Cited in the Fields Medal/Nobel prize in math

Several years ago I came up with a algorithm that was thousands of times faster then anything else known at finding long chains of primes in sequences.   primes.plentyoffish.com contains the original post I made when we found the first 23 primes in succession.   I created the application, and then recruited Paul Jobling  and Paul Underwood to provide computers to aid in finding the record.

In 2004 Terry Tao solved one of the hardest problems in Math and cited our record http://arxiv.org/pdf/math.NT/0404188

Here is more details on why he won the Fields Medal which is considered the Nobel Prize of Math, there is a typo there as it should say the record is 23 primes in progression.  Paul Jobling emailed Terry Tao to confirm.

http://www.physorg.com/news75479793.html

Earlier this year I refined the program and found several more chains of 23 primes.  I am amazed I managed to create this program in the first place,  I barely barely even understand how it works and I wrote it.  This is because the program scans in multiple dimensions is very hard to conceptualize.  At any rate I think its cool that my record is cited in the Fields Medals press release.

More on Useless Webmetrics/measurement companies.

The other day I ran accross Nielson netrattings paying  affiliates to find people to install their download.

Now if you want to show up ranked highly on nielson all you need to do is direct traffic to their download pages.   Nielson  claims that  45,000 -70,000 users in europe  have their software installed.  Extrapolating Internet usage of 700 million people who live in Europe based on a sample of 45k users is a bit of a reach.

Want to see all the sites spamming nielsons  download? 

Comscore and Nielson  are nearly identical in how they operate,  because different people distribute their  applications they are often out by a factor of 10 from each other when it comes to estimating traffic.   Every now and then they apply filters to try and lower the bias in the data.   As in this new york times article  Comscore changed its tracking system lately and Entrepreneur.com dropped from  7.6 million unique visitors  to  2 million unique visitors. 

Now there are peoplethat claim pageviews are dieing and shouldn’t be used as a measurement.   I say it doesn’t matter,  these companies have a fraction the install base of alexa and their accuracy isn’t even close to that of alexa.   Why on earth are major corporations so stupid and paying these companies hundreds of thousands of dollars a year  for data that isn’t even close to reality?   Not only are these companies paying they are also basing their strategies and marketing plans on worthless data.

Interesting Articles and stuff.

Harvard has done a study that says virtual dating is the future and the way to go.   I think chat rooms are evil and probably the quickest way to destroy your site.   People who use online chat and chat rooms are not serious about dating.  Many of these people spend hours and hours chatting to people for entertainment or because they are bored.  I have yet to see a major dating site that fully embraces chat,  most that i’ve seen take it off after doing some testing.

Hoping to Overtake Its Rivals, Yahoo Stocks Up on Academics   by the WSJ

Yahoo was stunned that when it converted yahoo personals to paid they got more users.   Gee, maybe the fact the industry was growing at over 100% a year at the time for a couple of years had something to do with that.   The article talks about how yahoo is hiring economics professors to try and squeeze more money out of the system.   The problem is that these people can only improve on a current system,  if you have the paradigm all wrong you still can’t compete.  Ie  Paid vs free dating sites.  

Youtube is already wildly profitable.

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.

Want to share traffic?

I’m looking for any big sites that want to share traffic,   I put up a link to your site and you put up a link to my site.    English speaking traffic only…   Any link I put up will get 1-3,000  clicks a day.  Your site should be able to provide at least as much traffic.

Grab my email from the about section if you want to exchange traffic.   The more female traffic you have the better

Making millions from ads new article

The latest business 2.0 article contains a lot of info on  new media sites.

Techcrunch,   $60,000  in monthly ad revenue,   $50,000 profit  from party last weekend.
Boingboing   $1 million/year
paidcontent   $1 million/year   5 million  page views/month
fark       $600-800k/month   40 million pageviews/month

I really need to get myself an ad sales force.   At 20 million pageviews a day my site is several orders  of magnitude bigger then all these sites  but my CPM is far lower.

