Using Pay Per Click ads is becoming less and less financially viable. This is mainly because they are an auction so if you win you’ll always be paying more that others thought the traffic was worth.
Also they are very expensive – $0.05 might sound cheap per click but unless you have a good conversion rate this quickly becomes much more per sale.
I’ve created a spreadsheet that lets you see how much per sale it’ll cost for a given CPC and conversion rate:
Are cities inherently grotty? Are there little oases of niceness surrounded by grottiness? Can a really nice street run parallel to a really grotty one? How good are you at guessing where somewhere is in a city you know?
Enter GrotSpot.com – where you are shown a random Google Street View for a city (currently London) and then asked to rate it from 1 to 10. Once you’ve rated you get to see a map of where it is and what others thought of it.
This is not a new idea – HotOrNot is probably the most famous and MySociety’s ScenicOrNot is very similar. What makes GrotSpot interesting is Google Street View’s coverage is so good that it should be possible to gather grottiness data for an entire city right down to the street level. Indeed we could do a whole country but the rural lanes tend to be less rewarding to rate.
So far I’ve only put in a couple of days work on this project. If it gains traction I’ll do some more – adding maps with the ratings on and letting people set up other cities to be rated. Who knows where this will end?
PS – the locations are entirely random. That I should get Buckingham Palace when doing a screenshot is very encouraging.