Real estate lies with short legs - Bratislava apartments for sale

There is a Slovak saying "A lie has short legs" - meaning it will not get away very far. I find it so hard to understand why lying is endemic among the real estate agents here in Bratislava. There are just so many misleading adverts for properties on sale. Over the last few years I have looked at hundreds if not thousands of real estate listings, especially apartment listings in Bratislava, I have dug around looking at the same apartments on offer from various real estate agents and here is a brief list of how they usually mislead:

1. Apartment size - it is very common to list square metres including areas that definitely do not belong. Most usually the cellar will be included, often balconies, too. It is pretty common for the agent him- or herself not to know if the metres cited include cellars. In my book saying that a 73 sq.m. apartment is 84 sq.m. because of a cellar located four floors below is a blatant lie.

2. Floor - advertising often omits to state clearly than an apartment is on the ground floor, it simply does not mention floor at all. This is just misleading.

3. Location - for apartments near and even far from the Old Town, the agents check Old Town as location to make people searching for Old Town Apartments look at their offerings.

The frustrating thing is that you will eventually find the truth out and inevitably lose faith in the agent. Why do so many of them take this short-sighted view?

Like Putting on a Ski Mask to Rob Google Blind

I've been eager to see who gets to advertise on my blog. At the moment for obvious reasons I don't get any visitors or anyone clicking my ads, so I guess Google is reaching into the dark corners of its advertisers' database in the rotation.

I have seen and felt Google Adwords guidelines on all sorts of advertising copy - spelling, punctuation, use of superlatives. I have also read extensively about the death of MFA.
Anyway, in true Andy Beal style, WELCOME NEW ADVERTISER, Project Black Mask:
For an incredible RRP of $97, ProjectBlackMask.com promises to reveal Google's Dirty Little Secret to "wealthbuilders".

I did not click (so I do not have to email Google), I typed in the URL directly. And I learned the the Project Black Mask has nothing to do with affiliate marketing but everything to do with

...gaming the search engines for thousands of FREE clicks in a completely automated way. Black Mask is about milking a loophole in the Google algorithm that was open in 2006... is still open in 2007... but it might not be in 2008...

"Like Putting On A
Ski Mask To Rob
Google Blind!"

More Project Black Mask ads (and respectable organic exposure) can be found if you search Google: a Squidoo lense, Digg entry and 11 ads, all pretty targetted:

Black Mask Blindfold
Project Black Mask is outdated
Learn why here
www.bigwiglog.com

Project Black Mask LAUNCH
Massive $50 Discount. Only Here.
_Everything_ will be revealed!
ProjectBlackMaskRevealed.info

In fact, you can see a whole bunch here.

Whatever people say about Google and democracy in China, Google proves its democratic nature here: you can pooh-pooh Google and advertise here no problem! :)

Watching a Ponzi-scheme implode

Over and over again, people get involved in Ponzi schemes (most likely since before Ponzi's time). The ones who get in early on can profit - sometimes handsomely, if they get their exit timing right.

In Slovakia, we are currently seeing what looks dangerously like a Ponzi scheme unravel and it seems fur is gonna fly...

In November 2006 a company called Duna-Trade, s.r.o. based in Galanta, a small town some 50 km from Bratislava, changed its name to Auto-Reklama, s.r.o (which means "car advertising"). The seat of the firm changed from a run-down Galanta prefab block of flats to an attractive address in the historical centre of Bratislava.

Soon an offer that sounded too good to be true but good enough for those who wanted to fall for it came to light: if you own a car, pay SKK 25,000 (about USD 1,000) upfront, Auto-Reklama will plaster advertising all over your car and pay you SKK 7,000 every month. Or lease a new car through the company and they will pay the same amount towards your leasing. All you have to do is show up once a month so the company can check you are driving the required amount (900 km).

