Tim Rogers

MY NIPPLES ARE DELIGHTFUL

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 21:28:35 +0000

MY NIPPLES ARE DELIGHTFUL

Just made a pretty awesome discovery. If you are a Netflix...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:50:00 +0000

Just made a pretty awesome discovery. If you are a Netflix subscriber in the UK (like me!) after it launched a month or so back, you have access to the US Netflix as well - your subscription is for the service in general, not for any particular country’s service.

This means that with the same login as you already have, without even retyping your password, you can get access to the much bigger content catalog from the US if you’re on the site whilst on holiday to the US (or working from a US internet connection *wink*). I think this is pretty awesome! I can already see there are a lot more things, and for instance, in the UK only 5 seasons of The Office are available whereas you get 1-7 in the US.

Now this is pretty awesome for me, but I’m definitely guessing it would work in the other direction as well for all the people in the States pining after UK TV - if you get a UK VPN set up somehow, I’m sure you’ll find access to our Netflix content too!

For reference, I’m not in the US. I just set up a pretty awesome little VPN on Amazon EC2 last night which does the job perfectly. And it’s incredibly fast compared to any VPN I’ve used previously.

It appears that great coffee does exist in London. In a new...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:24:05 +0000

It appears that great coffee does exist in London. In a new place called Fork on Marchmont Street, WC1.

A very proud moment for me when my post about running AdWords...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:23:43 +0000

A very proud moment for me when my post about running AdWords ads for Dropbox got to the front page on Hacker News - always nice and my first front page ever.

As a nice little experiment and after some posts around the...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:26:00 +0000

The ad statistics

The ad I actually ran

As a nice little experiment and after some posts around the Internet, I decided to use Google AdWords in order to get some more referrals on Dropbox and get some more space. Now, Dropbox give you 2GB free, which is cool, but not much. You can then pay $9.99 for 50GB space, but that only lasts while you’re paying and it isn’t that cheap, especially for students like me. Another route to free space is getting other people to sign up who you invite, for which you get 250MB extra, or 500MB for students (like me!)

Any bonus space you manage to get is permanent and thus stays on your account without paying. I already had a couple of gig extra from various places around the site and from a little game they did called Dropbox. But I wanted more. Another good way at the moment is using the Dropbox beta client which gives you 500MB extra for every 500MB of photos you upload, up to 5GB.

AdWords is the thing that lets you run ads on Google search results and I had never given it a try so I thought I would. As I’ve now learnt though, it can be expensive, but I managed to get a $25 voucher from my web host and within the US, Google offers a free $75 voucher to pretty much anyone - there’s a link to that in the Lifehacker post.

So, for a day, I simply ran ads for the keyword “dropbox” - I made the ad looks a little different to how the guide suggested, not sure what difference that made though. I also had a few extra keywords like “online space” and “drop box”, but the effect of those was negligible so I wouldn’t bother.

On different articles about doing this, there are very different ideas about what to use for your CPC, which is the maximum you’re willing to pay for each click on your ads. Some suggest small and some high, but I went for quite a high one as the web interface was suggesting that the ad probably wouldn’t be displayed at the lower rates. In the end, I picked a CPC of £0.80 (~$1.26) for the “dropbox” keyword and £0.60 (~$0.95) for the others.

Throughout the day, the referrals rolled in. Well, when I say rolled in, it wasn’t many. I think I got 6, thereby earning me 3GB of extra space which I’m quite happy with. As you can see from my picture above, the average cost I paid per click was £0.15 (~$0.24), which amounted to £0.14 for the “dropbox” keyword (~$0.22) and as much as £0.59 (~$0.93) for some of my other ones. So I’d probably only recommend bothering with that one search term, since it got by far the most results.

All in all, whilst I run the ads, I got 30,651 impressions (that’s how many people saw the ad) amounting to 218 clicks. Out of those clicks, only 12 people actually signed up for Dropbox, and even less, only 6 people downloaded the client and thus completed the referral and earned me my space. I can only hope though that a few more will! Financially, setting my maximum daily budget to £18 (~$28.43), I ended up spending £33.41 (~$52.77) overall over about 2 days, going beyond my free voucher’s balance, leaving me £11.62 (~$18.35) to pay to Google.

