#HE’S CURRENTLY THE ONLY OTHER SCOTT ON THE SERVER AND ALL SCOTTS IN EVERY UNIVERSE ARE LEGALLY ORDINATED MINISTERS

[teapot-of-tyrahn]

IF MAJORMOON WINS THEYRE GOING TO GET MARRIED (AGAIN) AND DOUBLE LIFE SCOTT IS GOING TO BE HELD AT GUNPOINT BY THE WATCHERS AS THE OFFICATOR. DOUBLE LIFE SCOTT IS GOING TO BE FORCED AGAINST HIS WILL TO OFFICIATE THE WEDDING BETWEEN HIS EX-SOULMATE AND THEIR NEW HUSBAND (WHO IS LITERALLY A CLONE OF HIM BUT BETTER IN EVERY CONCIVEABLE WAY).

COME ON IT WOULD BE REALLY FUNNY.

The final poll.

[smaidjor]

i know they're losing (chapter 2)

Hello everyone! Since the last chapter received such a positive response (well, if screaming could be called a positive response), I've decided to not make you all wait long for the second chapter of this fic. Also, I have no self-control. Anyways!

Once again obligatory disclaimer this is characters not people, don't ship real people, etc.

Chapter Title: over snow and winter's morn

Chapter Wordcount: 3203

Content warnings: more discussion of death, also quite a bit of Scott being a bit of a dick. He's going through it, besties.

AO3 Link

Chapter 1

Actual fic under the cut:

Jimmy doesn’t get a chance to return the ring any time in the next few weeks. Scott must have told Katherine that he visited, since she doesn’t come to bother him about it, and every time Jimmy tries to go to Rivendell, something gets in the way. Demon attacks, urgent business in his empire, once even Scott’s own guards turning him away. Apparently Scott is a ‘busy elf’. Jimmy doesn’t doubt he is, but he also doesn’t doubt that Scott’s actively trying to avoid him. Scott is a petty man, ultimately, and Jimmy knows this, used to love it like he loved all his husband’s flaws, all his imperfections that were perfect to Jimmy. Now, though, it just hurts that Scott’s turning that pettiness on him.

Finally, something changes. Jimmy gets an invitation (in person!) from one of his closest allies; Lizzie wants to hold a ball, and she wants as many people as possible to come. It will be fancy and formal, with dancing and politics and all the things Jimmy’s just a bit awkward with, but he is an extrovert at heart, and well...Scott will be there, as Lizzie warns him.

“I know you and him don’t really get on, so I get if you don’t want to come. I really hope you will, though, it’s going to be a fun night!”

Jimmy nods. “I’ll be there! I need to talk to Scott anyways, actually, got to return this ring to him. It’s important, I think.”

“Gotcha! See you there,” Lizzie says with a broad smile. Jimmy appreciates that she doesn’t ask any questions about the ring, especially given that it’s the one thing holding together his emotional state right now.

And that’s how he finds himself frantically searching for something fancy enough to wear to a formal ball, wishing he’d had the forethought to plan for this a bit better. Scott would have planned, he thinks, would have had an outfit laid out for each of them and the time it would take them to get there exactly calculated.

He shakes that thought off, settling for a green tunic with copper accents. It’s not the most elegant thing in the world, especially when you take into account the slime that’s dripped onto it, but it’ll have to do. It’s representative of his empire for sure, and the copper is a nod to his ally. It’s good enough, and that’s what matters, Jimmy thinks.

Lizzie greets him when he enters the ballroom, smiling widely with her new fiance by her side. “Jimmy! Glad you could make it!”

“Yeah, yeah, I did make it! Here I am!” The smile he gives her is genuine; he likes Lizzie. She's fierce and kind all at once, the best kind of ally.

Joel offers him a brief wave, which Jimmy happily returns before Lizzie drags him off to chat.

“So, heard from a little birdy you’ve actually been visiting Scott,” Lizzie says, a grin like the cat that got the bird on her face.

“As a favor to Katherine,” Jimmy quickly clarifies.

She nods. “She did say that, yes. She also said she heard about the visit from Scott himself.”

Jimmy hates himself a little for being pathetic enough to ask “What did- did she say what he said? Was he talking about me?”

“She didn’t say exactly, but he seemed ‘shaken up’, apparently...and a little wistful.”

“Oh, no. Lizzie, no.”

“Say, why did you have his ring?” She’s still grinning, a little more evil this time.

“It’s a long story!” Jimmy blurts, and flees. How’s he supposed to say ‘oh we were married on a server where we thought we were going to permanently die and then we respawned here and now Scott’s refusing to talk to me because the grief over my last death is slowly killing him’ tactfully? There’s just no way to do it! Nice one, Jimmy, now she thinks you’re in love with him or something, he thinks ruefully. Not that he isn’t- wasn’t. Wasn’t. Scott’s made it very clear that he and Jimmy are through.

Still, even with his depressing thoughts, the ball is pretty okay. No one’s gotten assassinated, there haven’t been any demonic appearances, Lizzie’s already showing off her engagement ring, and he’s pretty sure Joey’s going off about how hot demons are. It’s a decent party, by empires standards.

Scott makes an appearance some twenty minutes or so later, stepping into the ballroom with typical elven grace. He’s not a very elven elf, as he once told Jimmy, short and sarcastic with a love for mortals, but he still looks twice as elegant as everyone else in the ballroom. The shakiness in his step from a few weeks ago seems entirely gone, and for a minute, Jimmy’s heart leaps in hope. Maybe he’s getting better?

Well, only one way to find out. Jimmy swallows the complicated knot of emotion in his chest as he crosses the ballroom, coming to an ungraceful stop in front of Scott. Up close, the elf looks worryingly pale, and there are dark circles under his eyes. He looks like a strong breeze might sweep him away.

“Lord Codfather,” Scott greets.

“Elvenking,” Jimmy returns, dipping his head a little. Look, Scott, he can be formal too, alright? “Care for a dance?”

Scott stares for a long moment before giving a single nod. “I suppose I wouldn’t mind.” He takes Jimmy’s outstretched hand in his own gloved one, letting Jimmy put a hand on his waist as they start into a simple waltz.

Now, Jimmy is a terrible dancer, and he’s not too proud to admit it. He steps on Scott’s feet, gets off-rhythm once or twice, and nearly crashes them straight into Lizzie and Joel. But despite their current status as enemies(ex-spouses?), Scott says nothing about it. He’s silent, in fact, seemingly caught up in the music. There’s something wistful about his expression, something soft and gentle hidden under his icy facade. If Jimmy tries hard enough, he can almost pretend that the two of them are back in 3rd life, dancing under the stars, and Scott is looking at him like he’s the most precious thing in the world.

The illusion is shattered, however, by how heavily Scott is leaning on him by the end of the dance. He’s unsteady on his feet, grip like iron on Jimmy’s hand and shoulder. Though Jimmy can’t feel his hands though the gloves, when he brushes against Scott’s arm, it’s still a little too cold to be entirely right.

The music slows and then pauses before the next song, and they head for the edge of the dance floor.

“Thank you for the dance, Codfather,” Scott says. He steps away, face falling back into the emotionless facade so quickly it’s hard to be sure the tender expression of a moment before wasn’t a dream.

That’s the final straw for Jimmy’s fragile self-control. “Can we please stop acting like we don’t know each other?”

“What else do you want from me?” Scott snaps back.

“I- something! Anything! Just acknowledge that I exist, won’t you?”

“Acknowledging you exist doesn’t mean I’m still in love with you, you know.”

“I know,” Jimmy says, a little softer, a little bitter. “I know, trust me. I just want you to stop- to stop hurting yourself to try and avoid pain!”

“That’s not what I’m do-”

“Then what are you doing? Enlighten me, o wise elf!” They’ve kept their voices low enough, but people nearby are still starting to stare at them. Jimmy can’t bring himself to care. “You told me it would destroy you to lose me, but you’re losing me now by pushing me away!”

Scott’s expression is pained for a moment before he covers it with a glare. “I’m trying to do what’s best for the both of us, Jimmy.”

“No you’re-”

“I am an elf, and I cannot love a mortal. Humans are quick flames, burning and changing quickly. You’ll fall in love again, and you’ll forget me. There will be a mortal who loves you- I’m sure there are many already.”

“But I don’t want a mortal,” Jimmy protests. “I want you.”

“You can’t have me.”

“But why? Why, Scott?” His voice breaks, embarrassingly enough. “You said you loved me, you promised me all the time we’d be able to- to carve out, to steal from the universe.”

“I can’t give you that!” Scott snaps. “You’ll live sixty more years, maybe, a fraction of my life, a blink of an eye to an elf, and I can’t even give you that long! Not when I have to be the elvenking before anything else. Nothing I can do will ever be enough for you.”

“Enough for me? For ME? All I want is for you not to die to your own dumb plan and acknowledge my existance once in a while!”

“And all I want is for you to realize I can’t love you again!”

“Why can’t you care about me?”

“Why can’t you move on?” Scott counters.

“You’re not moving on, you’re just trying to forget!” Jimmy shouts.

In the silence that follows, he realizes that most of the ballroom must have heard the end of their little lovers’ quarrel. In fact, Lizzie’s somehow appeared next to him, laying a hand on his arm.

“Is everything alright, boys?” Her tight smile says that they will most certainly get kicked out of the ball if they continue this, and Jimmy can’t blame her.

“My apologies, Ocean Queen,” Scott says, switching to a formal tone with ease that Jimmy envies. He dips his head in respect, and only Jimmy sees how his hands tremble. “Everything is alright, but I am afraid I will have to leave early.”

She smiles again, dangerous this time. “No need to worry, Lord Smajor. Do try to avoid picking fights with my allies, next time, though.”

“It won’t happen again,” he promises, and sweeps away.

“Coward!” Jimmy shouts after him, anger making him bold. “You’re a coward, Scott!”

“Stop it,” Lizzie scolds. “You’ve already made quite the scene, and I did essentially kick him out. I’m not sure how much further you really want to carry it.”

“He is though, Lizzie, he’s a coward! Doesn’t want to face me because that means facing- well, facing everything that’s happened!”

“What do you mean, everything that’s happened?” Lizzie turns to the gathered audience of people who have been watching the spat, shooing them off as best as possible. They slowly disperse, thank goodness. “You and he are enemies, right?”

Jimmy almost winces. “It’s a bit- it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

“I can see that. Jimmy, that looked like a messy breakup!”

“It, um, well, it was. Sort of.”

“Oh, Jimmy.” Lizzie’s giving him a sympathetic look, which she follows up with a tight hug. “Next time, how about we don’t invite him?”

He nods against her shoulder, rage leaving him as quickly as it came. Instead, he just feels...tired. “Thanks, Lizzie.”

“Of course. We look after each other, yeah?’

“Yeah.”

Jimmy leaves the ball exhausted, still reeling from everything that happened. The few lingering bits of anger are what gets him home, a bitter taste in his mouth from the bitter words he spat. Coward! You’re a coward, Scott! He refuses to regret them.

Scott’s ring nearly ends up in the swamp again, but Jimmy’s cooled down enough by the time he gets back that he can’t bear to throw it away. Instead, it goes in a box which he tucks into his old storage chest, somewhere he’ll never have to see it again. Scott can go to hell if he wants the ring back after all that.

-

For a while, Jimmy’s plan to tuck the ring and never think about Scott again seems to be working. Lizzie visits a few times to check on him, but she never asks specifically about Scott, and Jimmy doesn’t say anything about him. He receives radio silence from Rivendell, and he tells himself that it’s good, that he doesn’t want to hear from Scott.

So yes, his plan is working, up until he gets a knock on his door and opens it to find Scott there.

The elf looks terrible, frankly, almost worse than he did at the ball. His hair, which is usually so nicely done, is a mess, cyan strands falling all across his face. His clothes are wrinkled and have swamp mud on them, his eyes have dark circles as violent as bruises, and he’s swaying a tiny bit. In short, he looks like he didn’t sleep for a week, chugged coffee, and fought god in a denny’s parking lot.

Jimmy thinks he’s kinda hot.

No, he doesn’t. Fake news, brain.

“Hi,” Scott says.

“Scott? What- why are you here?” Jimmy’s voice rises, in shock or outrage even he doesn’t know.

“I came to apologize.” Though he looks like he’s going to pass out at any second, Scott’s voice is steady. “I was scared- I am scared. I’m terrified to lose you again. But I shouldn’t have pushed you away and hurt you.”

“No, you shouldn’t have!” Jimmy snaps, but there’s little real rage behind it.

“I know. I- uh- fuck.” Scott’s hands are shaking as he pulls out a little box from some hidden pocket. “I brought a gift as an apology.”

Jimmy takes it, curious despite himself, and finds that what’s inside is a silver bracelet with little crystals embedded in it. Flowers are the predominant design; he recognizes roses, hyacinths, irises, anemone, and poppies. On the underside, there’s elven lettering, though Jimmy has no clue what it says. The whole thing is a little clumsy, not quite as professionally made as the ring Scott once gave him, and Jimmy looks up at Scott. “Did you make this yourself?”

“Mhm. I did my best, but it’s not as nice as I’d like.”

“It’s pretty,” Jimmy says.

Scott’s shoulders slump with relief. “It’s spelled, too. Protection, good fortune, that sort of thing.”

“Do the flowers mean something?”

“They do.”

Jimmy doesn’t press for details.

“I-” Scott starts again, a tremble in his voice that wasn’t there before. “I’m sorry, Jimmy, I really am. I won’t ask you to forgive me, but I needed to apologize before my time ran out.”

“Is it that- that dire?”

The barest nod. “This is what I chose to do with it. Making that, coming here. You deserved an apology.”

There’s a moment of awkward silence, Jimmy staring down at the bracelet.

Scott breaks it. “It wouldn’t be fair of me to ask you to love me. I can’t promise you eternity. I can’t promise you happiness. I can’t promise you that I won’t have to be the elvenking first and a husband second. But I am yours still, if you’ll have me.”

A part of Jimmy is very tempted to throw both Scott’s gift and his love back in his face. He can’t bring himself to stay mad, though, not when Scott’s looking at him like that, with so much raw vulnerability. So much devotion, like Jimmy’s the most precious thing he’s ever seen. It would be so, so easy to break that last strand of fragile hope in his expression; he’s offering up his heart on a silver platter, ready to shatter. Jimmy could- should- yell at him, reject his gift, tell him that he’s ruined any chance he has at Jimmy’s love.

Jimmy kisses him instead. It’s messy and it’s sudden and he very nearly drops Scott’s gift in the swamp in his haste to tangle his hands in Scott’s hair and press their lips together, but it’s real.

