I can’t honestly tell you if AVG Free 9.0 offers decent PC security. That’s because the application was so annoying and imposed such an overhead on my home desktop I deleted it before testing finished. There are times when free is too high a price.

AVG Anti-Virus Free 9.0 is still only two weeks old. It arrived about the same time as Windows 7 and is compatible with Microsoft’s new operation system.

I downloaded the file in late October to test on my desktop running Windows 7 release candidate version. The program is available at AVG’s free web site – but as I’ll explain in a moment, I don’t recommend it.

It’s only a small download at 869Kb – it takes seconds with broadband. The first file is actually a down-loader application which fetches and installs the rest of the software.

While process is easy enough, the second screen you see is only the start of what becomes an annoying and shrill sales pitch designed to control your choices and trick you in to paying money. It appears AVG has learnt from the scam artists the software promises to protect you from.

Flakiness abounds

Your first choice is to select either the free basic protection, or a 30-day trial of the company’s comprehensive protection. Notice the way this choice is presented. The implication is that responsible people will choose the second option – which means in 30 days AVG will ask yu to hand over money. Don’t worry – you’ll get plenty more opportunities to pay AVG if you choose not to do so at this point.

I thought I was downloading the free software – that’s what I clicked on at the AVG web site – so that’s what I proceeded with.

During the download AVG asks you to remove existing anti-virus software. This makes sense, anti-virus applications can conflict with each other and anyway, as each program imposes an overhead, the performance drop can multiply.

Annoyingly AVG doesn’t remove the other software. It’s install halts and opens the Windows uninstaller so you manually remove it. Even more annoyingly the AVG installer closes itself at this point – you need to hunt around in your download folder to find it and start all over again – by now many megabytes have been wiped off your download cap.

Click, click, bloody click

There’s a lot of clicking throughout this process – some of it unnecessary. Then it asks if you wish to install the AVG Security Toolbar. It’s recommended. The software has also helpfully pre-selected the option to change your default search engine to Yahoo. This is spam – of a sort. In both cases I choose No. It’s actually tricky – if you click off the first box, the Yahoo box stays ticked but grayed out. This can only be designed to trick you into selecting the search engine choice.

At this point the installer had to close Firefox. Not wanting to be sent all the way back to the start rather like that horrible long snake at the end of a game of Snakes and Ladders, I clicked to close Firefox held my breath. Phew. The install resumes. At this point we are now 40 minutes into the process. Even at minimum wage rate this free anti-virus program has cost me the price of lunch and a clutch of grey hairs.

Finally

Suddenly the process is over. A box appears telling me the install has finished. But wait, what is this? More stuff to click. Do I agree to give anonymous information? Oh alright then. And now would I like to receive spam? (Sorry news and alerts). Please enter your email address. Are you kidding? No.

While AVG starts its first scan. I reload Firefox. In the meantime I notice the program has installed an icon on my Windows desktop. Did I ask for this? No I damn well did not. AVG asks tons of questions during the install – but doesn’t allow me to choose whether the icon despoils my desktop. At this point I’m starting to get annoyed.

Not responding

Meanwhile Firefox is failing to load. What’s going on here? There was a string of open tabs – none of them are visible. Windows tells me Firefox is “not responding”.

Eventually – more than an hour after the first download, Firefox opens. And what’s this? AVG has installed AVG Safe Search. Is this the toolbar I choose not to install? The name is different, so let’s assume it isn’t the same thing. I wasn’t warned or asked about it, but hey, let’s go with the flow for a moment.  So, Firefox opens at the home page – my tags are all lost.

At this point the AVG software is scanning my computer looking for viruses. I open up the scanner’s display and see what looks like a banner ad for the paid for software at the bottom of the screen.  Fair enough, the software was free and these people have to eat. I can accept a little advertising as the price to pay for free anti-virus.

But it has to go

Before long my computer started crashing, randomly. And things started being very s l o w   l i ke  w a d i n g t h r o u g h m o l a s s e s. There could be only one explanation for this. I removed AVG, reinstalled Microsoft Security Essentials and performance returned to normal.

Of course, you mileage may vary. AVG may rock your boat. But for me it has proved so disastrous I couldn’t even test its efficiency as an anti-virus tool. I give it zero stars out of five.

See: Microsoft’s barely there Security Essentials

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An interesting piece at Computerworld about the father of modern management and the first person to use the phrase “knowledge worker”. I’m not sure about describing Drucker as a “life coach” though – it’s a term I’ve learnt to mistrust.

Peter Drucker as Life Coach: Book Shares His Wisdom.

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In June I asked Can Twitter be journalism? At the time I concluded Twitter could be journalism, but that’s not how most journalists use it.

Over the past week, Liam Tung at ZDnet Australia has shown just how powerful a tool the 140 character messaging service can be in the hands of a skilled reporter.

Tung is providing daily coverage of the trial between Perth-based ISP iiNet and the Australian Federation against Copyright Theft (AFACT).

He is also providing frequently updated tweets from the court room.

You can follow Tung’s tweets through Twitter from his home page (LiamT) or by tracking the #iitrial hashtag.

ZDNet also publishes the feed on a web page. This makes sense because it’s hard to make money from a Twitter feed, but a popular web page traffic sells plenty of advertising.

It’s easy to forget Microsoft Security Essentials is installed on my desktop computer. Unlike many, but not all other security applications, Security Essentials sips system resources so sparingly there’s no noticeable effect on performance.

And yet the free application appears to do a more than adequate job protecting my system from malware and attacks. Read the rest of this entry »

Advertising sales revenue is the money publishers make from selling ‘space’ in their titles. Most publishers set aside printed pages or parts of printed pages for advertisers. The number of pages compared to the total number of pages in a public  is known in the business as the advertising ratio. Paid for publications have a lower advertising ratio than free publications.

