Why to avoid buying adsense or affiliate websites

If you’re a beginner in the world of buying websites online, the promise of easy passive income might seem tempting, potentially leading you astray. Platforms such as Flippa.com and EmpireFlippers offer hundreds of listings flaunting this promise. Most of these are content-only sites, generating revenue through ads or affiliate links, often from Amazon. Generally, these sites don’t offer services that customers pay for directly. However, certain risks associated with these ventures include:

• Continuity in content generation

• Maintaining your traffic flow

• Stability of your income

The first risk can be managed reasonably well; you can either produce the content yourself or hire someone to do so. The profitability of this move, however, is a completely different discussion.

The second risk is more challenging to handle. A majority of the traffic for these sites originates from Google, presenting a risk you have little control over. While some suggest measures to maintain your Google ranking, it’s not a foolproof solution, and in my opinion, your incoming traffic should be diversified. I recommend aiming for at least 50% direct traffic and 30% social traffic.

The third risk is perhaps the most overlooked by beginners, and it’s highly pertinent to this narrative. A few years ago, I planned to buy a high-traffic content site (>50k a month) that created top 10 book lists. The site earned about $1-2k a month from Google ads and Amazon affiliate links. I secured a great deal for approximately $28k. The site was transferred without a hitch, set up on my WordPress hosting, and I replaced all the Google ads and Amazon affiliate links with my own. Things seemed to be going smoothly for a week or two until Amazon denied my affiliate account due to a “lack of original content”.

My interpretation of what happened was that because the seller had a more ‘reputable/older’ Amazon affiliate account they didn’t scrutinize his account as closely. This is a phenomena that I have noticed happening even with Google Adsense recently as well.

Ultimately, the seller was very reasonable (don’t ever buy from an unreasonable seller) and agreed to refund the money minus a month of lost profit. I’ve always regretted that deal not working out because I had a very nice algorithm written that could have automated a lot of the writing process.

Since this experience, I now request all sellers to replace their ads, links, and so forth with mine for about two weeks before the purchase. This strategy helps me ensure that there won’t be any unexpected issues post-transfer. Many sellers decline, which is fine by me. It simply indicates they either have something to hide or are unwilling to put in a bit of effort to facilitate the sale of their site.

How to upgrade Python Social Auth

I had an old Django project running python social auth that needed to be upgraded to Django 2, python 3 and the latest version of python social auth at the time of this writing.

These are the steps I took (adapted from here: https://github.com/python-social-auth/social-app-django/issues/28#issuecomment-405803775)

1. Dump the contents of social_auth_usersocialauth into a csv file

   psql -U postgres -W postgres

   \COPY social_auth_usersocialauth TO ‘/Users/username/Documents/persons_db_.csv’ DELIMITER ‘,’ CSV HEADER;

2. Delete all the old social auth tables

DROP TABLE social_auth_usersocialauth; DROP TABLE social_auth_nonce; DROP TABLE social_auth_code; DROP TABLE social_auth_association;

3. Delete all the old migrations DELETE FROM django_migrations WHERE app=‘default’; This deleted 3 rows for me

4. Install the new Django social or whatever it is called. Migrate as anew. python manage.py migrate

5. Now some of the columns are in a different order and you’ll notice there are 2 new columns (created, modified). I’ll alter the table so that importing the csv file isnt an issue

ALTER TABLE social_auth_usersocialauth ALTER COLUMN created SET DEFAULT ‘2022-03-02 19:58:19.398458+00’;

ALTER TABLE social_auth_usersocialauth ALTER COLUMN modified SET DEFAULT ‘2022-03-02 19:58:19.398458+00’;

\COPY social_auth_usersocialauth(id, user_id, provider, uid, extra_data) FROM ‘/persons_db_.csv’ DELIMITER ‘,’ CSV HEADER;

ALTER TABLE social_auth_usersocialauth ALTER COLUMN created DROP DEFAULT;

ALTER TABLE social_auth_usersocialauth ALTER COLUMN modified DROP DEFAULT;

All done :)

Update

After doing this I realized that I also need to change my pkey. This is the way you can “reset” a primary key when it is out of sync

SELECT setval(‘public.“social_auth_usersocialauth_id_seq”’, (SELECT MAX(id) FROM public.social_auth_usersocialauth) );

Bowling Mania

Did you know before the Real Estate Bubble, the Dotcom Bubble, the Bicycle Bubble, there was the “Bowling Bubble” of the 1960s?

