41–47 of 47 posts
To make matters worse, social media ad inventory is rapidly moving to phones, where advertising is even more challenging.
Something related on a literal level to the article's metaphor- there's a bar in Midtown Manhattan called Vanderbar that sells a $50 Kobe beef hot dog topped with caviar.
A new “social ad unit” will be created at Facebook or Twitter in the next 12 months that will manage to be far more profitable than current ad units, not piss off users, and immediately be embraced by advertisers. I call them "tweets". Seriously, most tweets are ads, so just charge people to send them. If you have over ~1,000 followers then you are a de facto marketer and you could pay per tweet per active follower.
We get it... the ad model is broken, a subscription model is, in theory, always better. It's simpler. Generally, simpler is better. However, I don't think the app.net experiment will succeed. I'll be brief: - Outside of phones (& WhatsApp), I can't think of a single paid non-business communication platform. - App.net will not have a good one-player or even two-player mode (good 1-player: DropBox, Github, Evernote). -…
If we agree that the ad-supported model is broken, why not try to create an alternative?
That said, no one appears to have any other firm ideas about what the viable alternative should look like (only what it shouldn't). And as it's your money and not mine, I say go for it, good luck!
We are building the new social ad unit at Referly - and every word is written and targeted by humans, not demographic algorithms
I can accept bad metaphors and analogies in HN comments; this a technically focused community and the comments are so far above above most online forums that nitpicking about literary devices would be ridiculous. But I can't forgive the hotdog/hamburger/caviar analogy in this full length blog post. It does not convey his message well and really does the article a disservice. This writing should have been more thought…
What's wrong with the metaphor? How would you have described the problem differently? I thought it was a really good description of the situation Facebook is in. People have speculated for years about all of the different ways they could produce insane revenue/profits (the hot dog -> caviar machine), but their current revenue (the hot dogs) is very lackluster.
A new “social ad unit” will be created at Facebook or Twitter in the next 12 months that will manage to be far more profitable than current ad units, not piss off users, and immediately be embraced by advertisers. I call them "tweets". Seriously, most tweets are ads, so just charge people to send them. If you have over ~1,000 followers then you are a de facto marketer and you could pay per tweet per active follower.
Won't that just incentive quantity of tweets rather than quality of tweets? Where is the value in that service?