The little startled noise Scott makes gets cut off by Jimmy’s mouth on his. Scott’s lips are chapped and taste a little of glowberries, but Jimmy doesn’t care. He’s going to kiss his damn husband, something he thought he was never going to get to do again.

When they finally have to separate, Scott’s breathing hard, cheeks flushed. It’s a good look on him, Jimmy thinks, much more alive than his pale, rigid expression from before.

“So, I’ll take that as you want to stay married?” Scott’s voice is wry, collected, but his blush ruins the smooth effect.

“Of course I do! You absolute idiot!”

“Just checking.”

Jimmy kisses him again, just to shut him up. Scott goes with it easily, leaning into Jimmy’s embrace without complaint.

They pull apart quicker this time, and Jimmy holds the bracelet out. “Can you help me put this on?”

Scott nods. His hands are cold against the skin of Jimmy’s wrist when he fastens the clasp, but Jimmy grabs them and holds them in his own warm ones until they don’t feel quite so much like ice. It’s something. It’s a beginning.

“Come in and catch up with me?” Jimmy offers.

Scott nods again, and he doesn’t let go of Jimmy’s hand when Jimmy turns to go inside.

They talk about a lot of things. Empires, 3rd life, nightmares. Pufferfish, cake, flowers. They talk about the trials and tribulations of ruling; really, Jimmy complains that people keep attacking him and Scott nods in sympathy.

Eventually, though, the sun is starting to set.

“I need to get home,” Scott says. “You need sleep, not to stay up all night talking.” He goes to get up, and Jimmy immediately lunges, catching his sleeve.

“Don’t go! Please,” he adds, feeling his face flush at how desperate he sounds.

“Jimmy, darling, we both need to sleep.”

“We can sleep! I just….nevermind.”

“No, no.” Scott kneels back down, peering at him like Jimmy’s a puzzle that needs solving. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Jimmy.”

“I don’t want to be alone!” Jimmy blurts, and immediately flushes again. “It’s just, I’ve been alone for a long time, and there’s this demon thing that keeps showing up, and I’ve only just got you back, I’m not ready to let you go, and-”

“Hold on. What was that about a demon?”

“There’s this demon creature that I keep seeing, and it’s really messing with me,” he manages. “It sounds like you, sometimes, but all distorted, and I can’t handle it! You know me, I’m not brave or smart or anything, I’m just Jimmy!”

Scott’s frowning, worry wrinkling his brow. “Alright. How about you come to Rivendell for the night, then? I can protect us both easier there.”

Jimmy nods, feeling especially pitiful as Scott helps him to his feet. “Thank you.”

“Always. Do you still have the ring I gave you?”

“I do, I just….give me a moment to remember where I put it.”

“Good. It’s important.” Scott doesn’t elaborate, and Jimmy is too distracted looking for the ring to ask what he means.

Scott’s offer of protection feels flimsier when he has to lean on Jimmy as they travel back to Rivendell, but even then, it’s impossible to feel quite so afraid now that Jimmy isn’t alone anymore. And it’s even harder to fear anything that could happen when he’s safe in a warm bed, his head tucked against his husband’s chest. They’ll be okay, Jimmy thinks. They’ve been given another chance, and this time they’re going to get it right.

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

September 6, 2020

My weekly view of things I am up to and thinking about. Topics include the future of Earth, housing in California, the national debt, carbon pricing, and software complexity.

Earth’s Future

The funder is interested in developing a timeline of Earth’s past and future and placing human history in the geologic context. It’s a bit off the beaten path for us, but a fun project, and I spent some time this week on it. It got me thinking about Earth’s long term future.

We all know, in at least a vague sense, that Earth’s days are numbered. I think most of us know that we expect the Sun to go nova some billions of years from now (about 7.6 billion I think is the best estimate), and barring intervention from a future advanced civilization, no life will be able to survive that.

I found this paper by O’Malley-James et al. to be an interesting read. It discusses the future of life from an astrobiological perspective, asking what biosignatures a distant civilization might observe from Earth in the distant future. Plant life that depends on C3 photosynthesis, and by extension most animal life, has maybe 500-600 million years left, beyond which point carbon dioxide is too depleted. Plant life based on C4 photosynthesis might make it 900 million years. From then on it’s only microbes. Eukaryotic life might last 1.2 billion years before the oxygen is depleted. Prokaryotic life was here first, and it will probably be here last. The paper estimates 2.8 billion years as an upper bound for any microbes at all to survive in caves or underground. For the remainder of its existence, Earth is a sterile, lifeless world without oceans, an atmosphere, or geological activity.

Before all that, Earth’s biosphere may go into an irreversible decline after the formation of Pangaea Ultima, about 250 million years from now. At that time, the combination of merging of continents, cooling of the Earth’s core, and increasing of solar luminosity will result in a falling of carbon dioxide to the point where today’s biological productivity cannot be sustained. Earth is now 95% of the age it will be when this happens.

It is an unspoken and open question of how this general picture might be altered by a civilization that is capable of effecting meaningful change over geological timelines. Human civilization is not at this level presently, and it is unclear if we will attain it.

I wonder too how contemplation of the biosphere’s mortality influences how we think of environmentalism and sustainability. Perhaps 250+ million years is so vast a time that it cannot be distinguished from infinity in our minds. For my part, I can admit that the prospect genuinely bothers me.

Housing in California

California’s legislative session expired at the end of August, and with it, another opportunity for statewide zoning reform. Scott Wiener’s SB1120 would have allowed duplexes on single family lots. It is a modest but valuable proposal which had majority legislative support, but some last minute parliamentary shenanigans from the party leadership ran out the clock.

I continue to think that the housing issue in California is intractable, and that with its current strategy, the YIMBY movement will not be able to attain any but the most marginal victories. The Bay Area needs to increase its housing supply by at least 50%, maybe 100%, to really solve the problem. To achieve those kinds of numbers, allowing duplexes and ADUs is not going to cut it. The region needs to be open to horizontal as well as vertical expansion. Something must be done to break the dysfunction in the construction industries that prevents buildings and infrastructure from being delivered at a reasonable time and speed. The movement should also stop diddling around with measures that feel good but will backfire, like rent control and vacancy taxes.

Meanwhile, the tech industry is continuing to make tentative moves toward remote work. I continue to be hopeful but skeptical that widespread adoption of remote work can finally get housing costs under control.

My suspicion is that the YIMBY movement has succumbed to the Shirky Principle, which posits that “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” An ever-growing share of its energy is devoted to playing the Reds vs. Blues game, which is more than redundant in California. They have no vision of what an affordable California or Bay Area look like, no credible plan for getting there, and ideological blinkers that foreclose many important aspects of the solution.

As I’ve done several times before, I go back to Citizens Climate Lobby, which I see as the gold standard for political advocacy done right. They have a clear vision of passing a federal carbon fee and dividend plan. They don’t dilute their efforts on ancillary priorities or play partisan games. They have commissioned detailed economic modeling of the plan and have made every effort to insure it works from both a technical perspective and from a range of value systems. I don’t know if CCL will succeed, but at least they can succeed, unlike most activists, and CCL is one of the few major organizations I feel good supporting.

Red Ink

The Congressional Budget Office released an unsurprising but grim report on the national debt. The debt-to-GDP ratio stands at 98%, the highest ever except for a brief time at the end of World War II. It should cross the 100% mark next year and reach 109% by 2030.

Deficits are a classic gnarly problem. They are harmful but not catastrophic, and the harms are mostly at some indeterminate point in the future and are not clearly visible. This makes them easy to ignore, and ignoring the debt, or at best using it as a partisan talking point, is now an established bipartisan tradition.

Japan somehow continues to function with a debt-to-GDP ratio exceeding 230%. I don’t know how high the US can go on this metric and hope not to find out. We’ve seen debt crisis in Europe and Argentina recently. What I think is more likely is that debt service will be another ball and chain, along with population aging, stagnant productivity, and broken housing, health care, and education markets, on the American economy.

Carbon Pricing

Resources for the Future has a new carbon pricing calculator tool out, evaluating several proposals from the current Congress.

At the $52/ton level, four of the eight proposals stand out as having a positive benefit/cost analysis when economic costs are weighed against CO2 reduction alone. In all eight cases, “secondary” health benefits exceed the CO2 benefit as well as economic costs. As economic intuition would suggest, benefit/cost ratio goes down the higher the carbon price goes, since as the price goes up, we move down the ladder from most cost-effective emissions reductions to less cost-effective.

For my own part, I’ve generally been using a social cost of carbon of $50/ton. A few years ago, that seemed like a reasonable median estimate. At some point I want to review the literature again to see if I should be using a different figure.

The large health benefits are good for making the case for carbon pricing, but they raise some questions. The numbers strongly suggest that we should be thinking about air pollution reduction as the primary goal with CO2 reduction as a secondary goal. But if we do that, is carbon pricing really the most effective policy on air pollution?

Software and the Collapse of Civilization

I found this talk from last year by the game developer Jonathan Blow. He details ways in which the software industry is unable to deliver fast, reliable products and analogizes to historical failures of technological reproduction that are associated with past civilizational collapses. The talk is about an hour. I have to say it is a bit odd, but I found it worth watching.

Several time throughout my life, I have made attempts to get into the software industry, and at other times such as now I have programmed on a hobbyist basis. While I don’t see bad software as a major existential risk to civilization, there are clearly problems. Blow identifies what could also be called the bloatware problem: programmers tend to reach for libraries and abstractions in their code, needlessly inflating size, complexity, runtime, and bugs. He worries that abstraction has become so pervasive that the industry is not even capable of delivering reliable software at this point, and the knowledge of machine code programming has been largely lost.

Blow’s argument is reminiscent of the success problem, as described by Samo Burja, or the notion of social reproduction.

I’ve toyed with the idea of trying to develop the analogy between software bloatware and policy bloatware, a term to describe the phenomenon of public policy being designed in ever more complex manners. An overly complex policy environment increases the difficulty of coordinating the entities required for a solution, and it causes solutions to look more like patches and kludges over problems rather than actual solutions. An example is the attempt to address housing affordability problems by developing complex, multi-government affordable housing subsidies. Kludgeocracy is the best term I’ve seen for this phenomenon so far.

Casey Muratori identifies the same problem, which he called the 30 million line problem, so named because he estimates that to write the most basic “Hello World” web app requires, between the server and the client, at least 30 million lines of code and probably far more, with present technology. He proposes a solution based on a universal CPU instruction set and restoring root access to developers. Ironically, the talk (excluding Q&A) is over an hour when I think 10 minutes would have been sufficient to convey the key points without loss of essential detail.

[freevbucksnoverification-blog]

Fortnite: battle Royale - combat flow Season three Announcement Trailer

Fortnite: battle Royale - combat flow Season three Announcement Trailer

Fortnite First released Dec 31, 2015

launched

Android

iOS (iPhone/iPad)

+ 6 higher Nintendo modification

In Fortnite, players and their buddies lead a number of Heroes to reclaim and restore a homeland that has actually been left vacant with the help of a strange darkness handiest described as "the Tornado."

best cost for Fortnite battle Royale - Deep Freeze Bundle on Xbox One

You can only submit entirely new text for analysis once every 7 seconds.

Fortnite party Royale Is another Step in opposition t Its Metaverse expertise

"Fortnite is a game. however please ask that query once more in 3 hundred and sixty 5 days."

Impressive CEO Tim Sweeney tweeted this rather ambiguous comment on Dec. 26, 2019 after he became asked regardless of if he watches Fortnite as a computer game or as a platform.

for many, Fortnite is barely a game. They hop in, take a Victory Royale, do some ridiculous dancings to celebrate, or simply play round in its creative Mode. All of this can be accomplished solo, or with a group of buddies as well as while its colorful layout and its high acquiring understanding of curve connected to its building mechanic might in addition place some off, it however continues to be among the crucial juggernauts of the video clip game service well-nigh 3 years after its preliminary unencumber.

For Tim Sweeney, though, Fortnite naturally has more abilities than newest as simply a game. Fortnite may also be pushed, formed, as well as established into some thing much more than a wacky battle royale online video game the place all and sundry flosses and famous pop-fiction like Deadpool make cameos equally as a result of.

As we part past the 4-month mark due to the fact that Sweeney tweeted, Fortnite's success seems as powerful as ever.

The authentic Twitter account boasted of over 350 million registered Fortnite avid players, and also 3.2 billion hours invested participating in April by myself. That's the equivalent of approximately 4. eight% of the location's populace (estimated at 8 billion), all subscribed to 1 video online video game.

It became on this information the day before today that Impressive chose to announce Fortnite birthday celebration event Royale-- free v bucks generator an 'All unwind. No Sweat' Fortnite experience where gamers can ignore mats and tools and also simply spend time as well as be glad.

There should be live track performances on the top phase, aerial challenge lessons at Skydive Rift, boat races at Fishsticks' Watercraft freeway, as well as a paint launcher for players to clutter around with on the Plaza.

In various expressions, Fortnite birthday event Royale is a social space like no various. where destiny 2's Tower is a widely known center for compensatory incentives as well as figuring out your Guardian earlier than beginning in your succeeding quest, there's no more great deals to preserve you glued to it.

You do not boot up the video game, eager for producing in the Tower. nonetheless you might start up Fortnite, eager for chillin' with some chums in event Royale.

Fortnite's already highlighted its potential to be anything more than a typical on-line video clip online video game experience. From the activities that occur every single period throwing people into unique dimensions, balloting in actual-time, or checking out an impressive Beast vs. robot fight play out across the island, with to its music performances from the likes of Marshmello and also Travis Scott. it will possibly now not be to your taste, nevertheless its technological expertise is a little unrivaled.

It's every one of this-- its huge install base, the company-name consciousness, huge celebrity names, as well as Sweeney's propensity to make Fortnite higher than just a video game-- that appears to be pushing it better and also nearer versus its metaverse advantage.

A 'metaverse' is 'a collective electronic shared house, and rarely simplified as 'a future model of the internet, made from relentless, shared, 3D electronic locations connected right into a regarded digital universe.'

Sound common? That's as a result of for those that consider it, Fortnite's currently additional or much less on its strategy to fitting a metaverse. Its battle Royale island is a shared, 3D electronic location the area gamers can blow every different's head's off. The creative setting provides avid players a blank canvas that can additionally be made use of to create incredible rates as well as globes that can be shared and concurrently exist in this metaverse.

although, it's just actually with Travis Scott's Expensive experience a few weeks lower back that Fortnite's metaverse abilities basically began to turn into clear.

