Idea: Shower-only gym memberships

So this one probably isn't going to make someone $1,000,000 but it would be extremely useful to people like me which is really all that matters, right? Right.

I have this thing where I can't get myself to pay $80/mth to workout indoors surrounded by smelly sweaty people and artificial light. Treadmills will never compare to running outdoors on a sunny day. I usually don't get home till after 6 when daylight is dwindling so I'd love to just take my lunch break and go for a run but my co-workers having this thing about not smelling. When are gyms going to start offering shower-only memberships for $5 or $10/mth -- I'd totally pay that. Plus, you would be getting me in the door which means I am easier to market to, more willing to buy extra stuff, and greatly increases my chances of upgrading to a full membership. Win, win.

The only thing that they would have to change is how they police their workout rooms to make sure shower-only customers aren't sneaking in. Simple, make little silicone bracelets for customers allowed to work out and hand them out with their memberships. What do those cost to make, $0.30 a piece? Done and done. Someone get on this, please?

Who said you can’t watch 5 different TV channels while working out in your own home?

Get this treadmill desk for your next in-home gym design.

via bornrich

Consumer, Cool, Design, desk, Furniture, Gadgets, home gym, treadmill, tv channels

Google just agreed to pay MySpace $900 million for the rights to advertising on the site for 3 years.

First of all, I bet they feel foolish they didn’t just buy MySpace when they had the opportunity, which turned out to be cheap at the price at $250 million dollars.

But $900 million for 3 years just feels like too much money to me, how can they possibly profit on that deal? Let’s do some off the cuff math:

$900 million over 3 years is $300 million a year. There are 50 million users. That means that each user must generate $6 in advertising clicks every year just for Google to break even, which is far off from the margins that Google gets on search advertising. $6 bucks doesn’t sound like that much though, but let’s break it down:

• Google makes a dime off of every search page view
• MySpace currently makes more like 3 or 4 cents for each page view.

Let’s assume they can target advertising more effectively just for kicks, about doubling the revenue and making 6 cents a page view.

6 bucks divided by 6 cents is 100. Every user needs to visit MySpace pages 100 times every year, just for Google to break even on their deal.

That’s pretty optimistic. It’s one thing to have a large number of registered users, quite another to have them checking back to the site twice a week on average.

And the margins…

Google spends a little bit of money just to distribute ads and run their million+ server farm and cook organic pork for their employees’ dinner. To maintain their margins and not even live up to expected gains in margins, they will need to earn back at the very least $1.25 billion in advertising on MySpace within 3 years. That’s a big number.

So why did they do the deal? In the long view, Google wants to be the only web advertising outfit out there. If they can kill off Yahoo or Microsoft’s interest in competition on those fronts, like they are moving well on with web search, they will get the whole market to themselves and corner the market on web advertising: with customers bidding against each other to set the price of the ads.

Of course MySpace is still growing frenetically, so maybe Google just wants to speculate on increased use and ride the wave on the way up :/

A new article in the New York Times today reveals that Google is now lobbying in Washington to stop Microsoft from including MSN search functionality in the upper right of their upcoming IE7 browser.

From the article

The new browser includes a search box in the upper-right corner that is typically set up to send users to Microsoft’s MSN search service. Google contends that this puts Microsoft in a position to unfairly grab Web traffic and advertising dollars from its competitors.

Google seems to consider Microsoft’s previous monopoly convictions an ace in the hole they can use in competition with the lumbering giant that is Microsoft.

What’s interesting though is that Google has their own monopoly in search that they are happy to exploit to gain market share. Virtually everyone now searches through Google, and Google uses that fact to advertise their other services – and dictate to web sites how they should lay out their content to avoid being blacklisted from Google.

While Microsoft is obviously nefarious, Google has their own browsers that default to their search engine, namely Firefox, Opera, Camino and Safari—plus others I’m sure.

In the middle of this heating up ‘search defaults’ war, poor Yahoo just has Flock.

There’s one race that makes the other races look lilliputian in comparision: GYM.

Google Yahoo MSN are currently engaged in pitched battle for online supremecy. 2006 Marks the rise of Google to take supremecy over the other 2, who have mostly rested on their laurels until the Google threat arrived but are slowly investing in their widely used online services again as their reach fades:

(Alexa)

The reason Google has taken over is likely due to the introduction of their competitive services that have been slowly stealing market share, chiefly GMail, which now according to Alexa statistics has just over 10% of Hotmail’s reach.

Hotmail is almost the entirety of Microsoft’s online, a service that ironically is one of the worst in online email providers. Microsoft also is investing in a search engine that a significant percentage of people do use, as well as spaces and msn financial that attract a fair audience.

Microsoft has been doing the worst of GYM. There have been big shakeups in the MSN department at Microsoft very recently, so maybe Microsoft will somehow be able to drag itself back into relevancy one more time.

Yahoo has the most diverse portfolio of projects, that are all somewhat popular in their own right, and they have a more sophisticated set of business principles attached to each project, charging premium access fees to the small percentage of users who need more than basic features.

Nevertheless, Yahoo is also on a downward trend, and it seems like Yahoo as well is moving away from their concept of the Internet as just another mass media outlet and towards betting on the idea of the web as a read/write medium, with aquisitions of innovative companies like del.icio.us and Flickr.

The next 6 months for these companies are going to be interesting, each will be launching new products and taking products out of beta, and it seems like there are shakeups in the works internally for all three companies.