#555: In her own image

From Friday's Globe and Mail: "So far the moderation in inflation has not occurred." Says it all, really.

Also, life imitates Bonobo Conspiracy strip #523. Although I think Algea is somewhat younger than 17.

In Project Wonderful news, I started scaling back my bids because my account with them was running low, and I've already sunk what feels like more than enough money into it. I decided to shoot for breaking even - spending no more money buying ads on other people's sites than my own ad boxes bring in. So I've been looking at my bids, figuring out which are most expensive per click, and lowering those until they're no longer winners - the idea being to reduce my total expenses while keeping the bids that produce the best performance of clicks per unit money. Thing is, though, pretty often when I lower a bid to the point where it starts losing the auction, it only loses the auction for a short time. Other people are lowering their bids too. I wonder if I've started some kind of a thing. Unfortunately, it's happening on my own boxes, too. The vertical box went from 0.10 and 0.20 bids, to 0.02, in the last couple of days. Of course that reduces my budget and means (if I'm going to be serious about the break-even thing) that I have to lower my own bids even more.

I wonder if this is going to stabilize in some kind of steady state, or if it's a basic problem with the market. Money leaves the system for Ryan's 25% cut, and presumably some of the big-time ad venues (the ones that get bids of dollars per slot per day) are taking out profits as well. I'm not taking out profits. If too many of the small-timers like me decide they want to break even, there's going to be very little actual money entering the system, and the stable state is going to be basically a free banner-swap network. For it to work as designed, there need to be more buyers bidding more real money, and I don't know where they're going to come from.