 7 days). To get the rest of the money, I had to do an Electronic Fund Transfer from my checking account, which would take 4-5 business days. (it cleared this past Tuesday). When I made the original bet on Mansion, it was for Pittsburgh to win, and giving 4.5 points.
WELL, before I could place my other bet to guarantee my return, the star quarterback of the Steelers gets a goddamn appendectomy, and the line on the game shifts dramatically. Two hours before the game, I found a sports book that would allow me to bet on the Miami Dolphins taking 4.5 points. To do that, I had to pay through the nose in fees to move the line 3 points. So to win the $350, I had to place a wager of $650. This made it so that no matter the result of the game, I would get $350.
As it turns out, Pittsburgh covered the spread, and I could have won $1000 by not placing the hedge bet. It’s slightly annoying. I have one friend in particular that would probably have jumped off a bridge if in my spot (although he would have never hedged in the first place).
Moral of the story: I just made $350 by utilizing the power of my computer and the Internet. That won’t pay my mortgage, but that’s substantial money. This can be done. There is money to be made in the digital realm.
September 8th, 2006
I’ve used Wordpress before. I’ve used Yahoo Hosting before. Yet, the combination, especially concering their feature to “auto-install” a Wordpress blog into your account, made for some quirky things.
That’s code for I fucked up the original configuration.
So, here is attempt #2 at a Wordpress installation. I had already reloaded my first two posts, and all links should be the same as before.
BTW, the Sports Bet I chronicled below is no longer available (they limited it to 5500 users). And because of reasons why I will describe in a followup post, I never placed the hedge bet on Miami. So if Pittsburgh wins by more than 4.5 points, I win $1000. If not, I win zero.
GO PITTSBURGH!
PS: Anyone know of a Wordpress spellcheck plugin?
September 7th, 2006
The start of the NFL season is upon us, much to the enjoyment of diehards football fans like myself. This is also the time where sports books get started for their busiest, and most profitable time of the year. The competition between online sports books to attract customers, particularly those who wager large amounts during the football season, is fierce. Many websites are offering deals in order to entice would-be gamblers to deposit money on their site. One site in particular, Mansion.com, has taken it a step further.
Their promotion is this: If you place a $1100 bet on the Pittsburgh Steelers to cover the point spread in their game this Thursday against the Miami Dolphins (which is currently about even due to the Ben Rothlisburger injury) and you lose the bet, they will refund the entire $1100 in full. If you win, you win $1000 (which is $1100 minus fees). Basically, it is a zero-risk way to win $1000. You may with $1000, but you also may win zero.
However, there is a way to guarantee yourself a win. If you make a ~$550 wager on another online sports book (don’t do it on Mansion, this will void your initial bet!) on Miami with the exact opposite odds, then no matter the result, you are guaranteed to make $500, minus fees. There are exceptions like if the point differential ends exactly on the line, but there are ways around that as well. Here is a link to a complete guide that will walk you through the steps of placing these two bets to guarantee you a return on your money.
A few notes about the above process:
- You will need to negotiate a means for transferring money between your bank account and the sports books. For this, I highly recommend opening a Neteller account to facilitate this. This account will also be useful for other techniques that will be researched in future posts, so opening this account, and keeping some seed money in it is HIGHLY recommended!
- To take advantage of this deal, you will need $1100 to make the initial wager, and another $550-600 in liquid assets to take advantage of the second bet that will guarantee you a $500 return. It is my goal in the future that most of the ideas presented here allow you to take advantage of a deal with little to no financial investment. If you do have the funds available to spare for a few days, do this offer, then keep the $500 you get out of the deal online to take advantage of other opportunities
- In order to withdraw money from Mansion.com, you will need access to a scanner so you can send them an email of a government issued ID to validate your identity. From talking with other users of the service, your money is safe on this site, but you will have to go through steps like this to do business with them. Because of this, don’t even THINK of doing this if you are under the age of 18!
What the hell are you waiting for? DO IT!
September 6th, 2006
I have a secret. Something that I’m sure is a shared belief among millions (perhaps billions) around the world:
I hate my job.
