Links

In hist post Email Newsletters Are Serious Business, Jason Baptiste describes the focus, estimated number of subscribers, and profits for DailyCandy, Thrillist, Help a Reporter Out, Jason Calacanis’ List, and Ideal Bite newsletters. Baptiste reports that DailyCandy and Ideal Bite sold for $125 million and $20 million respectively. Some of the reasons he attributes to the success of email newsletters are that they are “opt-in and permission based, usually a targeted demographic or crowd, and that they provide utility or gratification to the reader.” The article is worth a look although I wish he provided more direct links for the financial numbers.

Denis Papathanasiou writes about his experiences of being Blacklisted as Malware: a Downside of using Amazon EC2. He says that when his startup launched their web service on EC2 they immediately found themselves listed on three web filtering lists. He was able to make an appeal to each of the blacklists and have his site removed after inspection, but wondered how me might find out about new blacklists in the future. Originally, Papathanasiou attributed the problem as specific to EC2, however commenters on his post quickly pointed that it was unlikely there was anything specific to Amazon’s services. For example, his IP address may have been recently used by someone else for purposes that may have attracted attention of the blacklists. In addition his domain name may well have had negative reputation from its previous owner.

Credit Karma created a graphic linking Credit Scores and Email Domains, which is intriguing, but ultimately a gimmick and not particularly useful as their 20k address sample is likely skewed enough to render the results meaningless. The comments are more entertaining than the original article. Quite a few comments lambast Credit Karma for both their data analysis and their visualization choices that create obvious distortions in the data. For example, the article does not take into consideration that many users may well have used a secondary email address to sign up with the service as they may have been worried about spam.