As 27.7 million pleasurable players hopped into Fortnite over a weekend to watch Scott's efficiency, they were sent out speeding into the air with each decline within the bass. an enormous holographic Scott stomped around the map, before gamers have actually been despatched swimming undersea and dashing by means of location.

by itself, Astronomical isn't a 'item of the metaverse.' It merely shows Fortnite's abilities to host audacious live hobbies as well as its capability to deal with the salacious quantities of website traffic directed in the direction of its servers since of this. It was the take a look at the online game crucial to transfer to greenlight Epic's more strong strategies.

That's starting with Fortnite birthday celebration event Royale this Friday. A variety of musical efficiencies will certainly occur and enthusiastic players can freely check out and mess around on the island as they wish.

Do not expect birthday celebration Royale to be all that fascinating tomorrow, and even for the list below few months. It's mosting likely to be a size of straightening out pests and also obtaining the structures firmly in location.

yet if the battle Royale mode's track listing is anything to relocate off, which you can are anticipating it to be consistently improved, redesigned, and also surpassed to acknowledge its real abilities.

with the help of year-conclusion, don't be stunned to see birthday celebration Royal end up being a bustling metropolis for the Fortnite globe, including retail electrical outlets, fields, as well as greater odd and also remarkable searches for players to enjoy in a cooled, care-free atmosphere.

Fortnite currently has one of the most 'vital columns' of any metaverse currently in-vicinity with its V-Bucks electronic money. serious gamers can pack up their account with V-Bucks as well as go concerning spending it on cosmetics presently.

beyond that, nonetheless, V-Bucks can be used for entry to special leisure activities, allow you to additional improve your personality with brand-new gadgets, a place they may call their personal within the Fortnite world, and also the entire furniture and also delicious chocolates to enhance it and also make it their very own.

With an excellent 7 months to head other than we have the ability to ask Tim Sweeney whether Fortnite is a computer game or a platform, the change is already in growth. Currently it's just a situation of prepared to see what the closing destination really feels like.

[fogwitchoftheevermore]

ok hi hi. so this started with making an empires blaseball au and then… spiraled from there when i remembered that thing about the first election running three times. my posts about the empires leg of this au is here and the hermitcraft leg is here, the empires one is a lot more detailed and complicated by virtue of empires having a plot that more easily slots into the world of blaseball than hermitcraft, but also as a side effect of the fact that i just know WAY LESS about hermitcraft (outside of s9) than i do about empires. also, i’m currently not thinking WHATSOEVER about how any future seasons of these series (especially season 5 of the life series) could affect this au. tbh unless someone new is added to one of these servers next season or something else Very compelling gets me to reorganize this whole au, i’m just leaving it as is.

so my thought for the life series leg of this are:

for the most part, the plot of blaseball is just Happening as it happened in cannon, but the life series guys are here now. don’t think too hard about the repercussions. other than fall ball, though. that didn’t get an ending so i’m disregarding it we’re just stopping at season 24.

season 1 in this universe, all of the cast members from third life are players, except martyn, and plus pearl. i don’t know where i really want to put anyone except ren is a batter for the tacos and grian is a pitcher for the garages. martyn is not a player because he’s this universe’s parker. (the venn diagram i made about those two has infested my brain). the watchers are the boss stand in cause. look at them. im tempted to make the listeners our stand in for the reader but i can be swayed on that one. every other god stays exactly the same as they are in canon.

grian is our jaylen for this au, cause i mean… yeah… (he’s the only winner who’s death really felt like it slotted well with jaylen’s.) his replacement is mumbo, because i’ve “unremarkable derrick kreuger-ed” his ass. any player who has left the series (mumbo, lizzie, ren) are all gonna get dead at some point.

i don’t know exactly how i want lizzie to show up or when i want to kill her (maybe she’s a victim of instability?) but i know i want to give her precognition, because she was so wildly paranoid during last life that giving her the future seeing mod when her death is ever on the horizon just feels appropriate. i also want her to be a batter for the magic or the flowers.

ren is a batter for the tacos cause he’s our wyatt mason. this is because i think it would be fun and also because imagining the “i need you to wake up” message from parker with martyn and ren makes me insane.

i kinda want to make the other winners plot important characters as well (scott would probably be megan ito) but i cant decide quite what i want to do with pearl if that’s the case. maybe she can be thomas england? and then our sixpack dogwalker could be lizzie (because amnesia cold session), but i guess i just kill her at some point?? yeah idk quite what i want to do with pearl i feel like there’s just so many avenues to go down…

my vague idea for what i wanted to do with skizz was that i wanted him to be a batter for the lovers because it just Feels Right but i’m willing to bend on that. generally for everyone else i want them to just exist in the world and have to deal with everything because i like putting them through hell.

it could also be fun to do something with the vault but it shows up so late into the blaseball timeline (season 17 if im remembering correctly?) that i don’t want to rely on it being too much apart of the story. also, feel free to give anyone whatever mods you want!

Having a tough time irl rn because I’m leaving my home to go back to college four states away. so if anyone can come up with some shenanigans for me to get up to tomorrow on the ride there that would be greatly appreciated. Maybe I’ll write fic or something crazy like that. I’m silly I’m wild and goofy :P blehh

[scifigeneration]

Renewed space rivalry between nations ignores a tradition of cooperation

by Scott Shackelford

A composite image of a satellite firing an energy weapon at a target on Earth. Marc Ward/Shutterstock.com

The annals of science fiction are full of visions of the future. Some are techno-utopian like “Star Trek” in which humanity has joined together in peace to explore the cosmos. Others are dystopian, like the World State in “Brave New World.” But many of these stories share one thing in common – they envision a time in which humanity has moved past narrow ideas of tribe and nationalism. That assumption might be wrong.

This can be seen in Trump’s calls for a unified U.S. Space Command. Or, in China’s expansive view of sovereignty and increasingly active space program as seen in its recent lunar landing. These examples suggest that the notion of outer space as a final frontier free from national appropriation is questionable. Active debate is ongoing as of this writing as to the consistency of the 2015 Space Act with international space law, which permitted private firms to own natural resources mined from asteroids. Some factions in Congress would like to go further still with one bill, the American Space Commerce Free Enterprise Act. This states, “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, outer space shall not be considered a global commons.” This trend, especially among the space powers, is important since it not only will create precedents that could resonate for decades to come, but also because it hinders our ability to address common challenges – like removing the debris orbiting the planet.

End of the golden age

In 1959, then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson stated, “Men who have worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend together into the depths of war and desolation.” In this spirit, between 1962 and 1979 the United States and the former Soviet Union worked together and through the U.N. Committee for the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to enact five major international treaties and numerous bilateral and multilateral agreements concerning outer space.

These accords covered everything from the return of rescued astronauts and liability for damage from space objects to the peaceful use of outer space. They did not, though, address space weaponization outside of the weapons of mass destruction context, or put into place mechanisms for managing an increasingly crowded final frontier.

Progress ground to a halt when it came time to decide on the legal status of the moon. The Reagan administration objected to the Moon Treaty, which stated that the moon was the “common heritage of mankind” like the deep seabed, in part because of lobbying from groups opposed to the treaty’s provisions. Because no organized effort arose in support of the treaty, it died in the U.S. Senate, and with it the golden age of space law. Today, nearly 30 years after it was first proposed, only 18 nations have ratified the accord.

Rise of collective action problems

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union space governance has only gotten more complicated due to an increasing number of space powers, both public and private. National and commercial interests are increasingly tied to space in political, economic and military arenas. Beyond fanciful notions of solar energy satellites, fusion energy and orbiting hotels, contemporary political issues such as nuclear nonproliferation, economic development, cybersecurity and human rights are also intimately tied to outer space.

The list of leading space powers has expanded beyond the U.S. and Russia to include China, India, Japan and members of the European Space Agency – especially France, Germany and Italy. Each regularly spends over US$1 billion on their space programs, with estimates of China’s space spending surpassing $8 billion in 2017, though the U.S. continues to spend more than all other nations combined on space related efforts. But space has become important to every nation that relies on everything from weather forecasting to satellite telecommunications. By 2015, the global space industry was worth more than $320 billion, a figure that is expected to grow to $1.1 trillion by 2040.

Private companies, such as SpaceX, are working to dramatically lower the cost of launching payloads into low Earth orbit, which has long stood at approximately $10,000 per pound. Such innovation holds the promise of opening up space to new development. It also raises concerns over the sustainability of space operations.

At the same time, the Trump administration’s public desire to launch a Space Force has fueled concerns over a new arms race, which, if created, could exacerbate both the issues of space weapons and debris. The two issues are related since the use of weapons in space can increase the amount of debris through fragments from destroyed satellites. For example, China performed a successful anti-satellite test in 2007 that destroyed an aging weather satellite at an altitude of some 500 miles. This single event contributed more than 35,000 pieces of orbital debris boosting the amount of space junk by approximately 25 percent.

Without concerted action, Marshall Kaplan, an orbital debris expert within the Space Policy Department at Johns Hopkins University, argues, “There is a good chance that we may have to eventually abandon all active satellites in currently used orbits” due to the growing problem of space junk.

Astronaut Thomas P. Stafford and cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov shake hands in space on July 17, 1975 to ease Cold War tensions. NASA/Wikimedia Commons

Avoiding a tragedy of the space commons

The tragedy of the commons scenario refers to the “unconstrained consumption of a shared resource — a pasture, a highway, a server — by individuals acting in rational pursuit of their self-interest,” according to commons governance expert Brett Frischmann. This can and often does lead to destruction of the resource. Given that space is largely an open-access system, the predictions of the tragedy of the commons are self-evident. Space law expert Robert Bird, has argued that nations treat orbital space as a kind of communal pasture that may be over-exploited and polluted through debris. It’s a scenario captured in the movie “Wall-E.”

But luckily, there is a way out of this scenario besides either nationalization or privatization. Scholars led by the political economist and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom modified the tragedy of the commons by showing that, in some cases, groups can and do self-organize and cooperate to avoid tragic over exploitation.

I explore this literature on “polycentric” governance – complex governance systems made up of multiple scales, sectors and stakeholders – in my forthcoming book, “Governing New Frontiers in the Information Age: Toward Cyber Peace.” Already, we are seeing some evidence of the benefits of such a polycentric approach in an increasingly multipolar era in which there are more and more power centers emerging around the world. One example is a code of conduct for space-faring nations. That code includes the need to reduce orbital debris. Further progress could be made by building on the success of the international coalition that built the International Space Station such as by deepening partnerships with firms like SpaceX and Blue Origin.

This is not a “keep it simple, stupid” response to the challenges in space governance. But it does recognize the reality of continued national control over space operations for the foreseeable future, and indeed there are some benefits to such an outcome, including accountability. But we should think long and hard before moving away from a tried and tested model like the International Space Station and toward a future of vying national research stations and even military outposts in space.

Coordination between sovereign nations is possible, as was shown in the golden age of space law. By finding common ground, including the importance of sustainable development, we earthlings can ensure that humanity’s development of space is less a race than a peaceful march – not a flags and footprints mission for one nation, but a destination serving the development of science, the economy and the betterment of international relations.

About The Author:

Scott Shackelford is Associate Professor of Business Law and Ethics and Director, Ostrom Workshop Program on Cybersecurity and Internet Governance. He is also Cybersecurity Program Chair at IU-Bloomington, Indiana University.

This article is republished from our content partners at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[shirlleycoyle]

FTP Is Almost 50 Years Old—and It’s Ready to Retire

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Here’s a small piece of news you may have missed while you were trying to rebuild your entire life to fit inside your tiny apartment at the beginning of the COVID crisis: Because of the way that the virus shook up just about everything, Google skipped the release of Chrome version 82.

Who cares, you think? Well, users of FTP, or the File Transfer Protocol.

During the pandemic, Google delayed its plan to kill FTP, and now that things have settled to some degree, Google recently announced that it is going back for the kill with Chrome version 86, which deprecates the support once again, and will kill it for good in Chrome 88.

(Mozilla announced similar plans for Firefox, citing security reasons and the age of the underlying code.)

It is one of the oldest protocols the mainstream internet supports—it turns 50 next year—but those mainstream applications are about to leave it behind.

Let’s ponder the history of FTP, the networking protocol that has held on longer than pretty much any other.

1971

The year that Abhay Bhushan, a masters student at MIT who was born in India, first developed the File Transfer Protocol. Coming two years after telnet, FTP was one of the first examples of a working application suite built for what was then known as ARPANET, predating email, Usenet, and even the TCP/IP stack. Like telnet, FTP still has a few uses, but has lost prominence on the modern internet largely because of security concerns, with encrypted alternatives taking its place—in the case of FTP, SFTP, a file transfer protocol that operates over the Secure Shell protocol (SSH), the protocol that has largely replaced telnet.

FTP is so old it predates email—and at the beginning, actually played the role of an email client

Of the many application-level programs built for the early ARPANET, it perhaps isn’t surprising that FTP is the one that stood above them all to find a path to the modern day.

The reason for that comes down to its basic functionality. It’s essentially a utility that facilitates data transfer between hosts, but the secret to its success is that it flattened the ground to a degree between these hosts. As Bhushan describes In his requests for comment paper, the biggest challenge of using telnet at the time was that every host was a little different.

“Differences in terminal characteristics are handled by host system programs, in accordance with standard protocols,” he explained, citing both telnet and the remote job entry protocol of the era. “You, however, have to know the different conventions of remote systems, in order to use them.”

A teletype terminal from the ARPANET era. Image: fastlizard4/Flickr

The FTP protocol he came up with tried to get around the challenges of directly plugging into the server by using an approach he called “indirect usage,” which allowed for the transfer or execution of programs remotely. Bhushan’s “first cut” at a protocol, still in use in a descendant form decades later, used the directory structure to suss out the differences between individual systems.

In a passage from the RFC, Bhushan wrote:

I tried to present a user-level protocol that will permit users and using programs to make indirect use of remote host computers. The protocol facilitates not only file system operations but also program execution in remote hosts. This is achieved by defining requests which are handled by cooperating processes. The transaction sequence orientation provides greater assurance and would facilitate error control. The notion of data types is introduced to facilitate the interpretation, reconfiguration and storage of simple and limited forms of data at individual host sites. The protocol is readily extendible.

In an interview with the podcast Mapping the Journey, Bhushan noted that he came to develop the protocol because of a perceived need for applications for the budding ARPANET system, including the need for email and FTP. These early applications became the fundamental building blocks of the modern internet and have been greatly improved on in the decades since.

Due to the limited capabilities of computing at the time, Bhushan noted that early on, email-style functionality was actually a part of FTP, allowing for messages and files to be distributed through the protocol in a more lightweight format—and for four years, FTP was technically email of sorts.