While bowling had been around in America for years (the White House got its first bowling alley in 1947), prior to the 1950s, bowling alleys would have to pay people to manually place the pins every. single. time after a patron would bowl. This severely limited the margins of bowling allies as well as limiting the ease of expansion.

Then sometime in the mid 1950s a magical invention was brought to market called the Automatic Pinsetter and bowling boomed in America. Patrons could play games twice as fast, and bowling allies could have one or two fewer people on the payroll.

More and more bowling allies started to pop up across America. Action bowling would take off in seedier places where bowlers would gamble for thousands of dollars. By 1963, professional bowler Harry Smith was making more money than the MLB MVP and NFL MVP combined.

Wall Street started to notice the economic prosperity of bowling allies and decided to get in on the action. I tried to find a price chart of some of the bowling companies at the time to no avail however according to the Wall Street Journal the most popular corporation, Brunswick Bowling, went up 1,590% between 1957 and its 1967 peak.

But just like it always does, things did not last. As developers were building bowling allies at breakneck speeds people started to move away from urban centers, where most bowling allies were being built, to the suburbs, leading to a declining user base. Combined with the rapid expansion, this lead to an oversupply and the subsequent retraction in prices for the biggest companies like AMF and Brunswick.

Since the 1960s there has never been as many bowling allies.

“Wisdom” I learned from the “Wisdom of Crowds”

I wrote down what I thought were the most interesting points below. Some are quotes, others are my interpretation.

1. This guy John Craven was looking for a lost submarine. His accomplishment was taking everyone elses guesses and combining them. It ended up being within 220 yards of his final prediction [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._Craven#cite_note-faceplate2006-3].

2. American society is highly based on reciprocity meaning that most people will participate as long as they believe that everyone else is participating too. America is built upon the concept of “contingent consenters”. They’re willing to pay their fair share of taxes but only as long as they think that others are doing so, too, and only as long as they believe that people who don’t pay their taxes have a good chance of being caught and punished. “When people start to feel that the policeman are sleeping, and when they think others are breaking the law and getting away with it, they start to feel like they’re being cheated”.

3. One study was a bunch of grad students asking for people to give up their seat on the subway. About 50% of people agreed to. The hardest part of the study was getting the grad students to muster up the courage to ask. Is this more reflective of the grad students or students in general? IDK.

4. Specialization tends to make people productive and efficient while at the same time increasing the scope and diversity of the opinions and information of the total system when put in a group with others. Interesting thought. Not necessarily sure I agree.

5. Ideology does a better job predicting votes preference than self-interest. Conservatives w/o health insurance would still oppose national health insurance. This idea has been passed throughout the ages but has recently become more popular in lieu of the trump administration.

6. Putting notions into peoples heads can mess them up. Jack Treynor did an experiment where he asked people to guess the # of jelly beans in a jar. Average guess was within 3%. He repeated experiment but told people there was air @ the top of the jar and that jar was made of plastic, not glass, meaning it could hold more beans that expected. Average guess was within 15%.

7. Apparently bowling company mania was a thing in the stock market. From mid 1950’s to mid 1960’s bowling companies skyrocketed on wall street and then came crashing down (I’ll do a write up about this in the future b/c I think its interesting).

8. Schelling points - what people tend to choose by default in the absence of communication. E.g. Ask a person in NYC where is the most obvious place to meet another person in NYC. Most people will say Grand Central Station. I think the example in the book is a little bit weak but there are plenty of other examples. Schelling point comes from Thomas Schelling, economist, in his book “The strategy of conflict”. If someone has read it before let me know if its any good.