To be fair, there are many aspects of my job that I like. The pay, which won’t make me rich anytime soon, is definitely enough to live comfortably in the suburbs for a single guy. The job function, which is web and software development, is reasonably enjoyable as well. Health/Dental/Vision insurance? Covered. Four weeks vacation, not including the last week of the year which we get off as well. So, what is the problem?
Corporate America.
Or more appropriately, the traditional job model here in America. It’s the whole going-nowhere-fast mentality. Go to work 8-5 Monday through Friday, take two days off, repeat. I have never been much of a morning person, but I’ve gradually come to begrudgingly adjust to the schedule. Unfortunately, this usually end up in getting 5 hours a night of sleep, which I have to hope to catch up on during the weekend. The bigger issue, however, is the net result of your productivity. While this varies depending your job function and company, big corporations aren’t built to award hard work with an equitable amount of return. It’s no wonder that many employees only work to the lowest level that allows them to get by. If there is no reward for extra work, other than personal satisfaction only (which many people find value in, I find it at best temporary enhancement), then why bother?
The fact of the matter is, you are working for someone else. You are a component in a machine that is designed to create value for its shareholders. If you (or department) are not seen to create enough value by executives that have never met you, you will be fired, and be forced to quickly find yourself to become a component in someone else’s machine. In fact, I’d say that you are taking a much bigger risk with your financial future working for corporate America than for yourself. In corporate America, you can’t just start working extra hard to hedge your risk for slow periods of revenue. In corporate America, your entire income stream can be shut off by something completely unrelated to your job performance.
I’ve had enough. I hate being beholden to others for my well-being. I hate not having the level of my inputs not equitable to my outputs. I hate the uncertainty that comes working in corporate America. I hate not experiencing the personal satisfaction that comes with not creating my own future. I am bored with the relative stability that attracts so many like myself to stay in Corporate America our entire lives. I am fed up with the feeling that this boredom is a dangerous thought that will jeopardize my future. It’s not true. It’s a myth. It’s time for a change.
Well, not immediately. Certain life realities make it wise for me to keep my current position until I can prove that I can replace such income through other reliable methods. I need a means of researching other ways to make money in my free time, while still continuing my “career”. My educational background is in Business and Computers. It has been my belief ever since I first got on the Internet 11 years ago that there was money to be made by simply utilizing your computer and it’s Internet connection. These days, there is simply no way to deny the potential to make money online. Actually, there is simply no way to deny the potential to become rich online.
Thus, this blog, AlteredWealth, comes into existence. The premise is twofold: To discuss and research different ways to become a revenue creating machine, and to chronicle my personal experience of utilizing these techniques. It is my hope that by reading this blog, you too will also be able to use or adapt some of the techniques here, as well has to help share your insight and techniques to help enrich the lives of everyone involved. Any and all ways to make money online are fair game: E-commerce, online poker, content design and creation, advertising, and so on. The loose definition that we will go by here is “Any activity that utilizes a computer (or electronic device) and its connection to the Internet that creates financial value.” Pretty wide, eh? That’s the idea.
The content that will fill this blog will include one-hitter ideas and long term money making solutions. In fact, for my first money making post, I plan of posting about a way to make $500 this coming Thursday betting on sports online. Crazy, eh? I will also update my personal situation more in upcoming posts beyond the brief description in this post. At this point, I will go by the moniker of TheAbettor, to prevent problems with my current position. Please direct any personal correspondences to theabettor@alteredwealth.com
The layout of this blog is simple: Yahoo Hosting account, Wordpress blog. Cost me $9.71. (Damn, I’m supposed to be MAKING money!) Took me 15 minutes to set up after I had chosen the domain name I wanted. I’m not even going to change the presentation of the site at all yet, just default values. The changes that I do make will be detailed in future posts.
Now that the premise is set, the goal must be simple and direct: To quit my job due to my ability to create wealth using ideas put forth in this blog. I will set no timetable (yet), but I will actively use my research to help set a timetable in the near future.
Here goes nothing.
September 6th, 2006
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