Advertisements fall into two main categories:

• Display advertisements are larger and often more colourful – they can have highly creative text and images.
• Classified advertisements are smaller and often only text with a minimum of graphics.

Magazines typically sell display advertising by the page, although they offer double page spreads, half pages and other formats. Newspapers will sell pages, but they also sell column centimetres (or column inches). Classifieds sell as column centimetres, as lines of text or in some cases by the word.

The more you buy the cheaper it gets

As a rule, the more advertising an advertiser buys, the cheaper the rate per column centimetre (or page if they are buying magazine ads). So a full-page is cheaper than two half pages and so on.

Publishers also offer advertisers discounts if they commit to buying a series of advertising over a period such as a year or six months. So, booking a year’s worth of advertisements in a monthly magazine is cheaper than buying 12 single advertisements.

Some advertising positions attract a premium rate. On newspapers this would be the front page and maybe the front pages of the internal sections. Magazines typically charge extra for the back cover and possibly the inside front cover. Successful titles can also get away with charging a premium for early right hand pages or other attractive sites.

Agencies and commission

In some industry sectors, advertising is largely placed by specialist media buying companies who develop strategies for their clients and negotiate with publishers. These companies earn their income as a commission. Typically this is between 10 to 20 percent of the booking’s value.

In return for the commission, media buying agencies contract to pay their invoices by a set date after publication – typically a month or so after the advertisements appear.

Advertisers who buy their own space are known as direct clients in the industry. They often haggle over prices, but unless they are large-scale buyers of advertising have less clout than agencies who can buy in bulk. It often harder to collect money from direct clients than from agencies.

Rate cards

Publishers issue rate cards which show the prices or rates for each type of advertisement. Historically they were cards, but now they are usually available online, try Googling the term to see some. Rate cards prices are often, but not always negotiable. They also describe available advertising formats. Depending on circumstances rates shown on rate cards are negotiable.

When an advertiser or a buying agency buys advertising they are usually buying reach that is a publication’s ability to reach so many potential customers.

Advertorial

People in the business use the term advertorial when publishers offer advertising linked to editorial features, or in some cases when a publication’s editorial integrity itself is up for sale.

Advertorial deals come in many flavours. Many publications are more or less entirely made up of advertorial material – if an advertiser pays for space they are given a degree of say over what appears in the publication’s editorial content.

More credible titles wall off areas of content for advertorial projects. These might be clearly marked with terms like “advertising supplement” or “special advertising feature”, but it isn’t transparent to the reader.

Some publishers simply run editorial-style material provided by advertisers and charge for it. Others allow advertisers to send copy for inclusion alongside paid advertisements.

Publishers may or may not allow advertisers to sign off on their advertorial content. Some publishers will have journalists write advertiser-friendly copy for these sections, others keep up a strict demarcation between editorial and advertising.

It’s about the business model

As a rule, free publications are more likely to run advertorial and compromise editorial integrity for commercial consideration than paid-for titles. Paid titles are less likely to take this approach. Some paid titles have little in the way of advertising and charge a hefty premium for quality editorial content. This works best if they can manage a high circulation.

Have I missed anything here? Do you have any questions about how this works?

Other articles in this series:

Where the money comes from: - an introduction to traditional print publishing business models
Copy sales: – how traditional print publishers make money from selling copies

Publishers are experimenting with new online business models. So I’m starting a series putting newspaper pay walls, electronic books and other strategies in context. My plan is to show how old-school publishers made and continue to make money, then use this to examine their digital strategies.

This is a basic look at the print publishing business model. You may consider it oversimplified, but the big picture is more important than the details.

Revenue

Historically print publishers earned revenue from copy sales and advertising. Some publishers, mainly in the trade press, rely solely on advertising. Others, such as book publishers, rely solely on copy sales. Most newspapers and magazines make money from a mix of the two.

The balance between advertising and copy sales revenue usually determines a title’s editorial strategy.

The revenue part of a publication’s business model is simple:

Revenue = copy sales + advertising sales

Publishers who rely mainly on copy sales for their income typically spend more on producing quality editorial to attract readers. Advertising-focused publishers often put less emphasis on editorial. In extreme cases, they do away with editorial all together producing publications which closely resemble catalogues.

In part 2, we’ll look at print copy sales.

This post is deliberately short and simple. In future I’ll ask readers have I missed anything here? Do you have any questions about how this works?

Please add your comments and questions below or get in touch through my contact page.

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Gist is designed to cut through the deluge of incoming email, tweets and other messages. It sorts, highlights and presents your most important material in a simple format.

After one day of using the application I can see it has potential. It may become a lynch-pin. But I’m yet to be convinced I’ll use it over the long term. Here’s why:

Gist works with Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook inboxes, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Salesforce. The software is a free web-delivered or cloud application. There’s a paid subscription version in the pipeline.  Read the rest of this entry »

Keeping people motivated when a company goes through a major business change is a challenge. There are many factors to juggle. Tinkering in one area may unbalance matters elsewhere. Workers worry about losing control during change.

And then there’s uncertainty.

Each person has what we could describe as an uncertainty threshold. Your threshold may be high; someone else may have a lower threshold. When extra uncertainty pushes people above their threshold, they feel uncomfortable.

People – particularly those in knowledge-based industries – often take everyday uncertainty in their stride. External events, like a terrorist attack or economic downturn lift background uncertainty levels and reduce people’s capacity to deal with workplace uncertainty. Yet most workers cope well during normal times. Read the rest of this entry »