There is a lot of talk about john battelle’s  FM publishing.    I expect they will do well in the short run,  but it would be foolish to think that Google and yahoo are not working on something to extend brand advertising to large companies/sites in their ad network.   Offering  fortune 1000 advertisers traffic breakdown of the top sites in the publisher network along with demographic data taken from toolbars  they could really change the game.    I believe in 2 or 3 years we will have some kind of seamless ad market out there, and hopefully the provider will get less then 10% of the ad revenue.

Microsoft Confirms wide spread issues with last weeks patches.

Microsoft has confirmed there are issues with the patch released last week as I reported here.

Hotfix is out now and a update will be coming on August 22nd  the issue is with sites using dynamic compression and have IE SP 1 installed.   This is a HUGE problem and i’ve recieved hundreds of emails from angry users.   This is biggest microsoft screw up i’ve seen to date in terms of its effect on my traffic.

Userplane aquired by AOL.

Lots of comments out there on this acquisition.    Paidcontent.org  says the acquisition was in the 30-40 million range.   David evans says they have about a million a year in revenue.  Split between dating sites and social networking sites.  Userplane is my biggest fixed expense at over $100,000/year,  they are probably the only third party site that could accurately/indepently verify just how large Plentyoffish.com really is.

Techcrunch talks about the story to and has a bunch of comments,  they speculate what will happen and how it will fit into AOL’s long term strategies.   I am a little concerned as well AOL has a history of buying things and then letting them die off slowly.

Congrats to the  Userplane team,   definately a nice little pot of gold to take home and retire on!

Latest Microsoft Patches causing wide spread problems.

Ever since the security updates rolled out by microsoft this week i’ve been getting wide spread reports of problems on my site and other sites.

When users attempt to reply to a message,  or use the search on my site  both of which are forms IE  crashes and exits.    I’ve talked to other dating site owners and the same thing is happening there.   Anyone know whats going on?  I assume the problem only effects a small fraction of 1%  but when you’ve got hundreds of thousands of users that sure adds up fast.

I’ve got a few people complaining in my forums and a lot more via email.

http://forums.plentyoffish.com/datingPosts4955068.aspx

Looks like you have to reapply SP1  and the problem goes away?  I just wish I knew what the exact problem was.

The old yet new again publishing paradigm.

There was a lot of talk this week about  techcrunch network,  digg.com,  paidcontent.org and gigaom etc  starting  ** publishing 2.0** and reinventing media.   I think nothing could be further from the trueth.

There is nothing really innovative being done by any of these sites.   What I feel is happening is they are taking time sensitive information about a specific market and displaying it in a optimal way  which is a sort of a feed/blog.   If you think of a day traders desktop they get a real time news feed scrolling by on their screen,  these new networks are just a slowed down version of that.

Much like stock trading, when reading  sites such as techcrunch, digg, paidcontent etc  it doesn’t really matter if you miss a day.  If the information is important enough you will hear about it several times on several sites.   Day traders will use information contained in real time news feeds to buy stocks before the general market hears about the news 10 minutes later and make money.    In the case of sites like techcrunch,  the tech community is sitting around dissecting every site that gets reviewed and is looking for information that can make them more money  or give them a competitive advantage that no one else has.

In the future these sites will continue to grow and many online newspapers will be in trouble.   CPM rates in a online newspapers technology section will decline as users who are really into this stuff or have the intent of buying will be reading “blogs” like engadget.

I believe newspapers will start to reinvent themselves by going out and aggregating a large number of blogs and repackaging them for consumption.  This is basically what digg is doing,   the only problem  with digg is the content isn’t tailored to a user, its just a collection of stories that someone in the tech industry might be interested in.   If you think back to the stock trading example,  techcrunch would be like a news feed about a specific stock,  and digg.com  would be a news feed about the tech industry.   When is someone going to create a “news feed” that is tailored to a users interests?