“So we said, ‘Why don’t you put two commands into FTP called mail and mail file?’ So mail is like normal text messages, mail file is mailing attachments, what you have today,” he said in the interview.

Of course, Bhushan was not the only person to put his fingerprints on this fundamental early protocol, eventually moving outside of academia with a role at Xerox. The protocol he created continued to grow without him, receiving a series of updates in RFCs throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including an implementation that allowed it to support the TCP/IP specification around 1980.

While there have been some modest updates since to keep with the times and add support for newer technologies, the version of the protocol we use today came about in 1985, when Jon Postel and Joyce K. Reynolds developed RFC 959, an update of the prior protocols that is the basis for current FTP software. (Postel and Reynolds, among others, also worked on the domain-name system around this time.) While described in the document as “intended to correct some minor documentation errors, to improve the explanation of some protocol features, and to add some new optional commands,” it nonetheless is the version that stuck.

Given its age, FTP has many inherent weaknesses, many of which manifest themselves to this day. For example, transferring a file folder with a lot of tiny files is intensely inefficient with FTP, which does much better with large files as it limits the number of individual connections that are needed.

In many ways, because FTP was so early in the history of the internet, it came to define the shape of the many protocols that came after. A good way to think about it is to compare it to something that frequently improves by leaps and bounds over a few decades—say, basketball sneakers. Certainly, Converse All-Stars are good shoes and work well in the right setting even today, but for heavy-duty basketball players, something from Nike, potentially with the Air Jordan brand attached, is far more likely to find success.

The File Transfer Protocol is the Converse All-Star of the internet. It was file transfer before file transfer was cool, and it still carries some of that vibe.

“Nobody was making any money off the internet. If anything, it was a huge sink. We were fighting the good fight. We knew there was potential. But anybody who tells you they knew what would happen, they’re lying. Because I was there.”

— Alan Emtage, the creator of Archie, considered the internet’s first search engine, discussing with the Internet Hall of Fame why his invention, which allowed users to search anonymous FTP servers for files, didn’t end up making him rich. Long story short, the internet was noncommercial at the time, and Emtage, a graduate student and technical support staffer at Montreal‘s McGill University, was leveraging the school’s network to run Archie—without their permission. “But it was a great way of doing it,” he told the site. “As the old saying goes, it’s much easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.” (Of note: Like Bhushan, Emtage is an immigrant; he was born and raised in Barbados and came to Canada as an honors student.)

A screenshot of WS_FTP, a FTP client for Windows that was particularly popular during the ’90s.

Why FTP may be the last link to a certain kind of past that’s still online

As I wrote a few years ago, if you grab an old book about the internet and try to pull up some of the old links, the best chances you have of actually getting a hold of the software featured is through a large corporate FTP site, as these kinds of sites tend not to go offline very often.

Major technology companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, Mozilla, Intel, and Logitech, used these sites for decades to distribute documentation and drivers to end users. And for the most part, these sites are still online, and have content that has just sat there for years.

In many cases, the ways that these sites are most useful are when you need access to something really old, like a driver or documentation. (When I was trying to get my Connectix QuickCam working, I know it came in handy.)

An example of what FTP looks like in a web browser in the modern day, using ftp.logitech.com as an example.

In some ways, this setting can be less nerve-racking than trying to navigate a website, because the interface is consistent and works properly. (Many web interfaces can be pretty nightmarish to dig through when all you want is a driver.) But that cuts both ways—the simplicity also means that FTP often doesn’t handle modern standards quite so well, and can be far more pokey than modern file-transfer methods.

As I wrote in for Motherboard last year, these FTP sites (while being archived in different places) are growing increasingly hard to reach, as companies move away from this model or make the decision to take the old sites offline.

As I explained in the piece, which features an interview from Jason Scott of the Internet Archive, the archive is taking steps to protect these vintage public FTP sites, which at this point could go down at any time.

Scott noted at the time that the long-term existence of these FTP sites was really more of an exception than the rule.

“It was just this weird experience that FTP sites, especially, could have an inertia of 15 to 20 years now, where they could be running all this time, untouched,” he said.

With one of the primary use cases of FTP sites hitting the history books once and for all, it may only be a matter of time before they’re gone for good. I recommend, before that happens, diving into one sometime and just seeing the weird stuff that’s there. We don’t live in a world where you can just look at entire file folders of public companies like this anymore, and it’s a fascinating experience even at this late juncture.

“A technology that was ahead of its usage curve, FTP is now attracting a critical mass of business users who are finding transfer by email grossly inefficient or impractical when dealing with large documents.”

— A passage from a 1997 story in Network World that makes the case that FTP, despite its creakiness, it was still a good choice for many telecommuters and corporate internet users. While written by a ringer—Roger Greene was the president of Ipswitch, a major FTP program developer of the era—his points were nonetheless fitting for the time. It was a great way to transmit large files across networks and store them on a server somewhere. The problem is that FTP, while it improved over time, would be eventually outclassed by far more sophisticated replacements, both protocols (BitTorrent, SFTP, rsync, git, even modern variants of HTTP) and cloud computing solutions such as Dropbox or Amazon Web Services.

Back in the day, I once ran an FTP server. It was mostly to share music during my college days, when people who went to college were obsessed with sharing music. We had extremely fast connections, and as a result, it was the perfect speed to run an FTP server.

It was a great way to share a certain musical taste with the world, but the university system eventually got wise to the file-sharing and started capping bandwidth, so that was that … or so I thought. See, I worked in the dorms during the summer, and it turned out that after people left school, the cap was no longer a problem, and I was able to restart the FTP server once again for a couple of months.

Panic’s Transmit, a modern example of an FTP client. Many modern clients support a wide variety of protocols beyond the tried-and-true of FTP.

Eventually, I moved out and the FTP server went down for good—and more efficient replacements emerged anyway, like BitTorrent, and more legal ones, like Spotify and Tidal. (Do I have regrets about running this server now? Sure. But at the time, I felt like I was sticking it to the man somehow. Which, let’s be honest, I wasn’t.)

Just as file-sharing has largely evolved away from those heady times more than 15 years ago, so too have we evolved from the FTP servers of yore. We have largely learned more effective, more secure techniques for remote file management in the years since. In 2004, it was widely considered best practice to manage a web server using FTP. Today, with tools like Git making efficient version control possible, it’s seen as risky and inefficient.

Now, even as major browsers get rid of FTP support in the coming months, it’s not like we’re totally going to be adrift of options. Specialized software will, of course, remain available. But more importantly, we’ve replaced the vintage FTP protocol for the right reasons.

Unlike in cases like IRC (where the protocol lost popular momentum to commercial tools) and Gopher (where a sudden shift to a commercial model stopped its growth dead in its tracks), FTP is getting retired from web browsers because its age underlines its lack of security infrastructure.

Some of its more prominent use cases, like publicly accessible anonymous FTP servers, have essentially fallen out of vogue. But its primary use case has ultimately been replaced with more secure, more modern versions of the same thing, such as SFTP.

And I’m sure some person in some suitably technical job somewhere is going to claim that FTP will never die because there will always be a specialized use case for it somewhere. Sure, whatever. But for the vast majority of people, when Chrome disconnects FTP from the browser, they likely won’t find a reason to reconnect.

If FTP’s departure from the web browser speeds up its final demise, so be it. But for 50 years, in one shape or another, it has served us well.

FTP Is Almost 50 Years Old—and It’s Ready to Retire syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[lorajackson]

GOPers Are Trying to Recruit QAnon Voters And Using This YouTube Show to Do It

As she gathered support for what was then thought to be a long-shot primary bid against Rep. Scott Tipton (R-CO), congressional hopeful Lauren Boebert made an appearance on “Patriots’ Soapbox,” a YouTube channel with a devoted following that claims to broadcast “real news the MSM does not cover.”In her appearance, Boebert ran down her usual talking points: how she confronted former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke over gun control, how the restaurant she owns stands out because of its open-carry policy for waitresses, and how she dreams of joining the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. But a few things about Boebert’s appearance on Patriots’ Soapbox were different from her usual interviews on fringe right-wing outlets. There was the list of QAnon conspiracy theorist “clues” that the channel displayed next to her screen, and a constantly updating chat about QAnon running elsewhere on the broadcast at the same time. Boebert had stepped straight into the internet heart of the QAnon community, and she didn’t seem to mind. And why would she? Patriots’ Soapbox may be part of the political fringe—putting out conspiracy theory chatter that law enforcement officials have deemed a legitimate threat—but it is increasingly becoming a potent force on the right. Boebert, who pulled off an upset win over Tipton this month, isn’t alone. As the QAnon conspiracy theory movement makes inroads into the Republican Party and QAnon believers win a handful of congressional nominations, other Republican congressional candidates who don’t profess to believe in QAnon and even a Trump campaign official have begun courting believers on Patriots’ Soapbox.QAnon-Curious House Candidate Gave Her Customers DiarrheaPatriots’ Soapbox is a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week full-face dive into the heart of QAnon. It is the hub of a devoted community of tens of thousands of QAnon believers eager to share the off-the-wall ideas with each other. The various “shows” running on Patriots’ Soapbox often open with a Q-themed song like the Western-style “When Q Came to Town,” before launching into fevered dissections of QAnon clues and interpretation of current events through a QAnon lens. The channel, which has nearly 80,000 YouTube subscribers and a popular Discord chat server, has been one of the most vocal QAnon outlets since the conspiracy theory began with a series of anonymous clues posted by a mysterious “Q” in October 2017. As QAnon took shape and gained prominence among Trump supporters, with its claims that Trump is engaged in a shadowy war against high-ranking pedophile-cannibals in the Democratic Party, Patriots’ Soapbox grew alongside it. One of Patriots’ Soapbox founders, Coleman Rogers, who goes by the handle “Pamphlet Anon,” is so involved in the beginnings of QAnon that rival conspiracy theorists have accused him of being Q himself, a charge Rogers denies.“It’s a dedicated 24-7 livestream into the QAnon worldview,” said Travis View, the co-host of a podcast tracking developments among QAnon believers. Visually, Patriots’ Soapbox’s constant livestream looks like nothing else on YouTube. Other conspiracy theorists on the platform, like the producers of the slickly produced coronavirus conspiracy theory video “Plandemic,” rely on high production values to win new adherents to their ludicrous beliefs. But Patriots’ Soapbox relishes getting into the byzantine details of QAnon, with hosts sharing their screens to the audience as they flick between QAnon clues, tweets, and articles they claim prove the ultimate conspiracy.Michael Flynn Finally Embraces His Q Cult FollowingPatriots’ Soapbox emerged in the early days of QAnon as a bridge between the original Q clues and the broader Trump internet. At the time, the Q posts were mostly circulated and discussed on hard-to-navigate image boards like 4Chan and 8Chan, a barrier that prevented them from catching on with a more mainstream pro-Trump audience. That problem was worsened when Reddit banned its own QAnon forums, stopping QAnon from taking hold on that platform. But QAnon fans were able to find a place in the Patriots’ Soapbox YouTube and its lively Discord chat, where QAnon researchers obsessed with uncovering the global cabal they imagined could find compatriots at any time of day.  The demands of producing an unending stream of content has meant Patriots’ Soapbox has recruited QAnon believers across the world, according to View. And its popularity has turned some of those hosts, who operate under aliases like “Deadcat,” into micro-celebrities in QAnon world. The stream typically features various QAnon celebrities as guests, all of them primed to discuss the next QAnon clue.“Whenever a new Q drop comes in, they start decoding them immediately,” View said.  Patriots’ Soapbox didn’t respond to a request for comment. Boebert’s ties to QAnon believers have become more of a liability shortly after her surprise win over Tipton, when her comments on another QAnon-centric internet video show, “SteelTruth” surfaced. In the interview, Boebert said she hoped that QAnon “is real.” After her primary victory, Boebert walked back her comments, claiming that she is “not a follower.”  Boebert isn’t the only candidate with ties to QAnon to appear on Patriots’ Soapbox. Rich McCormick, the Republican nominee in a battleground Georgia district, appeared on Patriots’ Soapbox show in June. Like Boebert, McCormick avoided mentioning QAnon—even as the screens around him were covered with references to it. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party’s congressional campaign arm has attacked McCormick over his Patriots’ Soapbox appearance, calling him “QAnon’s Other Candidate in Georgia”—a reference to Marjorie Taylor Greene, an avowed QAnon believer poised to win a runoff next month for the Republican nomination in a heavily Republican Georgia district.A Patriots’ Soapbox appearance can be a low-risk way to signal to QAnon believers without risking the footage being seen by a wider audience, according to Marc-André Argentino, a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University who has studied QAnon. “They might see this as a pool of individuals they can get votes from if they say the right things,” Argentino said. “Your risk-reward, from a political perspective, is not as great as if you went on Fox News and said ‘I believe in QAnon.’”  Appearing on a QAnon show like Patriots’ Soapbox without explicitly mentioning QAnon could bear fruit for Republican candidates, View said. “We’ll see candidates feel more confident at signalling to the QAnon community that they would appreciate their vote, without explicitly endorsing in any way,” View said. The Boebert and McCormick campaigns didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of the House GOP, declined to comment on the candidates appearing on a QAnon YouTube channel Patriots’ Soapbox has also been embraced by one official from the Trump campaign. On Tuesday, Media Matters unearthed footage of campaign official Erin Perrine appearing on Patriots’ Soapbox to urge the channel’s following to volunteer for the Trump campaign. While QAnon has gained a strange mainstream credibility within the GOP, with its promoters landing congressional nominations and invites to the White House, the conspiracy theory has also inspired several violent incidents, including two murders. The FBI considers QAnon a potential source of domestic terror. The prospect of Republican candidates courting QAnon fans could energize the conspiracy theory’s believers and win more adherents, according to Argentino.“It would give a sense that a wider segment of the population is accepting QAnon,” he said. “If the name of someone who gives credence to QAnon is on the ballot, that means a lot more than ‘Anon1234’ on Twitter.” Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[goassignmenthelp-blog]

5 Popular Software News Blogs You Should Follow to Stay Updated

Software Engineering Assignments Help forms a mandatory assessment requirement for the students studying this subject in different universities. However, to work on a comprehensive assignment in this domain, the student must be conversant with tech news, posts, and latest trends in the domain. They must be thorough with the basic concepts and showcase interest to learn more about it.

For instance, to solve a given problem, they need to be conversant with the concept of the Software Development Life Cycle, followed by relational databases, interfaces, or concurrency. And, if they do not have a stronghold on any of these, they might not be able to solve the problem correctly. Eventually, their grades tell the story and impact the overall term performance.

