TopGear, the well-known UK car show, takes the Veyron up to 250MPH. Awe-inspiring
Porn.com
Some statistics on porn.com, a parked page from Name Intelligence.
Here are some details the owner of Porn.com gave to the crowd:
* Averages 26,000 clickthroughs per day to paid ads. * Earns between $2000 to $4000 per day * Averages 50,000 unique visitors per day
I predict this name will be back at Auction soon and the price will have increased. Someone could have stolen a great name for only $7.5 Million today.
That is 18 million unique visitors a year and over $1M per year in revenue (which for a parked page is basically equivalent to profit) without any work whatsoever. Pretty remarkable for an investment that someone made in the mid 1990s of $35 to $70 per year.
Summit Partners using Google Adwords
Makes sense that a firm with a mass outbound calling strategy would be the first (only?) to use (test?) Google Adwords for lead generation / deal sourcing. Here is the landing page that the Google Adwords lead you to.
Conventional wisdom says that this is too high value a service to be advertised for online, but at the lower end of the mid-market, the ads might generate a few leads along the way...
Built-in Upward Bias at Rating Agencies
Moody's, Stupid or Greedy, Flip-Flops on Banks: Mark Gilbert
Someone has gone to the trouble of producing mini-videos mocking the situation and posting them on the Internet. ``I let you out of my sight for 10 seconds and you give out AAA to the Icelanders,'' says a guy in a turban. ``You were just meant to boost fees and get more CDO business.''
There's more than a grain of truth in that little jest about collateralized debt obligations, known as CDOs. On March 13, for example, Moody's shares dropped as much as 6.5 percent on concern the rise in subprime mortgage defaults would crimp the market for new CDOs, hurting fee income for rating companies. Shares of McGraw-Hill Cos., the owner of Standard & Poor's, declined by as much as 2.7 percent.
Pay to Play
The rating companies are scrapping for market share in a business with a built-in bias. Anyone who makes and sells bonds for a living will pay whichever rating company is likely to give their products the highest grade.
So the intellectual honesty of delivering a true assessment of creditworthiness conflicts with the commercial imperative to win business. And whenever one of the rating companies tweaks its methodology, it always seems to result in higher grades, never lower assessments.