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Comment by il | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised YC funded something like this. The only reason someone would give up a significant chunk of ad revenue to a middleman vs starting their own blog/site is if that middleman was an established site and can deliver lots of eyeballs to their content.

Giving up ad revenue for a site that offers no additional value beyond hosting your content is madness.

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That wasn't the plan. The plan was that we'd do absolutely everything for them, not just hosting. For example, we'd build whatever features they needed, such as tools for deep analytics of their user base; we'd do all their social media marketing; we'd run their events, job boards, etc; we'd spend a great deal of time working on providing eyeballs and on working out how to monetize their traffic.

If we had solved these problems, 20% would have been a very reasonable cut I believe.

If you had done only one of those things, providing eyeballs, 20% would be a very reasonable cut.

The problem is that you were unprepared and unable to deliver those eyeballs, which is probably the main reason the site failed.

Your post reminded me of when I tried to monetize "blooks" (serialized books in blog format) about 5 years ago with PrintPusher.com (now defunct).

It was a tonne of work. Sourcing and promoting the content, publishing and layout (we were using WordPress, which was way jankier back then), and yes, generating traffic. It was so much work I didn't have time to enjoy any of the content, and it became unfun.

Heck, you should've just asked me. I could've saved you the hassle ;-)

Paul,

Thank you for writing this article.

Why would you have to build there tools instead of using ones already built?

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