Experts' Suggest Latest Software News Blogs Enhance Your Knowledge in the Domain

Our Experts suggest that college students make reading and information gathering a motto. Not only does this keep the students in line with current happenings in the domain, but they are also always a step ahead of their peers when it comes to software applications. An informed take in the domain will prove immensely helpful for those who aspire to make a career out of it.

For instance, Coding Dojo, a Software News Blog is all about Coding Tips, Career Advice, and Coding Bootcamp Insights. The blog features articles relevant to the domain like "The importance of studying algorithms-your competitive edge" and "Top 4 benefits of learning 3 stacks instead of 1". Other popular software news blogs that students can refer to are:

A-List Apart

Geeks for Geeks

Smashing Magazine

Scott Hanselman

Code Simplicity

As a Software student, if you tend to go through such informative stuff, you work your way through the subject, with an open and progressive attitude. Now you know more about the domain, latest happenings, and opportunities for the future.

When required to submit an assignment help, Software students can look for topics in areas like

Software Designing: Software designing is the most time consuming and important aspect of the software development lifecycle. It needs time, patience, and knowledge (practical and theoretical both).

Software Coding: A program can be drafted in a few steps, but the coder has to have a thorough understanding of the programming language he is using and the problem which requires a solution. It then succeeds in designing a solution and maintaining the flow. There are different programming languages like Ruby on Rails, PHP, C++, JavaScript, Python, etc.

Software Testing: The stage asks for program testing, to identify gaps in the code if any. Any launch cannot happen, without testing. University students receive a lot many projects on Software testing.  So they need to put forth their software testing skills along with a strong academic writing approach for a good my assignment Help.

Software Metrics: This step is required to maintain and manage the essential parameters that impact software development. For instance, they need to gauge the efficiency of the process, code, etc.

Software Maintenance: Every written piece of code that makes for a software program, needs continuous maintenance to sustain. University students also get a lot of many projects in this area.

Software Modelling: To understand the entire process that begins with software design to program launch to system maintenance, students need to be well aware of different software models like a V-shaped model, waterfall model, and spiral model.

While this showcases the broader concepts and the approach to working on a Software Engineering Assignment. Trends in Software Engineering Assignment Topics go like:

Client-Server Model

Project Management

Risk Management

Detail System Design

Paradigms like SOAP and REST etc.

With the subject requirements of being pretty practical and correct about the concepts, it requires lots of regular practice. While it's still easier to do that, sometimes it's the lack of theoretical knowledge that impacts the application aspect as well. Therefore, when an assignment writing task comes up, they fail to gauge multiple concepts simultaneously and make a half-hearted attempt at assignment writing. In a scenario, when students have multiple assignment writing tasks, impending assessments, and regular class hours on their platter, they tend to get jittery. There is so much to do, within a limited time frame and one can obviously not succeed everywhere.

You can reach out for assignment assistance to GoAssignmentHelp, across the entire gamut of the subjects, buy assignment online or ask for expert consultation on different topics. We are available for quick assistance 24*7 and promise to make you feel proud of your assignment submission.

Our experts' provide proper examples, citations, and graphs to keep every assignment interesting and easy to comprehend. They also ensure that the information provided in the assignment is 100% accurate. We also offer plagiarism reports with every assignment to validate our claims on no-plagiarism

[shivismiles-blog]

SDN

IEEE CS 2022 Report

Scott Shenker, University of California, Berkeley, was one of the core contributors to the OpenFlow protocol and has a one-sentence description of software-defined networking: an SDN is a set of abstractions for the control plane in networking.  IEEE CS 2022 Report This is very much a computer scientist’s descrip- tion, for abstraction is the key tool in the system computer scientist’s toolkit. It means separating the function of a device from its implementation. This permits independent development of the implementation, and applications, of a device—pro- gramming language, operating system, architec- ture, or protocol.  IEEE CS 2022 Report Of course, this is ubiquitous in computer science and information technology, and examples are easy to enumerate: the x86 architecture (or any stan- dardized ISA), the Linux kernel, the OpenStack API in cloud services, any programming language, and any programming language’s standard library. In fact, computer systems generally are hierarchies of abstract architectures, with each one built on top of the stack below.  IEEE CS 2022 Report Changes in implementation are essentially hidden from upper layers. For example, changes in the implementation of the Linux kernel are invisible to application programs, programs port easily between one x86 chip and another, and so on. Abstraction is so ubiquitous that we just assume it.  IEEE CS 2022 Report Given that, it is remarkable that, to this date, the network control plane has had no similar set of abstractions. The network data plane, in contrast, has an extremely successful layer of abstractions: the familiar standard OSI protocol stack, with its physical, media access, Internet, transmission control, and application layers. This set of abstrac- tions has been standardized for a generation and has been stunningly successful: a Web server is (largely) independent of the Transmission Control Protocol implementation upon which it relies, and the physical layer is completely invisible to applica- tion programs .  IEEE CS 2022 Report However, for all of the success of abstraction in the network data plane, there is no set of accompa- nying abstractions for the network control plane. And, to quote Shenker, “this is crazy.” With every new control protocol, network engineers have to re-specify and re-implement the general methods common to all control protocols: propagation of distributed state, failover, recovery from error, and so on. If this were done for (for example) storage systems, the filesystem API wouldn’t exist, and each application writer would have to re-speci- fy the layout of blocks on disk, error-correcting  IEEE CS 2022 Report codes, a two-phase commit protocol to the device, and so on. We do this for network control proto- cols, however, and we do it all the time—so often that we barely notice we’re doing it. For example, RFC 2328 specifies the Open Shortest Path First Protocol, the basic routing algorithm of the In- ternet. RFC 2328 runs to 250 pages, of which 13 are devoted to the method used to calculate the appropriate paths; the remaining 237 pages spec- ify details of how local information is propagated to neighbors in the network graph, maintenance of distributed state, security and authentication provisions, and so on. Given a fully developed set of abstractions for the control plane, OSPF—and virtually every other Layer 2 and Layer 3 control protocol—will be shortened by a significant degree. We have only begun the journey toward standard- izing and specifying a set of abstractions for the control plane. Shenker specified three general layers: the switch protocol, the network operat- ing system, and the specification layer—a.k.a., the programming language. The initial switch protocol, OpenFlow, is now fairly mature; the network oper- ating system is becoming so, with the emergence of a number of open source controllers. The final step, the specification language, is fairly nascent, with the emergence of the FreNetic language from Princeton and Cornel.

State of the art

IEEE CS 2022 Report

The state of the art in OpenFlow networks is the implementation of a standard protocol, in which a switch is reduced to a simple forwarding tab.  IEEE CS 2022 Report The table matches incoming packets based on specifications of the packet header—values of bits in specific fields, with wildcards. On match, one of four actions can be taken: send the packet out on a port, ask the off-board controller for help, drop the packet, or send the packet through the switch’s normal processing pipeline (so-called “hybrid mode”). The most recent implemented version of the protocol offers the ability to match a packet multiple times, offering the prospect of multiple actions on a single packet.  IEEE CS 2022 Report he preceding description of OpenFlow suggests two things: one, this is within the capabilities of almost any switch on the market today, and two, there is less need for on-switch software in a “soft- ware-defined network” than in today’s networks. Both these observations are correct: OpenFlow was deliberately designed to be implementable on the current generation of switches, and there is less software on a pure OpenFlow switch than in a standard switch. For the first, the original authors of the OpenFlow protocol observe, “While each vendor’s flow-table is different, we’ve identified an interesting common set of functions that run in many switches and routers. OpenFlow exploits this common set of functions.” For the second, there is no more software in an SDN than in a classic network. An Open- Flow-based network routes and forwards packets via on-switch hardware, and provides no more services than any other classic L2/L3 network. The software in an SDN, defining the rules and policies concerning packet forwarding and transmission, has been moved off the individual switches and routers, and centralized and opened up to the network administrator. And thus the network as a whole is more transparent and more controllable by the network administrator. The switch is a sim- ple forwarding table. Since forwarding rules and policies, not the phys- ical topology of a network, essentially defines what we mean by a “network,” this factoring of the control plane offers the possibility of virtual networks. A virtual network is an application- or purpose-specific network with its own forwarding rules, segregated address and rulespace, quali- ty-of-service guarantees, and admission control that can be set up and torn down on a dynamic ba- sis. This is dream in classic networks: an easy reali- ty in an OpenFlow network. You simply identify the virtual network by some combination of address space, VLAN tag, ethertype, protocol, and port and write the forwarding rules for this virtual network in a specification to the controller; the controller then forwards these rules to the individual switches. This capability of OpenFlow of isolated virtual networks suggests per-virtual-network control- lers. This in turn leads to the concept of a network hypervisor, which plays the same role for multiple network controllers that a hypervisor does for separate virtual machines on a single common substrate. The prototype network hypervisor is the FlowVisor, which partitions the matching header spaces among component controllers and permits each controller to write rules over its own header space (the flowspace) Rules from the controller are sent to the flowVisor, which checks to ensure that each controller is writing rules over its own flowspace and then transmits those rules to the switches.

[webanalytics]

How to Map Behavioral Metrics Into Your Key Business Drivers

Analytics is a blessing to marketers because of the wealth of data it provides.

It’s “the most measurable medium.”

Online marketers can analyze and dissect innumerable elements to gain a deeper understanding of the habits and preferences of their customers.

As a result, they can effectively put themselves in their customers’ shoes and optimize the entire experience. This allows them to fine-tune even the most minute aspects of their campaign, thereby improving customer satisfaction and increasing sales.

But this also creates of a quandary. With such an abundance of data points available, it can be a little perplexing deciding which behavioral metrics to focus on.

So, what do you do?

In this article, I attempt to answer the question by suggesting seven of the most important behavioral metrics that drive business.

What Behavioral Metrics Should Marketers Focus On?

Sometimes, the sheer volume of behavioral metrics can feel paralyzing. Just look at this list of examples provided by Scott Roever of CompUSA:

And here’s some more:

See what I mean?

Things can get murky in a hurry. So which behavioral metrics most demand your attention?

Obviously, it can definitely vary from company to company, but it all boils down to answering a single crucial question — what behavioral metrics impact your key business drivers?

For most businesses, there are three key business drivers in play:

Revenue

Active users (for SaaS companies)

Customer loyalty (for Ecommerce companies)

Here’s how to go about mapping behavioral metrics into these key business drivers.

Revenue

There are two behavioral metrics that heavily impact revenue.

Conversion rate and churn.

Conversion rate influences your ROI and overall bottom line.

It’s also what allows you to benchmark your website month-to-month and year-to-year to track long-term progress.

Therefore, it’s arguably the most important metric to examine pound-for-pound.

One of the simplest tools for determining how your conversion rate directly impacts your revenue is this one from Foremost Media:

It’s pretty straightforward.

Enter the average number of visitors to your website each month, the percentage of visitors that convert and the average value of a conversion.

Here’s an example:

In this case, website revenue would be $150,000.

But you can take it one step further.

If you’re wondering how much your revenue would increase by increasing traffic, increasing your conversion rate or both, you can do it with ease.

Just type in the increase in percentage of traffic and/or increase in conversion rate.

Let’s say, I’m able to increase traffic by 15 percent and increase conversions by 0.5 percent.

Here’s what I get:

This tells me that these improvements would take my website revenue from $150,000 to $173,650 – an increase of $23,650.

By following this simple formula, you can see exactly how your conversion rate is affecting revenue.

As for calculating churn, it can get pretty complicated and depends on a myriad of factors like how you count customers, time frame, customer segments and so on.

ProfitWell even goes so far as to say that there are 43 different ways to calculate SaaS churn.

But when broken down in its simplest form, the formula looks like this:

It’s important to note that churn is inevitable and is bound to occur in nearly every business.

What’s important is that you have an acceptable churn rate.

So…what’s considered “acceptable?”

Hate to say it, but it just depends.

I like the answer that David Mytton of Server Density wrote on Quora:

You can’t just pick a number and say “this is what churn should be” because it depends entirely on your customer segment.

This is a guy who knows that segmentation is crucial. Any churn rate that excludes customer segmentation from the equation is most likely misguided.

Mytton does, however, admit that it’s helpful to have benchmarks. He provides these:

Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures suggests than an acceptable churn rate is in the 5-7% range annually or 0.42 – 0.58 percent monthly. According to Murphy, “Companies with acceptable churn only lose about 1 out of every 200 customers (or dollars) per month.”

In my experience, this sets the standard way too high.

Churn happens, regardless of how amazing your customer service, how flawless your product, or how perfect your price point is.

But there are holes that should be plugged. If left unchecked, an exorbitant churn rate will erode your revenue.

If you’re staring at an alarming churn rate — whatever that might be for your vertical and segment — start taking action immediately.

Active Users (SaaS)

When it comes to SaaS companies, they’ll want to keep a close eye on their number of active users at any given time.

This is perhaps the best indicator of engagement and shows how many users are actually using their product on a consistent basis.

Of course, the term “active” is inherently nebulous and can be defined in a variety of ways.

Pipz Automation even calls active users a vanity metric saying that it’s too black and white to identify a user as active or inactive with nothing in between.

Although it’s an interesting argument, and determining “activeness” can depend on a variety of factors as well as the industry in question, I feel there are some concrete ways to identify active users.

So let’s get right down to it.

Logins

Perhaps the most obvious and universal is logins.

Facebook has a super simple way of defining active users, which primarily hinges upon logging in. You don’t need to Like, Comment, or use any feature to be counted as active. Just login.

We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger application (and is also a registered Facebook user), on a given day.

If a user doesn’t do this within a 30 day period, they’re marked as inactive.

This is a means of identifying users that pretty much any SaaS company can do with ease.

Pipz Automation makes another interesting point by saying, “For all you know, ‘inactive users’ could be on vacation, or their business could be passing through a slow sales season, so they don’t have the need to login on your product for a while.”

While this is definitely food for thought, I still think that examining logins is one of the most straightforward ways to gauge active users.

Session Duration

Another factor to take into account is how long a user is logged in.

Having someone logged in for 10 minutes would be favorable to someone only being logged in for 2 minutes.

Although anyone who logs in would be considered as an active user, you would assign more value to someone who stays logged in for longer.

The longer your average session duration is, the better.

Using Features

This is the second metric that Facebook (and many companies) use after logins.

Of course the specific type of features used can vary widely, seeing that a user is accessing key features is obviously a sign that they’re active.

For instance, Ahrefs might take a look at which specific features users were accessing most frequently from their dashboard.

You’ll probably also want to classify some features as being more important than others.

