You typically analyze the effectiveness based on a lift in "Direct" traffic, meaning visits to your site from people typing the URL of the site into the address bar instead of visiting it from a search of some kind. That and a lift in visits from "Branded" search results, AKA searches where the company's name is the primary search term, helps nail down the impact.

Take those sets of source information and narrow them down to visits where the IP address is within a certain range of the billboards you put up and you've got a decent way to see what happened.

Of course that's so many assumptions stacked on top of one another that yes, ultimately it's all bullshit. But when you stop doing the bullshit, other numbers drop so you have to keep doing the bullshit forever just in case it's doing something

How do the people working in marketing know how effective their marketing is?

There's a whole field called Marketing Analytics that is dedicated to quantifying the results and context of marketing efforts. It is rare for companies to spend a large amount of money (e.g. on marketing budgets) without some means of measuring what they get from spending it. This measurement generally includes things like impressions, click-through rates, time spent engaging with the content, google searches for the marketed material, visits to the websites, view counts, average and median watch time, and so on. There are a lot of key performance indicators that analysts will track in order to measure how effective a specific marketing tactic is, and those performance indicators get compared to the cost of the marketing tactic to determine overall cost efficiency.

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what they dont tell you about adulthood is that it’s startlingly easy to go long periods of time without having any fun at all not even a little bit. btw this causes ur brain to try to kill you with knives and hammers.

at the start of the game karlach and astarion are absolutely fucking reeling from being suddenly freed and are in a state of manic joy that would probably seem alien to them like a week ago, while gale has been locked in his depression tower for so long he's almost completely forgotten how to talk to people. shadowheart has not a single fucking clue whats going on because shar keeps slurping up her memories and lae'zel is literally in the midst of her ultimate nightmare scenario and trapped on an alien planet with a bunch of jackasses who have no idea whats happening. so almost everyone has experienced a situational personality shift and isn't quite the person they were a year before you met them. EXCEPT Wyll. Who is just like "this isnt even the weirdest thing thats happened to me this month." my man got scooped up, tadpoled, and slammed back and said "oh well, not gonna ruin my day" and went about his business teaching self defense to children and slaying evil beasts. He didn't even seem confused he literally did not give a shit. no urgency. He's like "I'll put that in my day planner but is gonna have to wait until after i hunt down this demon." When you recruit him there is no sense of "oh man we really gotta help each other because we have the same problem" he just would have said yes because you asked and he's wyll. Or because you told him he could kill mindflayers. He'd be like "sick" and done, no questions asked. Just another Tuesday for the blade.

The Hobbit - Illustration project by James Castillo

enraptured by the shape of this beast 🐣

Coffee shop droid. Based on designs by Katrina Belikova . Well I had fun doing this. Certainly try to imagine more scenarios if I can. And more in depth design. Cyberpunk.

in an astounding twist of fate, im looking into what is actually going on with google adsense. they're in hot fucking water right now actually.

this summer, an enormous and scathing review by adalytics (an independent media research website) came out criticizing google for a myriad of things which could be politely summed up as "fraud". we're talking like. theye were taking money to serve ads on pages that got 0 views regularly. thats not what people pay for lol.

as a result google mysteriously issued some refunds (""credits"", because "refunds" sounds bad) but insists it was all normal. adexchanger has a summary of an adage.com article

Google vehemently denies the report’s findings and that the credits are in any way related. “Issuing credits to advertisers is not uncommon,” a Google spokesperson says, adding that “Adalytics used a flawed methodology to make wildly inaccurate claims about GVP.”

so over the last four or so months, google has been making core updates to its adsense network with, apparently, very little warning to the people using it. and everyone's numbers tanked. hard. oct 2023 appears to have been esp brutal. both the search engine journal and lily ray from amsive, apparently a huge name in marketing, released reports that are completely nuts. the lily ray one is esp detailed and has a timeline of updates

73% of overall respondents indicated that they have seen their Google Discover traffic drop to 0 during the past 3 months. Among websites that lost Discover traffic, the most common complaints were dramatic traffic declines; dropping to 0 impressions and clicks; extreme percentage decreases in clicks ranging from 50-99%, and massive losses in revenue from AdSense and other ad networks.

50 to 99%?! yeah that's a small sample size but that's a fucking hell of a swing and a trend.

according to the search engine journal google appears to be saying "well, we''ll see what we can do" the same way that you would say "let me look in the back" when you know full and well its not in the back. like this reads to me as "them's the breaks". which is uhh. i think a really big problem.

Me!

I had to switch to using JellyFin because transcoding is done client-side and the Raspberry Pi it's hosted on isn't strong enough for server-side transcoding to work smoothly.

