Why the "Series A Crunch" Might Be Good For Unsexy Seattle Startups | Hacker News Reader

Why the "Series A Crunch" Might Be Good For Unsexy Seattle Startups

refer.ly

18 pointsdmor10 comments

Why do you point this to referly instead of the actual article in: http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/28/the-series-a-crunch-is-hitt...

This is the second time I was pretty confused about the article. Last time same thing happened. It seemes you are pointing to a collection of articles and the top header has the title of the first article. I am still pretty confused as what this is.

Definitely sounds like I've managed to confuse you. If you scroll - I listed a bunch of Seattle startups I think will weather the storm. The first item on the list is a link to the pando daily article but there is a lot more below the fold. The idea here is that most blog posts are built around links, so I'm using them to anchor each section. Maybe that's not a good idea though...

Perhaps you are pushing referly a bit too hard on HN?

Personally, I feel like I'm being trained to not click on referly links (in the same way I never opened Evites or clicked amazon links from blogs)

Not sure if there's a solution to this. It'd be interesting to hear how / if your HN content push is working for you.

HN is one of several traffic sources we are using to build an audience for Referly. The company is evolving really quickly to be much more than a tool for small-time affiliates. It's becoming a blogging platform/magazine/paid content site - and in a lot of cases there is no monetization of any kind in the article. HN readers are smart, give thoughtful product feedback and have even offered technical help when we've had issues. I try to find or make content that I think will be broadly valuable to the community here - I've been here a long time and think I have a general feel for what people like to read. Check out my submissions to get a sense of the kind of stuff I write about: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dmor

I try to stay around 50/50 on submitting my own original content and submitting other people's content. There are also plenty of things I submit that don't make the front page, or even get any votes, and that's fine. My feeling is that if you start clicking through Referly links regularly and finding interesting content on the other side, then we are winning. I'm still figuring out exactly what that is - breaking some design paradigms in blogging to create something new is sort of painful right now (like the ugly headers on that dark background of my article) but worth it.

Let me think about this a bit more, it might be interesting to write a longer blog post about content strategy (we also use StumbleUpon, Quora, Digg, etc...) to grow audience, if you'd be interested in reading that.

Maybe it's the marketer in me, but I haven't felt like Referly has been pushed too hard on HN. However, in this one particular case the title of the post led me to believe I was going directly to a blog post when I ended up with a number of options to view on Referly. I didn't like that and was a little confused, but I don't think I'm being trained in any way (at least consciously) to not click on Referly links.

The thing that somewhat threw me for a loop was the sudden transition from links to articles to links to landing pages of some big Seattle startups.

It felt like there were some links to interesting content, and then just some links tacked onto the end.

I think I understand the problem. I'm curious, do you think it would have helped if I had some subheaders similar to how blog posts get broken up, and some blocks of editorial text?

Also, maybe the link titles being so large is confusing?

I personally think the linked page is more interesting than the full article (though it is also interesting). I liked the headers with tidbits about the relevant companies.

At best linking via referly is blogspam, and at worst it's affiliate profiteering.

'Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.'

via http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Maybe you didn't read the actual post, but it consists of original content - I created my own hand selected list of Seattle companies to watch. I included links to other articles as sources but they don't contain the same content. Affiliate revenue is not "profiteering", it's running a business. You do realize that all the sites with ads on them probably make more per pageview generated by Hacker News than Referly does, right?

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