Cars of all makes and ages with aggressive Auto-Reklama stickers proliferated around Bratislava and Slovakia and people started to get paid. More people signed up. The media did a little sniffing - the owner of the company turned out to have debts vis-a-vis the state Social Insurance Agency from other companies. More interestingly, all the ads were always for Auto-Reklama itself. After all, whoever would pay over SKK 100,000 per year (assuming a VAT tax and some minimum fee for the middle-man's transaction costs) to put a sticker on someone's ugly car? Perhaps one of the Miss Auto-Reklama candidates? Or the 82 Bratislava cars featured on the website (notice the licence plates, readable on most cars)?

In May Auto-Reklama missed its monthly payments, the owner disappeared (a spokesman for the company explained only the owner had the right to release payments and the owner was abroad). Auto-Reklama offices in some towns stayed closed, with employees reportedly fearing an angry mob.

Two big questions remain:
1. Where is THE MAN behind all this now (a Mr. Porozsnyák)?
2. Do those butt-ugly stickers come off without trace?

Who's gonna cry when the MFA bonanza ends?

Not so long ago it was common to search Google and find pay-per-click ads in the results pointing to sites with nothing but more ads. You would search for something like 'Ohio insurance' and find a number of results with ads such as

Top sites on Ohio insurance
See top web results
on Ohio insurance!
ohio.thetop4bestsites.info

You would click through to a site filled with little but more Google ads - with numerous Adsense blocks throughout. The sites were usually optimised for maximum click-through on ads.

A case of arbitrage - webmasters tried to find cheap terms to advertise on and then have advertisements, which pay more on their own website. While this worked, and it did for a long time, there were apparently people out there making as much as tens of thousand dollars per month (UPS Club, anyone?).

But like with any untapped opportunity, the news spread and ranks of arbitrage and made-for-adsense (MFA) webmasters swelled. Automated software appeared to simplify the task of finding 'untapped niches'. Webmasters would find various ways to obtain cheap traffic (Adwords, organic, other cpc ad systems) and turn into into more expensive traffic by displaying higher quality ads.

What were the effects?
1. for Google, the additional ad-clicking meant the appearance of extra revenue, but not extra profit, since this was simply a transfer from some its advertisers to some of its publishers. In fact, MFA arbitrageurs were taking away money that could have been Google's profit,
2. for regular advertisers an increase in cost and decrease in effectiveness (conversion rates, ROI) of their ads on Google Adwords, likely pushing a segment of potential advertisers outside of the network completely,
3. for clever MFA webmasters, often huge profits with a small initial time investment,
4. for the searcher a decrease in quality of the search engine results pages (SERPs) - they click on ads, which rather than showing the expected content show more ads.

There were calls from the advertiser and searcher communities for Google to stop this practice. In the long term, by souring the quality of results (especially in the content network - ads published on people's blogs and other sites) the MFS arbitrage was probably hurting Google itself. Many CPC experts recommended that advertisers opt out of the content network (ads displayed on sites of publishers outside of Google itself)

According to Andy Beal at MarketingPilgrim.com, self-admitted MFA webmasters at WebmasterWorld have been discussing notices they received from Google that their Adsense accounts will be suspended as of June 1, 2007. Google apparently deemed their business model unfit (albeit after tolerating it for years).

And for MFA webmasters out there - lucky you, if you have made enough this way to make getting into a new business model easy, start learning about defensible traffic now. Also, there must be a market for your skills in writing those high click-through adwords ads and placing the adsense boxes just right.

Joost Blogging

Joost - Dusoft forced-fed me an "invite" to the peer-to-peer internet TV by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (of Skype and Kazaa fame). We watched a few car reviews including some pretty neat shows about almost mass market cars such as the BMW 130i and VW R32. Of course, the Porsche shows were neat too.

After troubleshooting an issue around logging off Dusoft's account and creating mine in the downloaded player we made Joost fullscreen. The broadcast was split in the middle by the frames of my two 19'' screens. Seeing the unused potentially monetisable real estate - the dark sides around the image, made me gulp at the though of the advertising potential.

Of course, the Joosters possibly gulped in a similar fashion some two years ago, began development with 150 programmers (or rather software developers in New York, London, Leiden and Toulouse - no word on Tallinn or Bratislava).