Studio711.com – Ben Martens

If you use a Surface RT, you may have noticed that Flash only works on some sites. There is a whitelist built in and Flash will only work if the website is on that list. But what about sites like studio711.com? If you want to watch the Flash that is used here, you’ll need to do a little extra work. Of course you’ll be doing something that isn’t recommended by Microsoft so proceed at your own risk. Still willing to try it? Follow the steps at wingadgetnews.com and you should be in action.

The rumor is that flash isn’t enabled for all sites because there are lots of crazy flash apps that could cause problems on your Surface RT. It’s generally enabled where I need it to be though and with this trick, I can make it work in the other places too. Walking around the house with ESPN3 streaming to the tablet was pretty cool.

Facebook sent me a $50 advertising credit so I decided to use it to promote my CascadeSkier applications and see behind the scenes of a Facebook ad.

Creating the ad was very simple. You set up the graphic, the text, where you want the ad to go (website or Facebook page) and then start narrowing down your target audience. I set up two versions of the ad. One was targeted to people in Washington and Oregon who were in one of the following categories: Outdoor fitness activities, extreme sports, traveling, or Windows. That one encompassed 2.7 million users. The second ad was much more targeted to people who were like the ski areas covered by my apps. That targeted 200K users.

Your two options for payment are per view or per click. Per click is obviously much more expensive, though in retrospect, I would have paid about the same with either choice. You can say how much you’re willing to pay and obviously Facebook shows ads for advertisers who are willing to pay more. I ended up paying $0.07 per 1000 views.

After 2.5 weeks, the ad had been shown to 92,163 unique users and each user had seen the ad an average of 4.6 times. That means I paid about $30. Of the 424,000 times my ad popped up on someone’s screen, it was clicked on a grand total of 23 times. That a 0.005% click through rate. Some quick searching revealed this is pretty standard. Unfortunately in my case there’s no way to know for sure if anybody bought anything when they went to cascadeskier.com because transactions are handled through the Windows Phone store, the Windows 8 store, and CafePress. Let’s assume that everyone who clicked there bought the phone app (because that’s where I make the most money per sale right now.) That would be $45.77 in sales minus the 30% cut that the store takes leaves me $32.04. Then if you take about 20% out for taxes I’m left with $25.63. So paying $30 in advertising gained me $25.63 in a very good scenario. It’s more likely that I only got one or two sales from those clicks.

I’ll let the $50 credit run out, but this doesn’t seem to be a net gain for me. Word of mouth has been a lot more successful and it’s free.

In addition to regular paper coupons, our grocery store has started a program called “Just For U” where you can clip coupons online. They intend for you to flip through the coupons and add certain ones to your frequent shopper card. Those items show up in the phone app and you are supposed to go buy those specific items. I’ve never been one for clipping coupons, but every once in a while, I go to the site and click Add on every single coupon. We use OneNote to track our shopping lists so their app has no appeal to me. I save a few bucks here and there, but it’s not really worth my time to clip these virtual coupons.

Then one day I had an idea: why am I manually clicking on all these buttons? I’m a geek and geek’s don’t do this sort of repetitive stuff. We write code to do it for us! So with a little ingenuity, I whipped up a very basic piece of javascript that runs over the whole page, finds all the coupon buttons and then clicks them. Within a second or two, I can clip hundreds of coupons. I even made this a button in my browser toolbar so it’s nice and easy to run.

javascript:(async function(){ function sleep(ms) { return new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms)); } async function scrollDown(count) { for (var i = 0; i < count; i++) { $(“.load-more”).click(); await sleep(1000); } } await scrollDown(10); $(‘.grid-coupon-btn:not([disabled])’).each(function(index,value){ value.click() });})()

This won’t help me save any more money, but it definitely means I spend less time clicking around on their website!

[11/23/2020] Updated Javascript to match the current website.