For example, you might assign more value to someone taking the time to fill out their profile rather than checking for notifications.

This would show that they’re engrossed in your software, which is a good sign.

Creating a CEI

A customer engagement index (CEI) is a way to gain even more comprehensive insights into user activity. It is sometimes also known as customer engagement score.

It involves assigning different values to a user’s actions, which ultimately gives you a snapshot of overall user engagement.

This ends up being quite helpful for determining just how active your users are on the whole.

Customer Loyalty (Ecommerce)

Finally there’s the matter of customer loyalty.

This affects everything from revenue and brand equity to the long-term sustainability of your business and how competitive you are in your industry.

You’ve probably heard something like, “It can cost five times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep current ones.”

This is a good quote that shows why companies are so concerned with customer loyalty.

But here are some other interesting statistics that demonstrate the full impact of having loyal customers.

“61 percent of SMBs report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat customers, rather than new business.”

“On average, loyal customers are worth up to 10x as much as their first purchase.”

“A five percent increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75 percent.”

When it comes to using behavioral metrics to determine customer loyalty, looking at repurchases is usually your best bet.

If a customer is compelled to purchase multiple products from your company, it indicates at least a base level of loyalty.

They like your brand enough and have had at a pleasant enough experience to buy from you again.

The more purchases a single customer makes correlates into stronger loyalty.

When it comes to a repeat purchase rate formula, it’s really quite simple.

So if out of 100 customers,15 have shopped with you previously, you would have a repeat rate of 15 percent.

Calculating your retention rate is one of the most effective ways to gauge the collective loyalty of your customers and determine if any adjustments need to be made.

Conclusion

The key business drivers I mentioned – revenue, active users and customer loyalty – contribute most heavily to your company’s bottom line.

There are of course a multitude of factors to take into account, but I feel that these three are most pertinent in the grand scheme of things.

Diagnosing the health of these key business drivers revolves around identifying which behavioral metrics impact them the most.

To recap it’s these:

Conversion rate and churn for revenue

Logins, session duration and using features for active users

Repeat purchases for customer loyalty

By analyzing these elements, you should be able to determine both your strengths and weaknesses so you can ultimately take measures to optimize your site and ultimately improve your bottom line.

What do you think is the number one most important business driver?

About the Author: Daniel Threlfall is an Internet entrepreneur and content marketing strategist. As a writer and marketing strategist, Daniel has helped brands including Merck, Fiji Water, Little Tikes, and MGA Entertainment. Daniel is co-founding Your Success Rocket, a resource for Internet entrepreneurs. He and his wife Keren have four children, and occasionally enjoy adventures in remote corners of the globe (kids included). You can follow Daniel on Twitter or see pictures of his adventures on Instagram.

from Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2xz0ZQS #Digital #Analytics #Website

[samiam03x]

How to Map Behavioral Metrics Into Your Key Business Drivers

Digital marketing is a blessing to marketers because of the wealth of data it provides.

Online marketers can analyze and dissect innumerable elements to gain a deeper understanding of the habits and preferences of their customers.

As a result, they can effectively put themselves in their customers’ shoes and optimize the entire experience. This allows them to fine-tune even the most minute aspects of their campaign, thereby improving customer satisfaction and increasing sales.

But this also creates of a quandary. With such an abundance of data points available, it can be a little perplexing deciding which behavioral metrics to focus on.

So, what do you do?

In this article, I attempt to answer the question by suggesting seven of the most important behavioral metrics that drive business.

What Behavioral Metrics Should Marketers Focus On?

Sometimes, the sheer volume of behavioral metrics can feel paralyzing. Just look at this list of examples provided by Scott Roever of CompUSA:

And here’s some more:

See what I mean?

Things can get murky in a hurry. So which behavioral metrics most demand your attention?

Obviously, it can definitely vary from company to company, but it all boils down to answering a single crucial question — what behavioral metrics impact your key business drivers?

For most businesses, there are three key business drivers in play:

Revenue

Active users (for SaaS companies)

Customer loyalty (for Ecommerce companies)

Here’s how to go about mapping behavioral metrics into these key business drivers.

Revenue

There are two behavioral metrics that heavily impact revenue.

Conversion rate and churn.

Conversion rate influences your ROI and overall bottom line.

It’s also what allows you to benchmark your website month-to-month and year-to-year to track long-term progress.

Therefore, it’s arguably the most important metric to examine pound-for-pound.

One of the simplest tools for determining how your conversion rate directly impacts your revenue is this one from Foremost Media:

It’s pretty straightforward.

Enter the average number of visitors to your website each month, the percentage of visitors that convert and the average value of a conversion.

Here’s an example:

In this case, website revenue would be $150,000.

But you can take it one step further.

If you’re wondering how much your revenue would increase by increasing traffic, increasing your conversion rate or both, you can do it with ease.

Just type in the increase in percentage of traffic and/or increase in conversion rate.

Let’s say, I’m able to increase traffic by 15 percent and increase conversions by 0.5 percent.

Here’s what I get:

This tells me that these improvements would take my website revenue from $150,000 to $173,650 – an increase of $23,650.

By following this simple formula, you can see exactly how your conversion rate is affecting revenue.

As for calculating churn, it can get pretty complicated and depends on a myriad of factors like how you count customers, time frame, customer segments and so on.

ProfitWell even goes so far as to say that there are 43 different ways to calculate SaaS churn.

But when broken down in its simplest form, the formula looks like this:

It’s important to note that churn is inevitable and is bound to occur in nearly every business.

What’s important is that you have an acceptable churn rate.

So…what’s considered “acceptable?”

Hate to say it, but it just depends.

I like the answer that David Mytton of Server Density wrote on Quora:

You can’t just pick a number and say “this is what churn should be” because it depends entirely on your customer segment.

This is a guy who knows that segmentation is crucial. Any churn rate that excludes customer segmentation from the equation is most likely misguided.

Mytton does, however, admit that it’s helpful to have benchmarks. He provides these:

Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures suggests than an acceptable churn rate is in the 5-7% range annually or 0.42 – 0.58 percent monthly. According to Murphy, “Companies with acceptable churn only lose about 1 out of every 200 customers (or dollars) per month.”

In my experience, this sets the standard way too high.

Churn happens, regardless of how amazing your customer service, how flawless your product, or how perfect your price point is.

But there are holes that should be plugged. If left unchecked, an exorbitant churn rate will erode your revenue.

If you’re staring at an alarming churn rate — whatever that might be for your vertical and segment — start taking action immediately.

Active Users (SaaS)

When it comes to SaaS companies, they’ll want to keep a close eye on their number of active users at any given time.

This is perhaps the best indicator of engagement and shows how many users are actually using their product on a consistent basis.

Of course, the term “active” is inherently nebulous and can be defined in a variety of ways.

Pipz Automation even calls active users a vanity metric saying that it’s too black and white to identify a user as active or inactive with nothing in between.

Although it’s an interesting argument, and determining “activeness” can depend on a variety of factors as well as the industry in question, I feel there are some concrete ways to identify active users.

So let’s get right down to it.

Logins

Perhaps the most obvious and universal is logins.

Facebook has a super simple way of defining active users, which primarily hinges upon logging in. You don’t need to Like, Comment, or use any feature to be counted as active. Just login.

We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger application (and is also a registered Facebook user), on a given day.

If a user doesn’t do this within a 30 day period, they’re marked as inactive.

This is a means of identifying users that pretty much any SaaS company can do with ease.

Pipz Automation makes another interesting point by saying, “For all you know, ‘inactive users’ could be on vacation, or their business could be passing through a slow sales season, so they don’t have the need to login on your product for a while.”

While this is definitely food for thought, I still think that examining logins is one of the most straightforward ways to gauge active users.

Session Duration

Another factor to take into account is how long a user is logged in.

Having someone logged in for 10 minutes would be favorable to someone only being logged in for 2 minutes.

Although anyone who logs in would be considered as an active user, you would assign more value to someone who stays logged in for longer.

The longer your average session duration is, the better.

Using Features

This is the second metric that Facebook (and many companies) use after logins.

Of course the specific type of features used can vary widely, seeing that a user is accessing key features is obviously a sign that they’re active.

For instance, Ahrefs might take a look at which specific features users were accessing most frequently from their dashboard.

You’ll probably also want to classify some features as being more important than others.

For example, you might assign more value to someone taking the time to fill out their profile rather than checking for notifications.

This would show that they’re engrossed in your software, which is a good sign.

Creating a CEI

A customer engagement index (CEI) is a way to gain even more comprehensive insights into user activity. It is sometimes also known as customer engagement score.

It involves assigning different values to a user’s actions, which ultimately gives you a snapshot of overall user engagement.

This ends up being quite helpful for determining just how active your users are on the whole.

Customer Loyalty (Ecommerce)

Finally there’s the matter of customer loyalty.

This affects everything from revenue and brand equity to the long-term sustainability of your business and how competitive you are in your industry.

You’ve probably heard something like, “It can cost five times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep current ones.”

This is a good quote that shows why companies are so concerned with customer loyalty.

But here are some other interesting statistics that demonstrate the full impact of having loyal customers.

“61 percent of SMBs report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat customers, rather than new business.”

“On average, loyal customers are worth up to 10x as much as their first purchase.”

“A five percent increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75 percent.”

When it comes to using behavioral metrics to determine customer loyalty, looking at repurchases is usually your best bet.

If a customer is compelled to purchase multiple products from your company, it indicates at least a base level of loyalty.

They like your brand enough and have had at a pleasant enough experience to buy from you again.

The more purchases a single customer makes correlates into stronger loyalty.

When it comes to a repeat purchase rate formula, it’s really quite simple. Here’s how to calculate it:

Image Source

So if out of 100 customers,15 have shopped with you previously, you would have a repeat rate of 15 percent.

Calculating your retention rate is one of the most effective ways to gauge the collective loyalty of your customers and determine if any adjustments need to be made.

Conclusion

The key business drivers I mentioned – revenue, active users and customer loyalty – contribute most heavily to your company’s bottom line.

There are of course a multitude of factors to take into account, but I feel that these three are most pertinent in the grand scheme of things.

Diagnosing the health of these key business drivers revolves around identifying which behavioral metrics impact them the most.

To recap it’s these:

Conversion rate and churn for revenue

Logins, session duration and using features for active users

Repeat purchases for customer loyalty

By analyzing these elements, you should be able to determine both your strengths and weaknesses so you can ultimately take measures to optimize your site and ultimately improve your bottom line.

What do you think is the number one most important business driver?

About the Author: Daniel Threlfall is an Internet entrepreneur and content marketing strategist. As a writer and marketing strategist, Daniel has helped brands including Merck, Fiji Water, Little Tikes, and MGA Entertainment. Daniel is co-founding Your Success Rocket, a resource for Internet entrepreneurs. He and his wife Keren have four children, and occasionally enjoy adventures in remote corners of the globe (kids included). You can follow Daniel on Twitter or see pictures of his adventures on Instagram.

http://ift.tt/2w9Di1w from MarketingRSS http://ift.tt/2jrqkGv via Youtube

[marie85marketing]

How to Map Behavioral Metrics Into Your Key Business Drivers

Digital marketing is a blessing to marketers because of the wealth of data it provides.

Online marketers can analyze and dissect innumerable elements to gain a deeper understanding of the habits and preferences of their customers.

As a result, they can effectively put themselves in their customers’ shoes and optimize the entire experience. This allows them to fine-tune even the most minute aspects of their campaign, thereby improving customer satisfaction and increasing sales.

But this also creates of a quandary. With such an abundance of data points available, it can be a little perplexing deciding which behavioral metrics to focus on.

So, what do you do?

In this article, I attempt to answer the question by suggesting seven of the most important behavioral metrics that drive business.

What Behavioral Metrics Should Marketers Focus On?

Sometimes, the sheer volume of behavioral metrics can feel paralyzing. Just look at this list of examples provided by Scott Roever of CompUSA:

And here’s some more:

See what I mean?

Things can get murky in a hurry. So which behavioral metrics most demand your attention?

Obviously, it can definitely vary from company to company, but it all boils down to answering a single crucial question — what behavioral metrics impact your key business drivers?

For most businesses, there are three key business drivers in play:

Revenue

Active users (for SaaS companies)

Customer loyalty (for Ecommerce companies)

Here’s how to go about mapping behavioral metrics into these key business drivers.

Revenue

There are two behavioral metrics that heavily impact revenue.

Conversion rate and churn.

Conversion rate influences your ROI and overall bottom line.

It’s also what allows you to benchmark your website month-to-month and year-to-year to track long-term progress.

Therefore, it’s arguably the most important metric to examine pound-for-pound.

One of the simplest tools for determining how your conversion rate directly impacts your revenue is this one from Foremost Media:

It’s pretty straightforward.

Enter the average number of visitors to your website each month, the percentage of visitors that convert and the average value of a conversion.

Here’s an example:

In this case, website revenue would be $150,000.

But you can take it one step further.

If you’re wondering how much your revenue would increase by increasing traffic, increasing your conversion rate or both, you can do it with ease.

Just type in the increase in percentage of traffic and/or increase in conversion rate.

Let’s say, I’m able to increase traffic by 15 percent and increase conversions by 0.5 percent.

Here’s what I get:

This tells me that these improvements would take my website revenue from $150,000 to $173,650 – an increase of $23,650.

By following this simple formula, you can see exactly how your conversion rate is affecting revenue.

As for calculating churn, it can get pretty complicated and depends on a myriad of factors like how you count customers, time frame, customer segments and so on.

ProfitWell even goes so far as to say that there are 43 different ways to calculate SaaS churn.

But when broken down in its simplest form, the formula looks like this:

It’s important to note that churn is inevitable and is bound to occur in nearly every business.

What’s important is that you have an acceptable churn rate.

So…what’s considered “acceptable?”

Hate to say it, but it just depends.

I like the answer that David Mytton of Server Density wrote on Quora:

You can’t just pick a number and say “this is what churn should be” because it depends entirely on your customer segment.

This is a guy who knows that segmentation is crucial. Any churn rate that excludes customer segmentation from the equation is most likely misguided.

Mytton does, however, admit that it’s helpful to have benchmarks. He provides these:

Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures suggests than an acceptable churn rate is in the 5-7% range annually or 0.42 – 0.58 percent monthly. According to Murphy, “Companies with acceptable churn only lose about 1 out of every 200 customers (or dollars) per month.”

In my experience, this sets the standard way too high.

Churn happens, regardless of how amazing your customer service, how flawless your product, or how perfect your price point is.

But there are holes that should be plugged. If left unchecked, an exorbitant churn rate will erode your revenue.