At the end of the day, I’m quite happy. I managed to get quite a bit of extra permanent space, which was quite a good idea as my Dropbox had been running a little low, and a little more space couldn’t hurt. I did admittedly end up spending a little more than I had hoped, but the exercise as a whole was interesting and I don’t mind giving Google a little of my money for all the stuff they’ve provided to me online! I’d definitely recommend this idea to anyone who wants more Dropbox space, but only if they’ve got a little money to spend. If you’re in the US or Canada however, it’s definitely worth it since you get a much more substantial free voucher!

Do me a favour and vote me up on Hacker News if you can!

If anyone fancies getting me a little more space, feel free to use my referral link - hope all you HN users enjoyed the article!

Update: I’m giving the same thing a go now using the free £30 vouchers available now for Microsoft Advertising on Bing - I’ll make a new post when I have my results!

Pam in The Office. With glasses. What is happening to the world?

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:11:35 +0000

Pam in The Office. With glasses. What is happening to the world?

A look behind the scenes at gov.uk

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:03:08 +0000

A look behind the scenes at gov.uk:

Pretty cool to see how the back-end and monitoring works, as well getting an idea of the development process. The whole site is a massive step forward for the UK Government.

konnaire: I got so bored today that I actually made myself some...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:41:34 +0000

konnaire:

I got so bored today that I actually made myself some badges. Quite fond of this one.

Can I steal this sexy badge? <3

I love Jim’s awful realisation in The Office S04E07 that he is actually pretty similar to...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:41:10 +0000

I love Jim’s awful realisation in The Office S04E07 that he is actually pretty similar to Michael. The only difference really is that he’s genuinely funny rather than just trying to be.

At the uni bar with mates. It’s such a tradition that we...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:11:01 +0000

At the uni bar with mates. It’s such a tradition that we couldn’t possibly let football interrupt it…

Just installed a Tumblr app called DashBuddy on my Windows...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:32:10 +0000

Just installed a Tumblr app called DashBuddy on my Windows Phone. To try it, I thought I’d just post a quick screenshot from my device. It’s a pretty cool app.

My awful BlackBerry PlayBook app is done - let’s hope...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:26:34 +0000

My awful BlackBerry PlayBook app is done - let’s hope it’s sufficient to get me a free device. Although I suspect it probably won’t be, which is fair to be honest considering it sucks.

I love how Pam actually looks happy all the time again in The Office Season 4. No more tormented and...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:00:10 +0000

I love how Pam actually looks happy all the time again in The Office Season 4. No more tormented and anguished girl from Series 3 and back to the happy and Jim-loving girl of before - yey :D

Free BlackBerry PlayBook. Hopefully.

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:28:00 +0000

Free BlackBerry PlayBook. Hopefully.:

RIM are genuinely mental and offering a free BlackBerry PlayBook for everyone who makes an app for it in the next week or so. And before you ask, I’m working on it ;)

konnaire: The new gov.uk beta site is making me genuinely...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 10:32:44 +0000

konnaire:

The new gov.uk beta site is making me genuinely happy. The subsequent pages are just as fantastic.

Even the government can make nice websites if they try.

Just thought I’d quickly share this photo as well as I...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 10:25:05 +0000

Just thought I’d quickly share this photo as well as I like it - a little table and chairs at the end of the garden rather swamped with snow.

One of my many snow pictures this morning - pretty! You can see...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 10:17:10 +0000

One of my many snow pictures this morning - pretty! You can see the rest of them on my Google+, let me know what you think and reblog if you like :)

Snow Mark II: this time, I bothered to get my tripod.

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 23:39:59 +0000

Snow Mark II: this time, I bothered to get my tripod.

Jim and Pam in The Office US. Literally the best TV couple ever.

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 23:18:46 +0000

Jim and Pam in The Office US. Literally the best TV couple ever.

All I do now is watch The Office on Netflix.

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 23:02:16 +0000

All I do now is watch The Office on Netflix.