What is DigitalOcean's strategy here? Kudos to CSS-Tricks on the acquisition!
DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks
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Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks
#42Congratulations, I love css tricks. Your articles helped me out a ton.
Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks
#43Good for CSS-Tricks team but Why does DigitalOcean need it in the first place? Is it some kind of purchase of real estate for future permanent advertisement of DO?
DigitalOcean writes a ton of tutorials: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials That is to say, syndicated content is already a part of their SEO strategy. The question now is how they’ll fit CSS Tricks into that mosaic. Maybe just simple ads and links? Maybe moving it under the DO domain with 301s? We shall see.
>Maybe just simple ads and links? Maybe moving it under the DO domain with 301s? We shall see.
I think they shouldn't touch it and let CSS-Tricks continue to do their own thing.
Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks
#44Good for CSS-Tricks team but Why does DigitalOcean need it in the first place? Is it some kind of purchase of real estate for future permanent advertisement of DO?
I've spent some time with Digital Ocean team members, and they're dead-set on having the best technical content on the internet. It's been a core to their growth strategy so far: - Target long-tail searches -- queries where there may not be a lot of volume but also not a lot of competition - Stand out with very good content (not just SEO filler) - Build trust with the dev community This is a time-consuming and expens…
That makes sense and aligns with my own experience with Digital Ocean content. I've often found it to be very easy to read while remaining technical.
Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks
#45Well done! Has been an invaluable resource for front-end web development for at least a decade.
Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks
#46This is part of a broader trend. Last year, Balaji Srinivasan tweeted about the idea of SaaS companies buying media companies – https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1374363031417753609 – and as an observer/operator in this space, I've heard about a lot of conversations going on behind the scenes with larger companies expressing an interest in smaller media companies (including my own - I value autonomy too much but for…
As a (casual) reader of several of the newsletters you maintain: Peter, hang in there, don't sell! :-D
For those who are not familiar (if that's possible), check out https://cooperpress.com/publications/
To your (& Balaji's) point - one of tried and true methods of customer acquisition for SaaS is content marketing, but it's a very long game and you need to have quality content. Acquiring a blog or a media company that already has that has clear ROI.
DO already has a solid knowledge base of articles ("How to ... on Ubuntu Server" almost always leads to DO) but mostly for the back-end part of the stack. From that perspective, buying CSS-Tricks is not too surprising.
Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks
#47Css-Tricks is an amazing site and its awesome that Chris and digital ocean were able to come together on this. Congrats to chris and their team
Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks
#48What is DigitalOcean's strategy here? Kudos to CSS-Tricks on the acquisition!
They can sprinkle some tasteful adverts on the Flexbox article and make their money back in < 03 years.
Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I'm guessing that is what happened. Maybe it was a clause in the contract? If Chris reads this comment maybe he can chime in to clarify. I should have made that clear in my original comment, though. I found out about it by doing keyword research for a piece I was doing. Better.dev was one of the sites that ranked extremely well for it and I hadn't heard of the name before. Upon closer inspection, I learned that the p…
Scotch.io redirects to Digital Ocean Community site when I checked just now. I imagine a big reason it was acquired for the sweet domain authority for SEO.
You can see that Scotch.io was dying off in traffic [1] - I would assume it wasn't getting new content regularly enough. The domain is pretty powerful, so even pushing some traffic to Better.dev [2] via 301's would have helped both sites out.
I imagine better.dev would have agreed to promote DO and put some links on their top pages to give the DigitalOcean domain even more SEO power.
[1] - https://imgur.com/a/ashZPDa [2] - https://imgur.com/a/Wd9kzJt
Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks
#50Good for CSS-Tricks team but Why does DigitalOcean need it in the first place? Is it some kind of purchase of real estate for future permanent advertisement of DO?
DigitalOcean writes a ton of tutorials: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials That is to say, syndicated content is already a part of their SEO strategy. The question now is how they’ll fit CSS Tricks into that mosaic. Maybe just simple ads and links? Maybe moving it under the DO domain with 301s? We shall see.
I imagine they'll put links into their strongest pages and then eventually 301 the domain. In a comment above they mentioned DO has also acquired Scotch. io and that 301s to DO now.