If you’re staring at an alarming churn rate — whatever that might be for your vertical and segment — start taking action immediately.

Active Users (SaaS)

When it comes to SaaS companies, they’ll want to keep a close eye on their number of active users at any given time.

This is perhaps the best indicator of engagement and shows how many users are actually using their product on a consistent basis.

Of course, the term “active” is inherently nebulous and can be defined in a variety of ways.

Pipz Automation even calls active users a vanity metric saying that it’s too black and white to identify a user as active or inactive with nothing in between.

Although it’s an interesting argument, and determining “activeness” can depend on a variety of factors as well as the industry in question, I feel there are some concrete ways to identify active users.

So let’s get right down to it.

Logins

Perhaps the most obvious and universal is logins.

Facebook has a super simple way of defining active users, which primarily hinges upon logging in. You don’t need to Like, Comment, or use any feature to be counted as active. Just login.

We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger application (and is also a registered Facebook user), on a given day.

If a user doesn’t do this within a 30 day period, they’re marked as inactive.

This is a means of identifying users that pretty much any SaaS company can do with ease.

Pipz Automation makes another interesting point by saying, “For all you know, ‘inactive users’ could be on vacation, or their business could be passing through a slow sales season, so they don’t have the need to login on your product for a while.”

While this is definitely food for thought, I still think that examining logins is one of the most straightforward ways to gauge active users.

Session Duration

Another factor to take into account is how long a user is logged in.

Having someone logged in for 10 minutes would be favorable to someone only being logged in for 2 minutes.

Although anyone who logs in would be considered as an active user, you would assign more value to someone who stays logged in for longer.

The longer your average session duration is, the better.

Using Features

This is the second metric that Facebook (and many companies) use after logins.

Of course the specific type of features used can vary widely, seeing that a user is accessing key features is obviously a sign that they’re active.

For instance, Ahrefs might take a look at which specific features users were accessing most frequently from their dashboard.

You’ll probably also want to classify some features as being more important than others.

For example, you might assign more value to someone taking the time to fill out their profile rather than checking for notifications.

This would show that they’re engrossed in your software, which is a good sign.

Creating a CEI

A customer engagement index (CEI) is a way to gain even more comprehensive insights into user activity. It is sometimes also known as customer engagement score.

It involves assigning different values to a user’s actions, which ultimately gives you a snapshot of overall user engagement.

This ends up being quite helpful for determining just how active your users are on the whole.

Customer Loyalty (Ecommerce)

Finally there’s the matter of customer loyalty.

This affects everything from revenue and brand equity to the long-term sustainability of your business and how competitive you are in your industry.

You’ve probably heard something like, “It can cost five times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep current ones.”

This is a good quote that shows why companies are so concerned with customer loyalty.

But here are some other interesting statistics that demonstrate the full impact of having loyal customers.

“61 percent of SMBs report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat customers, rather than new business.”

“On average, loyal customers are worth up to 10x as much as their first purchase.”

“A five percent increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75 percent.”

When it comes to using behavioral metrics to determine customer loyalty, looking at repurchases is usually your best bet.

If a customer is compelled to purchase multiple products from your company, it indicates at least a base level of loyalty.

They like your brand enough and have had at a pleasant enough experience to buy from you again.

The more purchases a single customer makes correlates into stronger loyalty.

When it comes to a repeat purchase rate formula, it’s really quite simple. Here’s how to calculate it:

Image Source

So if out of 100 customers,15 have shopped with you previously, you would have a repeat rate of 15 percent.

Calculating your retention rate is one of the most effective ways to gauge the collective loyalty of your customers and determine if any adjustments need to be made.

Conclusion

The key business drivers I mentioned – revenue, active users and customer loyalty – contribute most heavily to your company’s bottom line.

There are of course a multitude of factors to take into account, but I feel that these three are most pertinent in the grand scheme of things.

Diagnosing the health of these key business drivers revolves around identifying which behavioral metrics impact them the most.

To recap it’s these:

Conversion rate and churn for revenue

Logins, session duration and using features for active users

Repeat purchases for customer loyalty

By analyzing these elements, you should be able to determine both your strengths and weaknesses so you can ultimately take measures to optimize your site and ultimately improve your bottom line.

What do you think is the number one most important business driver?

About the Author: Daniel Threlfall is an Internet entrepreneur and content marketing strategist. As a writer and marketing strategist, Daniel has helped brands including Merck, Fiji Water, Little Tikes, and MGA Entertainment. Daniel is co-founding Your Success Rocket, a resource for Internet entrepreneurs. He and his wife Keren have four children, and occasionally enjoy adventures in remote corners of the globe (kids included). You can follow Daniel on Twitter or see pictures of his adventures on Instagram.

[reputationiseverything]

How to Map Behavioral Metrics Into Your Key Business Drivers

37 email marketing tips

Digital marketing is a blessing to marketers because of the wealth of data it provides.

Online marketers can analyze and dissect innumerable elements to gain a deeper understanding of the habits and preferences of their customers.

As a result, they can effectively put themselves in their customers’ shoes and optimize the entire experience. This allows them to fine-tune even the most minute aspects of their campaign, thereby improving customer satisfaction and increasing sales.

But this also creates of a quandary. With such an abundance of data points available, it can be a little perplexing deciding which behavioral metrics to focus on.

So, what do you do?

In this article, I attempt to answer the question by suggesting seven of the most important behavioral metrics that drive business.

What Behavioral Metrics Should Marketers Focus On?

Sometimes, the sheer volume of behavioral metrics can feel paralyzing. Just look at this list of examples provided by Scott Roever of CompUSA:

And here’s some more:

See what I mean?

Things can get murky in a hurry. So which behavioral metrics most demand your attention?

Obviously, it can definitely vary from company to company, but it all boils down to answering a single crucial question — what behavioral metrics impact your key business drivers?

For most businesses, there are three key business drivers in play:

Revenue

Active users (for SaaS companies)

Customer loyalty (for Ecommerce companies)

Here’s how to go about mapping behavioral metrics into these key business drivers.

Revenue

There are two behavioral metrics that heavily impact revenue.

Conversion rate and churn.

Conversion rate influences your ROI and overall bottom line.

It’s also what allows you to benchmark your website month-to-month and year-to-year to track long-term progress.

Therefore, it’s arguably the most important metric to examine pound-for-pound.

One of the simplest tools for determining how your conversion rate directly impacts your revenue is this one from Foremost Media:

It’s pretty straightforward.

Enter the average number of visitors to your website each month, the percentage of visitors that convert and the average value of a conversion.

Here’s an example:

In this case, website revenue would be $150,000.

But you can take it one step further.

If you’re wondering how much your revenue would increase by increasing traffic, increasing your conversion rate or both, you can do it with ease.

Just type in the increase in percentage of traffic and/or increase in conversion rate.

Let’s say, I’m able to increase traffic by 15 percent and increase conversions by 0.5 percent.

Here’s what I get:

This tells me that these improvements would take my website revenue from $150,000 to $173,650 – an increase of $23,650.

By following this simple formula, you can see exactly how your conversion rate is affecting revenue.

As for calculating churn, it can get pretty complicated and depends on a myriad of factors like how you count customers, time frame, customer segments and so on.

ProfitWell even goes so far as to say that there are 43 different ways to calculate SaaS churn.

But when broken down in its simplest form, the formula looks like this:

It’s important to note that churn is inevitable and is bound to occur in nearly every business.

What’s important is that you have an acceptable churn rate.

So…what’s considered “acceptable?”

Hate to say it, but it just depends.

I like the answer that David Mytton of Server Density wrote on Quora:

You can’t just pick a number and say “this is what churn should be” because it depends entirely on your customer segment.

This is a guy who knows that segmentation is crucial. Any churn rate that excludes customer segmentation from the equation is most likely misguided.

Mytton does, however, admit that it’s helpful to have benchmarks. He provides these:

Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures suggests than an acceptable churn rate is in the 5-7% range annually or 0.42 – 0.58 percent monthly. According to Murphy, “Companies with acceptable churn only lose about 1 out of every 200 customers (or dollars) per month.”

In my experience, this sets the standard way too high.

Churn happens, regardless of how amazing your customer service, how flawless your product, or how perfect your price point is.

But there are holes that should be plugged. If left unchecked, an exorbitant churn rate will erode your revenue.

If you’re staring at an alarming churn rate — whatever that might be for your vertical and segment — start taking action immediately.

Active Users (SaaS)

When it comes to SaaS companies, they’ll want to keep a close eye on their number of active users at any given time.

This is perhaps the best indicator of engagement and shows how many users are actually using their product on a consistent basis.

Of course, the term “active” is inherently nebulous and can be defined in a variety of ways.

Pipz Automation even calls active users a vanity metric saying that it’s too black and white to identify a user as active or inactive with nothing in between.

Although it’s an interesting argument, and determining “activeness” can depend on a variety of factors as well as the industry in question, I feel there are some concrete ways to identify active users.

So let’s get right down to it.

Logins

Perhaps the most obvious and universal is logins.

Facebook has a super simple way of defining active users, which primarily hinges upon logging in. You don’t need to Like, Comment, or use any feature to be counted as active. Just login.

We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger application (and is also a registered Facebook user), on a given day.

If a user doesn’t do this within a 30 day period, they’re marked as inactive.

This is a means of identifying users that pretty much any SaaS company can do with ease.

Pipz Automation makes another interesting point by saying, “For all you know, ‘inactive users’ could be on vacation, or their business could be passing through a slow sales season, so they don’t have the need to login on your product for a while.”

While this is definitely food for thought, I still think that examining logins is one of the most straightforward ways to gauge active users.

Session Duration

Another factor to take into account is how long a user is logged in.

Having someone logged in for 10 minutes would be favorable to someone only being logged in for 2 minutes.

Although anyone who logs in would be considered as an active user, you would assign more value to someone who stays logged in for longer.

The longer your average session duration is, the better.

Using Features

This is the second metric that Facebook (and many companies) use after logins.

Of course the specific type of features used can vary widely, seeing that a user is accessing key features is obviously a sign that they’re active.

For instance, Ahrefs might take a look at which specific features users were accessing most frequently from their dashboard.

You’ll probably also want to classify some features as being more important than others.

For example, you might assign more value to someone taking the time to fill out their profile rather than checking for notifications.

This would show that they’re engrossed in your software, which is a good sign.

Creating a CEI

A customer engagement index (CEI) is a way to gain even more comprehensive insights into user activity. It is sometimes also known as customer engagement score.

It involves assigning different values to a user’s actions, which ultimately gives you a snapshot of overall user engagement.

This ends up being quite helpful for determining just how active your users are on the whole.

Customer Loyalty (Ecommerce)

Finally there’s the matter of customer loyalty.

This affects everything from revenue and brand equity to the long-term sustainability of your business and how competitive you are in your industry.

You’ve probably heard something like, “It can cost five times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep current ones.”

This is a good quote that shows why companies are so concerned with customer loyalty.

But here are some other interesting statistics that demonstrate the full impact of having loyal customers.

“61 percent of SMBs report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat customers, rather than new business.”

“On average, loyal customers are worth up to 10x as much as their first purchase.”

“A five percent increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75 percent.”

When it comes to using behavioral metrics to determine customer loyalty, looking at repurchases is usually your best bet.

If a customer is compelled to purchase multiple products from your company, it indicates at least a base level of loyalty.

They like your brand enough and have had at a pleasant enough experience to buy from you again.

The more purchases a single customer makes correlates into stronger loyalty.

When it comes to a repeat purchase rate formula, it’s really quite simple. Here’s how to calculate it:

Image Source

So if out of 100 customers,15 have shopped with you previously, you would have a repeat rate of 15 percent.

Calculating your retention rate is one of the most effective ways to gauge the collective loyalty of your customers and determine if any adjustments need to be made.

Conclusion

The key business drivers I mentioned – revenue, active users and customer loyalty – contribute most heavily to your company’s bottom line.

There are of course a multitude of factors to take into account, but I feel that these three are most pertinent in the grand scheme of things.

Diagnosing the health of these key business drivers revolves around identifying which behavioral metrics impact them the most.

To recap it’s these:

Conversion rate and churn for revenue

Logins, session duration and using features for active users

Repeat purchases for customer loyalty

By analyzing these elements, you should be able to determine both your strengths and weaknesses so you can ultimately take measures to optimize your site and ultimately improve your bottom line.

What do you think is the number one most important business driver?

About the Author: Daniel Threlfall is an Internet entrepreneur and content marketing strategist. As a writer and marketing strategist, Daniel has helped brands including Merck, Fiji Water, Little Tikes, and MGA Entertainment. Daniel is co-founding Your Success Rocket, a resource for Internet entrepreneurs. He and his wife Keren have four children, and occasionally enjoy adventures in remote corners of the globe (kids included). You can follow Daniel on Twitter or see pictures of his adventures on Instagram.

[filipeteimuraz]

How to Map Behavioral Metrics Into Your Key Business Drivers

Analytics is a blessing to marketers because of the wealth of data it provides.

It’s “the most measurable medium.”

Online marketers can analyze and dissect innumerable elements to gain a deeper understanding of the habits and preferences of their customers.

As a result, they can effectively put themselves in their customers’ shoes and optimize the entire experience. This allows them to fine-tune even the most minute aspects of their campaign, thereby improving customer satisfaction and increasing sales.

But this also creates of a quandary. With such an abundance of data points available, it can be a little perplexing deciding which behavioral metrics to focus on.

So, what do you do?

In this article, I attempt to answer the question by suggesting seven of the most important behavioral metrics that drive business.

What Behavioral Metrics Should Marketers Focus On?

Sometimes, the sheer volume of behavioral metrics can feel paralyzing. Just look at this list of examples provided by Scott Roever of CompUSA:

And here’s some more:

See what I mean?

Things can get murky in a hurry. So which behavioral metrics most demand your attention?

Obviously, it can definitely vary from company to company, but it all boils down to answering a single crucial question — what behavioral metrics impact your key business drivers?

For most businesses, there are three key business drivers in play:

Revenue

Active users (for SaaS companies)

Customer loyalty (for Ecommerce companies)

Here’s how to go about mapping behavioral metrics into these key business drivers.

Revenue

There are two behavioral metrics that heavily impact revenue.

Conversion rate and churn.

Conversion rate influences your ROI and overall bottom line.

It’s also what allows you to benchmark your website month-to-month and year-to-year to track long-term progress.

Therefore, it’s arguably the most important metric to examine pound-for-pound.

One of the simplest tools for determining how your conversion rate directly impacts your revenue is this one from Foremost Media:

It’s pretty straightforward.

