…oh, and why you want to be ready for Scott Hanselman love

This afternoon I was sitting in a meeting discussing a potential upcoming marketing campaign to target developers.  It’s a great concept, and I am looking forward to seeing it come to fruition.  However, during the course of the discussion, it became clear that ad buys would be the primary driver of traffic.

My chief concern was that the developer audience uses ad blocker software at a higher rate than the general population.  We don’t have data on it, and no one was sure how to get it.  I asked the community at Hacker News, and was pointed to this posting about the downloads of AdBlock Plus.  That was a good start, but to really get an answer about which we could feel happy I came up with this hack to get quick and dirty numbers.

This is the part where I learned the following formula:

Scott Hanselman Influence + Survey Monkey + Basic Account = Fail

To get started, I created a survey up at Survey Monkey.  Unfortunately, the basic account has a cap at 100 responses for any survey.  I pinged Scott once I had the bit.ly link set up, asking for help from his tweeple.  I set up the bit.ly link so that I could track clicks on the survey, versus just knowing how many people took it.  Within, and this is not a joke, a few minutes, I had hit my cap.  Whoops.  Within the time it took me to get a credit card into the system, I lost about 150 to 200 clicks.  I would never have known about the survey being closed had @BrianGorbett been on the spot to point it out.

If you happen to work at Survey Monkey, here’s a potential feature.  Don’t close the survey.  Continue to collect the data, but only show me the first 100 responses.  Holding the data captive is a far more likely upgrade path than me coming in after the fact and deciding to upgrade.  I will likely be happy with 100 responses, and probably wouldn’t have known about the survey closing to so many others (especially if Twitter streams come into play).  I have no idea how many of their surveys hit the 100 response limit, and what their convert ratio is on those basic users to upgrade to premium, but my need was now, not tomorrow.  I don’t know when I will need another survey, and had Brian not pointed it out, I would never have known, and wouldn’t have upgraded my account.  That would have been $19.99 lost dollars you didn’t get.

The survey is still open, but as of this writing, I had 991 clicks, about 12 retweets, and 584 survey takers.  Awesome!  It was a pretty simple survey asking what type of developer you see yourself as, and whether or not you use ad blocking software.  I asked people to categorize themselves as “web app developer”, “enterprise developer”, “different kind of developer”, or “not a developer.”  The result is that 55% of the time, people are using AdBlockers.

More surprisingly was that it almost didn’t matter how you classified yourself, the percentages were pretty consistent.

Looking at a breakdown by self-identified type, there are quite a few “enterprise” developers out there.  More than I would have thought given the audience of the tweets.

So there you go.  Updated: Total time from survey monkey account creation to having this data was a couple of hours.

If you are thinking about using ads to drive traffic to a marketing campaign, you will want to consider what percentage of your audience is likely to never see the ads, and therefore how your results will be skewed.  I was surprised that for techies (since Twitter drove most of the clicks) were as likely to to have ad blocker turned activated regardless of whether they identified themselves as a dev or not.

I spent the better part of the last month looking to buy a new car.  I have to say, I am quite surprised at the tactics that would be employed to sell a car.  It’s bad enough that we are in a bit of an economic, erm, situation borne of borrowing too much and living beyond our means, but to willfully create fiscal irresponsibility is something I could not let go.

Let me start by saying I ultimately bought the Honda Odyssey from the lot in question, Bellevue Honda.  The sales person, Gil, was a great guy, and had nothing to do with my issue.  I take Honda to task.  Since I didn’t notice this “issue” until the day that I was buying the car, I don’t know whether or not this is an issue with other lots.  I suspect it is.

This first picture is from the window of a Honda Insight.  At a whopping 40-45 miles per gallon, what’s not to like about this car?  Sounds great, and the $1,464 in fuel costs per year sounded normal to me.  Normal is a relative term, of course, and I didn’t do the math in my head to sort out if this number made any real sense at all.  It wasn’t until I wandered past a Honda Pilot that I did a double take, with the words “WTF” flying out of my mouth.

You see, the Honda Pilot is one of those SUVs.  They tend to drink gasoline.  I should know, I used to own one.  This sticker shows that they get 16-22 miles per gallon.  That’s an improvement over the initial model year (when I was an owner), but clearly worse than the Insight, right?  Apparently, your estimated fuel costs for the Pilot will be about $1,585 per year.  Again, WTF?  At first I thought that Honda was playing games with the number of miles per year that someone would be driving.  You know, because someone who is driving a hybrid will drive that shit to death because of all the great gas mileage they are getting.  Nope, it turns out that they estimate 15,000 miles per year on both cars.

So the culprit lay at the feet of the estimated fuel costs.  $4.10 per gallon for the Insight and $1.90 for the Pilot.  Again, WTF?  I really, really want to believe that this is not a calculated move on the part of Honda, and in fact the fuel prices reflect the reality of the fuel costs at the time the lot took ownership of the car.  Regardless, with that kind of spread in pricing, the lots should take the initiative and change the stickers in the cars to reflect a price of gasoline more in line with reality.  At $1.90, the estimated fuel costs for the Insight would be about $680.  The Pilot, at $4.10 per gallon, would estimate out to about $3,400.

Again, I want to believe that Honda just dropped the ball.  I don’t want to think that since SUVs have historically been the profit honey pots for car dealerships that they are maliciously misleading customers with an artificially low per year fuel costs to make them seem more affordable.