I've become my house's IT team

In love with this random guy who had a lock slapped on his storage unit for not paying its rental and not only did he ignore management and took his stuff out without paying, but also chose to steal the lock itself and send it to the LockPickingLawyer along with a confession letter

Good read, not surprising, still alarming levels of mismanagement. Deeply arrogant to approach a whole new medium with the same playbook and assume nothing needs to change

but I suppose that’s par for the course with a lot of execs these days - can’t make a pivot without lighting $$$ on fire because, and here me out here guys, what if the established approach is wrong because everyone who’s come before us just isn’t as good as us

this article is so fucking crazy. not only are they completely overhauling daredevil (which had already been half shot) but they're completely restructuring how they do television because 1. they had no showrunners 2. they had no pilots or showbibles 3. they had no tv specific executives and had execs doing tv and film simultaneously and 4.

this entire paragraph. they really were looking at seasons of tv like eight hour long movies with zero oversight zero direction just going oh well we'll fix it in post. actually fucking insane no WONDER these shows have been total garbage

Wait but tell me more, what kind of math does our godforsaken measuring system make sense for? I'm horribly curious!

oh dear oh boy okay, I’ve tried to explain this to people and had them just get more annoyed, so I’ll give it a shot, but no promises that it will make any sense. Disclaimer also that I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I’ve just done a lot of baking, and ages ago I read something by Plato explaining why the musical scale is how it is, and I’m extrapolating from the two

(wow this turned out way longer than I meant it to because IT’S MIDNIGHT)

the metric system is a base 10 system, like most modern human math, so it is easy to use in the way people tend to do math these days - ie, by sitting down with either a piece of paper or a calculator and doing sums. It’s a good system for a lot of things, especially scientific applications where you need to be VERY precise and don’t want to waste time converting units, and need to do shit like calculus. It’s a highly rational way of doing it…if you are literate.

if you aren’t literate, or are less literate, it’s not a sensible way to construct a measuring system at all. If you measure something and come up with 367.45 cm, that’s nothing. You’re going to forget it, and you can’t easily divide it by anything, there’s no way to go from here

But consider the English Foot. We’ve all been working with a base 12 system without realizing it, and without really utilizing it for what it’s best for, which is easy mental division. This is where people get mad at me, they say math all gets terrible and ugly when you do it in feet, you end up trying to figure out how many sixteenths of an inch 0.135 is, or you end up with repeating decimals, and it all sucks super bad. To this I say yes, it does, because you’re thinking like a modern algebra student, and not like a medieval bricklayer.

The base 12 system of the traditional English foot is fantastic for mental math, because 12 is a highly divisible number. It’s easily divisible into halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths by most people in their heads. The inch is then typically divided into 1/16ths, which *super* suck to deal with on a calculator, but are really quite friendly if you just keep them as fractions like God and the Magna Carta intended. This is the kind of math most artisans need to do. You want supports placed evenly along a wall, to divide a piece of fabric in half, or to double a recipe. Nobody 1.7x’s a recipe. Metric would be great for that, but why would you do that? It wouldn’t be worth the math involved.

And listen, I also use a lot of metric baking recipes. Everything is in grams, you can measure everything the same way, and it’s super accurate. They’re great if you have a digital scale, but before the age of digital scales? Unfathomable. You (a medieval peasant) have a cup you’ve decided is The Cup, and sometimes you put in a half or a third or a quarter of that cup. THAT makes sense. Also, it’s a lot easier to double something that calls for 1 cup of flour than it is when it calls for 136 grams of flour, and this is for me, a person who learned math in the typical modern way and always has a calculator in their pocket. I would have the sourdough recipe I make every week memorized if it wasn’t in fucking grams. I DO have my pie crust recipe memorized. For every cup of flour you put in a third of a cup shortening, one tablespoon of butter, and start with 3 tablespoons of water (and a dash of salt). A double crust pie takes about 3 cups of flour, so that’s one cup shortening. Easy! A third of a cup of shortening in grams is 68.3333333. That’s nothing! That’s garbage!

“Wouldn’t it be more accurate to measure 68.3333333 grams, though?” Sure, but the amount of wet indigence you need to put in any baked thing changes with the fucking weather! That’s why this recipe says “start with 3 tbs water.” There’s no need to be more accurate, and in fact it would make things more difficult.

Okay that turned into a tangent about how to make pie crust, a thing I think everyone should learn because pie crust is delicious, but i hope you get the idea. TLDR sometimes you just want to divide things in thirds and have it not suck ass. The eldritch sigil of measurement conversions is a little less threatening if you realize every step up or down is a factor of thirds or fourths

fuck oh no another half remembered piece of pop science coming at you - the largest number a typical human can hold in their head *without language* is 3. You don’t need numbers to count to three, you don’t need to count to be aware of three, you can just see three things and say “that’s three.” Don’t believe me? That’s the whole basis of Roman numerals. The numbers 1-3 are representational, after that they get more symbolic, and you never end up with more than three of the same symbol in a row. After III comes IV, not IIII, and it’s just that III is much easier on the brain. For the same reason, a lot of English conversions are in factors of 4. There are 4 cups in a quart, and 4 quarts in a gallon, so you’re only dealing with measurements that are easy to hold in your head without counting. You never have to count out 4 cups if you convert. You either need 3 cups or 1 quart. Does that make sense? Anyone who has done Big Cooking should know that if you have to count cups beyond 3 or 4 it becomes very easy to lose track.

Now i’m not saying it’s all logical. It would be great if every step was a factor of 4, but they had to get fancy and throw pints in there. Pints aren’t too bad, that’s a factor of two, but I’ll be the first to admit that it makes no sense for one tablespoon to equal three teaspoons instead of four. But because this is a system that evolved over time instead of being constructed intentionally, you have to cut it some slack. I’m sorry to anyone who decided to read this, I should be in bed, but I actually care a lot about this and I swear it’s not just stockholm syndrome from Being American