Enter the average number of visitors to your website each month, the percentage of visitors that convert and the average value of a conversion.

Here’s an example:

In this case, website revenue would be $150,000.

But you can take it one step further.

If you’re wondering how much your revenue would increase by increasing traffic, increasing your conversion rate or both, you can do it with ease.

Just type in the increase in percentage of traffic and/or increase in conversion rate.

Let’s say, I’m able to increase traffic by 15 percent and increase conversions by 0.5 percent.

Here’s what I get:

This tells me that these improvements would take my website revenue from $150,000 to $173,650 – an increase of $23,650.

By following this simple formula, you can see exactly how your conversion rate is affecting revenue.

As for calculating churn, it can get pretty complicated and depends on a myriad of factors like how you count customers, time frame, customer segments and so on.

ProfitWell even goes so far as to say that there are 43 different ways to calculate SaaS churn.

But when broken down in its simplest form, the formula looks like this:

It’s important to note that churn is inevitable and is bound to occur in nearly every business.

What’s important is that you have an acceptable churn rate.

So…what’s considered “acceptable?”

Hate to say it, but it just depends.

I like the answer that David Mytton of Server Density wrote on Quora:

You can’t just pick a number and say “this is what churn should be” because it depends entirely on your customer segment.

This is a guy who knows that segmentation is crucial. Any churn rate that excludes customer segmentation from the equation is most likely misguided.

Mytton does, however, admit that it’s helpful to have benchmarks. He provides these:

Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures suggests than an acceptable churn rate is in the 5-7% range annually or 0.42 – 0.58 percent monthly. According to Murphy, “Companies with acceptable churn only lose about 1 out of every 200 customers (or dollars) per month.”

In my experience, this sets the standard way too high.

Churn happens, regardless of how amazing your customer service, how flawless your product, or how perfect your price point is.

But there are holes that should be plugged. If left unchecked, an exorbitant churn rate will erode your revenue.

If you’re staring at an alarming churn rate — whatever that might be for your vertical and segment — start taking action immediately.

Active Users (SaaS)

When it comes to SaaS companies, they’ll want to keep a close eye on their number of active users at any given time.

This is perhaps the best indicator of engagement and shows how many users are actually using their product on a consistent basis.

Of course, the term “active” is inherently nebulous and can be defined in a variety of ways.

Pipz Automation even calls active users a vanity metric saying that it’s too black and white to identify a user as active or inactive with nothing in between.

Although it’s an interesting argument, and determining “activeness” can depend on a variety of factors as well as the industry in question, I feel there are some concrete ways to identify active users.

So let’s get right down to it.

Logins

Perhaps the most obvious and universal is logins.

Facebook has a super simple way of defining active users, which primarily hinges upon logging in. You don’t need to Like, Comment, or use any feature to be counted as active. Just login.

We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger application (and is also a registered Facebook user), on a given day.

If a user doesn’t do this within a 30 day period, they’re marked as inactive.

This is a means of identifying users that pretty much any SaaS company can do with ease.

Pipz Automation makes another interesting point by saying, “For all you know, ‘inactive users’ could be on vacation, or their business could be passing through a slow sales season, so they don’t have the need to login on your product for a while.”

While this is definitely food for thought, I still think that examining logins is one of the most straightforward ways to gauge active users.

Session Duration

Another factor to take into account is how long a user is logged in.

Having someone logged in for 10 minutes would be favorable to someone only being logged in for 2 minutes.

Although anyone who logs in would be considered as an active user, you would assign more value to someone who stays logged in for longer.

The longer your average session duration is, the better.

Using Features

This is the second metric that Facebook (and many companies) use after logins.

Of course the specific type of features used can vary widely, seeing that a user is accessing key features is obviously a sign that they’re active.

For instance, Ahrefs might take a look at which specific features users were accessing most frequently from their dashboard.

You’ll probably also want to classify some features as being more important than others.

For example, you might assign more value to someone taking the time to fill out their profile rather than checking for notifications.

This would show that they’re engrossed in your software, which is a good sign.

Creating a CEI

A customer engagement index (CEI) is a way to gain even more comprehensive insights into user activity.

It involves assigning different values to a user’s actions, which ultimately gives you a snapshot of overall user engagement.

This ends up being quite helpful for determining just how active your users are on the whole.

Customer Loyalty (Ecommerce)

Finally there’s the matter of customer loyalty.

This affects everything from revenue and brand equity to the long-term sustainability of your business and how competitive you are in your industry.

You’ve probably heard something like, “It can cost five times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep current ones.”

This is a good quote that shows why companies are so concerned with customer loyalty.

But here are some other interesting statistics that demonstrate the full impact of having loyal customers.

“61 percent of SMBs report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat customers, rather than new business.”

“On average, loyal customers are worth up to 10x as much as their first purchase.”

“A five percent increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75 percent.”

When it comes to using behavioral metrics to determine customer loyalty, looking at repurchases is usually your best bet.

If a customer is compelled to purchase multiple products from your company, it indicates at least a base level of loyalty.

They like your brand enough and have had at a pleasant enough experience to buy from you again.

The more purchases a single customer makes correlates into stronger loyalty.

When it comes to a repeat purchase rate formula, it’s really quite simple.

So if out of 100 customers,15 have shopped with you previously, you would have a repeat rate of 15 percent.

Calculating your retention rate is one of the most effective ways to gauge the collective loyalty of your customers and determine if any adjustments need to be made.

Conclusion

The key business drivers I mentioned – revenue, active users and customer loyalty – contribute most heavily to your company’s bottom line.

There are of course a multitude of factors to take into account, but I feel that these three are most pertinent in the grand scheme of things.

Diagnosing the health of these key business drivers revolves around identifying which behavioral metrics impact them the most.

To recap it’s these:

Conversion rate and churn for revenue

Logins, session duration and using features for active users

Repeat purchases for customer loyalty

By analyzing these elements, you should be able to determine both your strengths and weaknesses so you can ultimately take measures to optimize your site and ultimately improve your bottom line.

What do you think is the number one most important business driver?

About the Author: Daniel Threlfall is an Internet entrepreneur and content marketing strategist. As a writer and marketing strategist, Daniel has helped brands including Merck, Fiji Water, Little Tikes, and MGA Entertainment. Daniel is co-founding Your Success Rocket, a resource for Internet entrepreneurs. He and his wife Keren have four children, and occasionally enjoy adventures in remote corners of the globe (kids included). You can follow Daniel on Twitter or see pictures of his adventures on Instagram.

Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2017/09/how-to-map-behavioral-metrics-into-your.html

[alissaselezneva]

How to Map Behavioral Metrics Into Your Key Business Drivers

Analytics is a blessing to marketers because of the wealth of data it provides.

It’s “the most measurable medium.”

Online marketers can analyze and dissect innumerable elements to gain a deeper understanding of the habits and preferences of their customers.

As a result, they can effectively put themselves in their customers’ shoes and optimize the entire experience. This allows them to fine-tune even the most minute aspects of their campaign, thereby improving customer satisfaction and increasing sales.

But this also creates of a quandary. With such an abundance of data points available, it can be a little perplexing deciding which behavioral metrics to focus on.

So, what do you do?

In this article, I attempt to answer the question by suggesting seven of the most important behavioral metrics that drive business.

What Behavioral Metrics Should Marketers Focus On?

Sometimes, the sheer volume of behavioral metrics can feel paralyzing. Just look at this list of examples provided by Scott Roever of CompUSA:

And here’s some more:

See what I mean?

Things can get murky in a hurry. So which behavioral metrics most demand your attention?

Obviously, it can definitely vary from company to company, but it all boils down to answering a single crucial question — what behavioral metrics impact your key business drivers?

For most businesses, there are three key business drivers in play:

Revenue

Active users (for SaaS companies)

Customer loyalty (for Ecommerce companies)

Here’s how to go about mapping behavioral metrics into these key business drivers.

Revenue

There are two behavioral metrics that heavily impact revenue.

Conversion rate and churn.

Conversion rate influences your ROI and overall bottom line.

It’s also what allows you to benchmark your website month-to-month and year-to-year to track long-term progress.

Therefore, it’s arguably the most important metric to examine pound-for-pound.

One of the simplest tools for determining how your conversion rate directly impacts your revenue is this one from Foremost Media:

It’s pretty straightforward.

Enter the average number of visitors to your website each month, the percentage of visitors that convert and the average value of a conversion.

Here’s an example:

In this case, website revenue would be $150,000.

But you can take it one step further.

If you’re wondering how much your revenue would increase by increasing traffic, increasing your conversion rate or both, you can do it with ease.

Just type in the increase in percentage of traffic and/or increase in conversion rate.

Let’s say, I’m able to increase traffic by 15 percent and increase conversions by 0.5 percent.

Here’s what I get:

This tells me that these improvements would take my website revenue from $150,000 to $173,650 – an increase of $23,650.

By following this simple formula, you can see exactly how your conversion rate is affecting revenue.

As for calculating churn, it can get pretty complicated and depends on a myriad of factors like how you count customers, time frame, customer segments and so on.

ProfitWell even goes so far as to say that there are 43 different ways to calculate SaaS churn.

But when broken down in its simplest form, the formula looks like this:

It’s important to note that churn is inevitable and is bound to occur in nearly every business.

What’s important is that you have an acceptable churn rate.

So…what’s considered “acceptable?”

Hate to say it, but it just depends.

I like the answer that David Mytton of Server Density wrote on Quora:

You can’t just pick a number and say “this is what churn should be” because it depends entirely on your customer segment.

This is a guy who knows that segmentation is crucial. Any churn rate that excludes customer segmentation from the equation is most likely misguided.

Mytton does, however, admit that it’s helpful to have benchmarks. He provides these:

Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures suggests than an acceptable churn rate is in the 5-7% range annually or 0.42 – 0.58 percent monthly. According to Murphy, “Companies with acceptable churn only lose about 1 out of every 200 customers (or dollars) per month.”

In my experience, this sets the standard way too high.

Churn happens, regardless of how amazing your customer service, how flawless your product, or how perfect your price point is.

But there are holes that should be plugged. If left unchecked, an exorbitant churn rate will erode your revenue.

If you’re staring at an alarming churn rate — whatever that might be for your vertical and segment — start taking action immediately.

Active Users (SaaS)

When it comes to SaaS companies, they’ll want to keep a close eye on their number of active users at any given time.

This is perhaps the best indicator of engagement and shows how many users are actually using their product on a consistent basis.

Of course, the term “active” is inherently nebulous and can be defined in a variety of ways.

Pipz Automation even calls active users a vanity metric saying that it’s too black and white to identify a user as active or inactive with nothing in between.

Although it’s an interesting argument, and determining “activeness” can depend on a variety of factors as well as the industry in question, I feel there are some concrete ways to identify active users.

So let’s get right down to it.

Logins

Perhaps the most obvious and universal is logins.

Facebook has a super simple way of defining active users, which primarily hinges upon logging in. You don’t need to Like, Comment, or use any feature to be counted as active. Just login.

We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger application (and is also a registered Facebook user), on a given day.

If a user doesn’t do this within a 30 day period, they’re marked as inactive.

This is a means of identifying users that pretty much any SaaS company can do with ease.

Pipz Automation makes another interesting point by saying, “For all you know, ‘inactive users’ could be on vacation, or their business could be passing through a slow sales season, so they don’t have the need to login on your product for a while.”

While this is definitely food for thought, I still think that examining logins is one of the most straightforward ways to gauge active users.

Session Duration

Another factor to take into account is how long a user is logged in.

Having someone logged in for 10 minutes would be favorable to someone only being logged in for 2 minutes.

Although anyone who logs in would be considered as an active user, you would assign more value to someone who stays logged in for longer.

The longer your average session duration is, the better.

Using Features

This is the second metric that Facebook (and many companies) use after logins.

Of course the specific type of features used can vary widely, seeing that a user is accessing key features is obviously a sign that they’re active.

For instance, Ahrefs might take a look at which specific features users were accessing most frequently from their dashboard.

You’ll probably also want to classify some features as being more important than others.

For example, you might assign more value to someone taking the time to fill out their profile rather than checking for notifications.

This would show that they’re engrossed in your software, which is a good sign.

Creating a CEI

A customer engagement index (CEI) is a way to gain even more comprehensive insights into user activity.

It involves assigning different values to a user’s actions, which ultimately gives you a snapshot of overall user engagement.

This ends up being quite helpful for determining just how active your users are on the whole.

Customer Loyalty (Ecommerce)

Finally there’s the matter of customer loyalty.

This affects everything from revenue and brand equity to the long-term sustainability of your business and how competitive you are in your industry.

You’ve probably heard something like, “It can cost five times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep current ones.”

This is a good quote that shows why companies are so concerned with customer loyalty.

But here are some other interesting statistics that demonstrate the full impact of having loyal customers.

“61 percent of SMBs report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat customers, rather than new business.”

“On average, loyal customers are worth up to 10x as much as their first purchase.”

“A five percent increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75 percent.”

When it comes to using behavioral metrics to determine customer loyalty, looking at repurchases is usually your best bet.

If a customer is compelled to purchase multiple products from your company, it indicates at least a base level of loyalty.

They like your brand enough and have had at a pleasant enough experience to buy from you again.

The more purchases a single customer makes correlates into stronger loyalty.

When it comes to a repeat purchase rate formula, it’s really quite simple.

So if out of 100 customers,15 have shopped with you previously, you would have a repeat rate of 15 percent.

Calculating your retention rate is one of the most effective ways to gauge the collective loyalty of your customers and determine if any adjustments need to be made.

Conclusion

The key business drivers I mentioned – revenue, active users and customer loyalty – contribute most heavily to your company’s bottom line.

There are of course a multitude of factors to take into account, but I feel that these three are most pertinent in the grand scheme of things.

Diagnosing the health of these key business drivers revolves around identifying which behavioral metrics impact them the most.

To recap it’s these:

Conversion rate and churn for revenue

Logins, session duration and using features for active users

Repeat purchases for customer loyalty

By analyzing these elements, you should be able to determine both your strengths and weaknesses so you can ultimately take measures to optimize your site and ultimately improve your bottom line.

What do you think is the number one most important business driver?

About the Author: Daniel Threlfall is an Internet entrepreneur and content marketing strategist. As a writer and marketing strategist, Daniel has helped brands including Merck, Fiji Water, Little Tikes, and MGA Entertainment. Daniel is co-founding Your Success Rocket, a resource for Internet entrepreneurs. He and his wife Keren have four children, and occasionally enjoy adventures in remote corners of the globe (kids included). You can follow Daniel on Twitter or see pictures of his adventures on Instagram.

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