Utah First Friday

I crashed the Utah First Fridays business networking meeting this morning. The keynote speaker was a John Bresee cofounder of Backcountry.com.

The title of the presentation was "WOW - Affiliate Marketing Does That?"

The actual presentation was about other online ventures of the company (I get the distinct impression that affiliate marketing is on the decline). I joined the BCS affiliate program back in 2000. In the following years I displayed their ad some 300,000 plus times. I had 1392 clicks, 10 sales and scored a massive $119.28 in commissions. The actually pay rates have been declining steadily. My rough estimates are that, to pay one year minimum wage salary, I figure I would have to pump about 300,000 hits to an online merchant. That is just about the size of the population of Salt Lake City proper. To actually pay a living wage, I would have to pipe through the population of the county through the merchant.

Speaking about the size of Salt Lake, I had to renew my license this year and took a trip out to the DMV in West Valley City. The DMV is interesting in that just about everyone in this valley has been through the building at one time or another. There are lots of buildings in Salt Lake filled with lots of people. There are very few, however, that have seen such a full cross section of the population. The building was full of the rich, poor, young (16+) and old.

The DMV is getting much more efficient. We used to have to stand in line 5 hours to get a license. If you weren't at the DMV by noon, you were hosed. It was horrible, you would get to the DMV at 2:00PM then watch all of the station closed signs pop up, and have to come back the next day.

This trip was over in 40 minutes. It is a funny set up. I stood in line for 20 minutes to get a number, then sat in a waiting area with my number for 10 minutes. Handing of cash to the teller, reading the line in the eye exam thingy and getting my picture was over in 10 minutes.

BTW, my telling you that I went through the DMV yesterday tells you that I am a Libra. I thought about asking the teller if she sees any differences in the people throughout the year. A person interested in astrology would do well to get a job at the DMV as the set up displays a full cross section of the population near their birthdays. If there really is a discernable difference between the astrology signs (which I doubt) a DMV employee would be in the ideal position to see the differences.

My other about town adventure was a walk through Murray City Park. The park was much larger than I had imagined. The park has a entrance gate and statue of Chief Washakie on State Street. So I always just imagined that the park was just a small rectangular slot of land with a few playgrounds. It turns out that the park is massive with three full size soccer fields, several baseball fields, an aquatic center, a massive ice skating arena, an arboretum, an ampitheatre, a half dozen pavilions and playgrounds. Facility-wise, the park dwarfs Liberty Park and Sugarhouse Park.