9. Groups are better at deciding between possible solutions to a problem then they are at coming up with them. Invention is usually better left to individuals but selecting among inventions should be a collective process.

10. If you want a collective group to come to the perfect answer you have to make sure that all of their estimates are independent of each other. Independence is important b/c it keeps the mistakes that people make from being correlated. One of the quickest ways to introduce bias is to make people dependent on each other.

11. Want to prevent conformity? Just have one other person in a group announce their thoughts that are opposite the current view of the group and the rate of conformity plummets.

12. Scott Page, political scientist @ University of Michigan, did computer simulation experiments. Found that diverse groups of smart plus non smart people did better than groups of smart people.

A big thing I’m leaving out is prediction markets. Contrary to what crypto people believe prediction markets have been around for a long time before the introduction of augur.The book does a good job touching upon them.

Favorite Quotes from Trump: The Art of the Deal

Don’t know anything about this guy in person. Never met him. Definitely has some controversial views. His book kinda sucked. The whole book was a dude stroking his ego the entire time but there were some good quotes. He should have taken some advice from Caesar and only referred to himself in the third person.

1. He is really good at reframing. Almost to a pathological level. If you want to be a good negotiator do this “If someone asks me what negative effects the world’s tallest building might have on the West Side, I turn the tables and talk about how New Yorkers deserve the world’s tallest building, and what a boost it will give the city to have that honor again. When a reporter asks why I only build for the rich, I note that the rich aren’t the only ones benefiting. I put thousands of workers to the city’s tax base w/ each of my projects. I also promote bravado. I play to people’s fantasies and emotions. Not their logic. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get excited by those who do. That’s why a littler hyperbole never hurts. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration and a very effective form of promotion”

2. I admire this quote a lot but from the outside looking in he doesn’t strike me as a person who would say something like this. Maybe his ghostwriter wrote it. “Life is very fragile, and success doesn’t change that. If anything, success makes it more fragile. Anything can change, w/o warning, and that’s why I try not to take too much of it seriously. Money was never a big motivation for me except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game. I don’t spend a lot of time wondering about what could of happened if this happened or what I should have done differently”

3. Low IQ people don’t get this “It’s not how many hours you put in, it is what you get done while you’re working”

4. Common adage. Controversy sells. “Good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all.”

5. Good advice in general. “Never act on an impulse - even if its a good one- without considering the down side.”

6. Don’t know much about rent control but this was just interesting to me “Rent Control is a disaster for all but the prevailed minority who were protected by it. Rent control is responsible for the desperate housing crisis that has plagued NYC for the past twenty years. Began as a temporary federal policy. The government froze rent prices on every apartment in America to provide affordable housing to returning veterans. This was in 1943 so after world war II, (WW1 ended in 1918). This law was rescinded but in 1962’s NY put into place its own form of rent control. It said any dwelling built before 1947 was subject to rent control. But the city didn’t underwrite it, so they forced landlords to subsidize tenants. When landlords couldn’t keep up with rising costs, they abandoned the housings.”

Update on Predict My Step Score

Just wanted to address several things since I’ve been getting a lot of the same questions and people are starting to get their scores back

1. How accurate are the predictions for Step 1 with the new NBMEs?

At this point I would say that the data is good enough to give semi-accurate scores. Some of you have noticed that the confidence interval is pretty wide and that’s just because of the lack of data but overall things are on the right track. As to whether the tests over-predict or under-predict I can not accurately say at this time.

2. How accurate are the predictions for Step 3?

Worse than the new NBME for Step 1. Just don’t have enough data. I estimate in about 6 months there should be enough data to make accurate predictions

3. Is the site more accurate than the reddit excel sheet?

Yea. I gather data from other sites which helps get rid of the overprediction bias seen on Reddit since everyone here is a 280+ gunner (jk jk)

4. Do you have any plans on charging for the site or will you sell me the data?

No plans on charging for access to the site since med school is expensive enough but eventually if I find this to be time consuming I may have to place ads. No plans on giving out the data cuz I know some asshole will charge people for it.

Let me know if you have any feedback. One day I’ll get around to making it easier to use.