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Referly Discontinuing Rewards, Paying Existing Links Through March 31st, 2013
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: Referly Discontinuing Rewards, Paying Existing Links Through March 31st, 2013
#22Affiliate commissions are a small fraction of a purchase price. Around 4%-15% usually, average 7% in my experience. It's hard to build a business model where your revenue is a fraction of that fraction.
We tried this ourselves in one of our projects: http://bvyer.net. We plan to keep that one going, since it doesn't cost us much to run, at least so far... but we certainly learned that it's hard to make any money in this line of work.
Re: Referly Discontinuing Rewards, Paying Existing Links Through March 31st, 2013
#23It sounds like they're stepping away from being hubpages.com with a product lean to becoming ehow (demand media) with a product lean.
And evidently it'll look kinda like pinterest based on the layout of the front page.
Just might work!
Re: Referly Discontinuing Rewards, Paying Existing Links Through March 31st, 2013
#24I applaud this move. It's difficult, emotionally, to pivot this radically, but I think in the long term it will be a more rewarding and meaningful route for the founders.
Re: Referly Discontinuing Rewards, Paying Existing Links Through March 31st, 2013
#25Glad to see the Refer.ly circle jerk around here come... full circle.
Re: Referly Discontinuing Rewards, Paying Existing Links Through March 31st, 2013
#26As a causal observer, I think one major weakness of Referly when put up against its ex-competitors, companies I'd consider to be Pinterest, Wanelo, The Fancy, Svpply, etc., is that consumer behavior on those sites was driven by the love of doing that thing--clipping, collecting, and presenting in a community of peers, whereas Referly was about monetization (baked into the name "Referly"). In my experience, in life, Referly loses that fight every day of the week.
I'm afraid the exact same will be true when you put Referly up against Medium, Svbtle, etc. You can tell on Medium and Svbtle that it's all about the writing and there's a real passion and community around the written word. If Referly continues to be about monetization, I think per post vs. affiliate is irrelevant, and Referly will lose.
A quick scan of the views on their posts suggests that the most popular posts are written by Danielle and Kevin, and I wouldn't be surprised if they drove the majority of those views via HN. Danielle seems to have a very strong personal network and through that she can attract prominent writers to get this thing kickstarted (like one I see via Francisco Dao). But HN and personal networks are great to bootstrap a baseline level of activity, but they need to quickly be leveraged into broader distribution, etc. (eg, it needs to relatively quickly flip from being Danielle and Kevin posting Referly articles to HN to randoms posting those articles, otherwise you're not bootstrapping anymore, you're propping up your traffic).
Danielle and crew seem very tenacious, and I wish them the best.
Re: Referly Discontinuing Rewards, Paying Existing Links Through March 31st, 2013
#27As a causal observer, I think one major weakness of Referly when put up against its ex-competitors, companies I'd consider to be Pinterest, Wanelo, The Fancy, Svpply, etc., is that consumer behavior on those sites was driven by the love of doing that thing--clipping, collecting, and presenting in a community of peers, whereas Referly was about monetization (baked into the name "Referly"). In my experience, in life, R…
SeekingAlpha seems to be doing quite well and their content is all driven by paid user submissions. I've never submitted content, but as a user I love it. Very high quality articles.
Re: Referly Discontinuing Rewards, Paying Existing Links Through March 31st, 2013
#28[deleted]
Re: Referly Discontinuing Rewards, Paying Existing Links Through March 31st, 2013
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are not going the low quality route, we are headed for direct competition with Medium and blogging networks/platforms like it (we are keeping pace with them on traffic to our articles and plan to continue doing so). There is an undeniable groundswell around this kind of company right now, and even established companies like Quora are starting to offer much better tools for long-form content. It is going to be very…
Go with a name that will work even if you end up pivoting 10 more times, because you will if your company is still around in 100 years. Blog post I did on buying premium domains you might find helpful in your search - feel free to email me if you need help: http://franceschine.com/post/19837401405/how-to-buy-domains-...
I suggest "Pivot". Why a startup has not done this already, I have no idea. I will be registering Pivot.ly and Pivot.co shortly.
Re: Referly Discontinuing Rewards, Paying Existing Links Through March 31st, 2013
#30As a causal observer, I think one major weakness of Referly when put up against its ex-competitors, companies I'd consider to be Pinterest, Wanelo, The Fancy, Svpply, etc., is that consumer behavior on those sites was driven by the love of doing that thing--clipping, collecting, and presenting in a community of peers, whereas Referly was about monetization (baked into the name "Referly"). In my experience, in life, R…
SeekingAlpha seems to be doing quite well and their content is all driven by paid user submissions. I've never submitted content, but as a user I love it. Very high quality articles.
Theory: their userbase is basically focused on monetization, so for them, the payment-driven model makes a ton of sense.