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The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

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Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#81

Post by guyzero »

Finbarr wrote: post #78
IgorPartola wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly sarcasm, but Uber is one example of several companies whose business model was to disrupt an entrenched industry by providing more value than they were charging for, capture market share, then raise prices. Basically, initially it was cheaper to take an Uber than a Taxi. Currently that's no longer the case.

In the SF Bay Area it's still way cheaper to take Uber than a Taxi.

In the one urban area that has the worst taxi service in the US, Uber is winning. Great!

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#82

Post by MichaelBurge »

guyzero wrote: post #81
Finbarr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the SF Bay Area it's still way cheaper to take Uber than a Taxi.

In the one urban area that has the worst taxi service in the US, Uber is winning. Great!

I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you claiming that they're losing in every single other market?

At least in Portland, I've never taken a taxi in my life, but have taken probably a dozen Ubers.

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#83

Post by softawre »

volatilitish wrote: post #72
robbiemitchell wrote: post #51

This is a great PR play -- leverage the founder's origin story as a hook for the real point: promoting the app.

We need a more intelligent adblock that spots and blocks things like this :)

It would then block hacker news for promoting YC, right?

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#84

Post by softawre »

manarth wrote: post #68
OJFord wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Each Daily Calm session is available for that day only, > so you either listen to it or you don't. I'm really not in the target audience at all, but doesn't that make the situation described by the parent commenter _worse_? "Agh! Better listen quick or it's gone forever!"

At least there's no worry about the ever-increasing number (and increasing time-investment) of missed episodes to catch up on. I say this as the guy who wakes up in the morning with 500-800 overnight missed tweets, and then patiently reads through them.

That sounds awful.

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#86

Post by BeetleB »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #82
guyzero wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the one urban area that has the worst taxi service in the US, Uber is winning. Great!

I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you claiming that they're losing in every single other market? At least in Portland, I've never taken a taxi in my life, but have taken probably a dozen Ubers.

>At least in Portland, I've never taken a taxi in my life, but have taken probably a dozen Ubers.

Which is one reason why Uber is winning. You do not even bother to check taxi fares.

I checked Uber rates to get to the airport. Not cheaper than taxi - about the same.

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#87

Post by petercooper »

IgorPartola wrote: post #58
vannevar wrote: post #55

But Tew was the first to do it, which left a lot of people wondering why they didn’t think of it first. Lots of people thought of it, but discounted it because it was a dumb idea, missing one crucially important ingredient: page-views. Anybody can put up a web site, it's getting people to look at it that's hard. And once people are looking at it, it's easy to sell ad space. What no one could have known, including Tew…

I'm not sure that nobody has it. It's basically a matter of hacking the system to get cheaper CPM than what you can get with ads. If ads are the market index fund, you are trying to beat it by exploiting some oddity in the system. Once you do so on a large scale, the market adjusts and the oddity either goes away, or becomes useless. But I can think of a few ways to do this: - Produce awesome content. Remember the Ol…

I'll tell you one way a lot of indie fashion brands, mobile apps, and bedroom music producers are doing it right now.

There are people (mostly teenagers/early 20s) who set up catchy Twitter accounts with endless streams of funny photos or videos along various themes. They cross promote and cross retweet these accounts (often retweeting each other's posts for just 5 minutes, then unretweeting again to remove the trace) until they build up over 100K legitimate followers. They then sell "spots" on these accounts to (mostly) people running Shopify fashion stores or mobile app developers ($18 per 100K impressions is a typical rate right now). I've also seen a couple of musicians "come up" through this approach using Soundcloud. (What they do is have fake female accounts repost Vines, tweets, or screenshots of Tumblr raving about thing X, then get those retweeted on "decks" - people then impulse retweet, then they delete the original content to make it all look organic.)

This is the wild west of social right now, it's hard to find info about it, you gotta spend weeks digging around and warming up to the right people, especially since a lot of the trail is destroyed shortly after it's posted.

I'm not going to go into much more detail as I've spent months figuring out this space, but believe me, there are some amazingly savvy 15-25 year olds out there making things on social not look exactly what they seem(!) :)

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#88

Post by fokinsean »

huehehue wrote: post #42
gyardley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing just how easy it is to write a quick script that downloads all the content and stores it on your hard drive. Subscribe for a month, write the script in an hour or so, unsubscribe, and you're done. I did this for one of these services and the most annoying thing was correcting the inconsistent names they gave their audio files. You can do this with anything - works great with programming screencasts, fo…

This sounds like stealing

You seem new around here, welcome to the internet.

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#89

Post by JohnHammersley »

vannevar wrote: post #55

But Tew was the first to do it, which left a lot of people wondering why they didn’t think of it first. Lots of people thought of it, but discounted it because it was a dumb idea, missing one crucially important ingredient: page-views. Anybody can put up a web site, it's getting people to look at it that's hard. And once people are looking at it, it's easy to sell ad space. What no one could have known, including Tew…

I remember this at the time -- Tew invested the initial earnings he made (So whilst he was lucky, he did kind of make his own luck by putting the money into it -- he could have just taken that money and sat on it.

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#90

Post by JohnHammersley »

JohnHammersley wrote: post #89
vannevar wrote: post #55

But Tew was the first to do it, which left a lot of people wondering why they didn’t think of it first. Lots of people thought of it, but discounted it because it was a dumb idea, missing one crucially important ingredient: page-views. Anybody can put up a web site, it's getting people to look at it that's hard. And once people are looking at it, it's easy to sell ad space. What no one could have known, including Tew…

I remember this at the time -- Tew invested the initial earnings he made ( So whilst he was lucky, he did kind of make his own luck by putting the money into it -- he could have just taken that money and sat on it.

From an article in 2006:

"His friends and family paid the first $1,000 dollars, which he spent on a press release. That small publicity gave his site more traffic, which in turn persuaded more advertisers to have faith."

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4585026.stm

I remember from the TV news coverage he talked about how he'd sent that press release out to hundreds of news outlets. So I feel he (in part at least) made his own luck on this one.

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