Dana Blankenhorn

Valuing Clicks

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 39 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Let's go back to Internet Commerce a moment or two. That's what A-Clue.Com was created to cover in 1997.

A click's value is easy to state but very hard to calculate.

It's worth what you can get for it.

The corollary is also true.

It costs what it costs.

In absolute terms this means a page view is worth the advertising (or commerce revenue) you can generate from it, less the cost of getting the page view and serving the page.

V= A - C

These values vary tremendously by site, and ignorance of the underlying equation leads to ferocious misunderstanding wherever e-commerce is discussed.

Identifying the Crazy

Frank Rich did us all a favor by providing some historical perspective to the hysterical ramblings of Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck, it seems, is playing the 1897 Game.

Much of what passes for the Right today is a reversed version of 1969. Haties are hippies, born followers of the previous thesis who, in the wake of a crisis for which they had no answers, are just taking their ideas to extremes.

Beck's nonsense has deeper historical roots. While we think of Populism in terms of William J. Bryan, even assigning it some liberal values because it opposed Wall Street and led to such innovations as the Income Tax and Federal Reserve, it was in fact a cross-partisan festival of hatred against "the other."

This is reflected best perhaps at the Georgia State Capitol. You won't find a statue of Jimmy Carter or Martin Luther King Jr. there. Instead you'll see this man, the Populist Thomas E. Watson.

Watson actually got a sniff of national power as a potential vice president to Bryan in 1896. His statue stands where it does, however, thanks to his later proclamations of racism and anti-semitism, which culminated in the lynching of Leo Frank and the second rising of the KKK. The statue's legend reads, "A champion of the right who never faltered in the cause."

Beck's nonsense is cut from the same cloth. Unlike Fox' other nutcases, Beck is virulently anti-Wall Street. He is also overtly religious, adding to its bigotry a hatred of black and brown people, all wrapped up in a "caring" attitude for The Little Guy.

That's Watson all over.

Keith Olbermann calls the result "Lonesome Rhodes," after the character Andy Griffith played in 1957's "A Face in the Crowd." Griffith's Rhodes was a bigoted, profane force of nature, an Arkansas con man whose act won him money, fame and power until he took himself too seriously.

Beck isn't as good an actor as Griffith. He's not as  self-aware as Rhodes was. It's important that Watson did not become the man on the pedestal until his national flame had dimmed, when he became a hurricane for regional injustice, until his followers actually committed murder for him.

Beck''s probably not that strong, either.