281–290 of 380 posts
> It costs us about $1 to process 80 searches.
This caught me by surprise. It would be good to know if this is pure hardware and bandwidth cost, or if they are factoring in all the costs associated with running a business. I wonder if costs for Google are also on the same level.
There team's plan seems to quite expensive considering we are so used to free (ad supported) search.
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I'm a little tired of the rhetoric about Netflix adding ads. It's only on an entry-level account that is subsidized from the normal pricing (IIUC, correct me if I'm wrong). You could argue that they've artificially inflated the price of the normal plan or that it's a slippery slope, but it's not like they've forced ads on the existing plans. I think what's more interesting/concerning/insidious is hidden ad content li…
I would consider the Netflix UI to be ad laden for some years now with hundreds of originals shoved in your face in a non-customizable fashion and autoplaying etc. Also personalized thumbnails based on past watching behavior. You could argue that it's a good UX for most people, but for me it's always felt a bit more like user hostile marketing.
All major content providers left them years ago and started their own Netflixes. So they're left with a few movies from ten years ago, a couple of recent-ish releases, and their own content.
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I'm a little tired of the rhetoric about Netflix adding ads. It's only on an entry-level account that is subsidized from the normal pricing (IIUC, correct me if I'm wrong). You could argue that they've artificially inflated the price of the normal plan or that it's a slippery slope, but it's not like they've forced ads on the existing plans. I think what's more interesting/concerning/insidious is hidden ad content li…
> It's only on an entry-level account So far. I imagine they will be expanding it over time.
With the exception of filler ads for their own content that occurs when they need to wait for the next quarter time, ex movie ended at 12:55pm. There have been no ads
I've been using Kagi the last few months. I've never had a reason to complain about its search results - they seem to work plenty well enough day to day that I don't really 'notice' them. Like most, I now search reflexively, as an extension of the mind, so I only 'notice' search when it's bad. What really excites me is that is that I'm paying them. That sounds odd, but seriously. It's incredibly refreshing to know th…
>It's incredibly refreshing to know that the company providing my search results has an incentive to make things better for _me_ and not a legion of advertisers Cable television and netflix have made it quite clear that payment does not mean “no ads”, it just means “no ads, yet”. It still might be a better alternative in the short term, but the moment growth starts to peak, companies follow where the incentives lead…
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I just tried Kagi and was surprised that my open source project shows up in the results for relevant keywords. All the other search engines I tried bury it completely out of view no matter how specific the keywords are. It makes me wonder how many other indie projects like mine are excluded from mainstream search engine results.
See if the founder’s side project Teclis [0] (non-commercial search) finds it. Kagi uses the project’s index in addition to Google and Bing. [0]: https://teclis.com/
Google search only shows paid SaaS platforms in the first page of results.
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"At USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use" 240 searches cost them over $10.00. They will need to find additional revenue or reduce costs to even reach a break even point. They will have to raise prices or make you pay per search or sell your data or better yet all three.
I wonder how much the per-search cost is marginal cost vs. amortized fixed costs. If their paying user base grows by 10x, do the searches drop from 4¢ each to 2¢ each?
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> blatant SEO attempt It is marketing and trying to influence the discourse, but I don't see how you can call it SEO.
Writing blog articles like this and posting them to social media to create crosslinks is a very common SEO strategy to "trick" PageRank into promoting your site higher in search results. It's the whole purpose behind all of those random blog articles on corporate sites; to improve PageRank ranking.
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>It's incredibly refreshing to know that the company providing my search results has an incentive to make things better for _me_ and not a legion of advertisers Cable television and netflix have made it quite clear that payment does not mean “no ads”, it just means “no ads, yet”. It still might be a better alternative in the short term, but the moment growth starts to peak, companies follow where the incentives lead…
I think it’s important to consider whether this happens with all companies, or whether venture capital seeking to maximize returns to the detriment of both the business and the user is a factor here.
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I would consider the Netflix UI to be ad laden for some years now with hundreds of originals shoved in your face in a non-customizable fashion and autoplaying etc. Also personalized thumbnails based on past watching behavior. You could argue that it's a good UX for most people, but for me it's always felt a bit more like user hostile marketing.
Netflix doesn't have enough content, so they resort to these tactics. All major content providers left them years ago and started their own Netflixes. So they're left with a few movies from ten years ago, a couple of recent-ish releases, and their own content.
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The economic argument not being watertight is the problem. This is why tech companies keep pivoting to ads, they just didn't make enough money otherwise. Afaik [1], there's about 5 employees and the revenue only covers server expenses while they're still trying to get more headcount. Not an expert on bootstrapping but I'm pretty sure you don't want to expand faster than your revenue does otherwise you stop being able…
> This is why tech companies keep pivoting to ads The reason they advertise is because they can. It doesn't matter how much money they're making now, they can always make more by advertising. Paying money just makes your attention more valuable. The only way to stop them is to make it impossible or illegal to advertise. Blocking ads everywhere and making no exceptions.