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Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

daltoncaldwell.com

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Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#3

Post by tgrass »

..the takeaway here is that the services provided by SourceForge/Github are too important to its users to be ad-supported.

Why muddy the waters like that? The takeaway is that the incentives a company adopts are consequential and will define the culture and the product.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#4

Post by mgkimsal »

What was very annoying about the sourceforge story years ago was that the only way they tried to monetize it was by selling "enterprise" versions. I wanted to use SF (eventually did for a couple projects), but wanted to use it a lot, but didn't want the ads. They shot themselves in the foot by not offering an affordable subscription service. I'm happy to pay bitbucket/github/whoever $x/month, but not $yyyy/month.

I may grow in to needing the $yyyy/month plan, but most people don't start off at that end, and the majority of people who can afford something that expensive (because they're an operating concern with a lot of money) probably already have a solution in place (hence their ability to make money).

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#5

Post by zem »

tgrass wrote: post #3

..the takeaway here is that the services provided by SourceForge/Github are too important to its users to be ad-supported. Why muddy the waters like that? The takeaway is that the incentives a company adopts are consequential and will define the culture and the product.

yeah, "importance" was a needless distraction from the main point, which was that sourceforge and later twitter undeniably crappified their user and ecosystem experience in pursuit of ad pennies.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#7

Post by tptacek »

drumdance wrote: post #6

Am I the only one who doesn't feel like Twitter is hammering me with ads? OTOH I don't use Twitter very much and when I do it's almost exclusively on my phone or iPad.

I can't recall ever having seen a Twitter ad.

But I think the subtext here isn't so much that Twitter is hammering people with ads, so much as that their need to show users ads is causing them to constrict the marketplace for Twitter applications --- anything that might get in the way of an ad-supported strategy is, in this understanding of Twitter, in jeopardy.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#8

Post by smacktoward »

drumdance wrote: post #6

Am I the only one who doesn't feel like Twitter is hammering me with ads? OTOH I don't use Twitter very much and when I do it's almost exclusively on my phone or iPad.

I don't think the concern is that they've gone ad-crazy to date, it's that going ad-crazy appears to be the direction they're moving in going forward. Hence the need to push out third-party clients -- for ads to work, they need the only portal you view Twitter through to be owned by Twitter. (A third party can just strip out the ads.)

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#9

Post by mgkimsal »

Seems to me that 'ad supported' is always going to be more attractive to funders/investors, because the potential is effectively unlimited (certainly by comparison with paid-for services).

With pay-for services, there's a much smaller number of people who are going to (or be able to) pay, and when you start looking at those numbers, it's never the fabled 'hockey stick to heaven' that people dream of.

What if twitter just sold access to their stream, and a few million orgs (companies, individuals) were paying, oh, say, $20/month. And let's say... 2 million - why, that's only $480/million per year maximum! Gosh - who would ever want to invest in that? Instead, by going with 'ads', there's always the promise of some big change that could explode the revenue down the line.

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