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Comment by DanBlake | Hacker News Reader

Its nice to say "we stopped doing it because we love our users" but I always feel like there is something more behind the scenes that makes these things happen.

Did chrome or Firefox recently change the way they handle nonexistent DNS answers so that opendns '404 pages' would no longer work? If the writing was on the wall it might make sense for opendns to get ahead of it, since there wouldn't be much they could do to combat browser level changes.

Or:

Did google/yahoo not renew their search feed agreement with them to be the search provider and/or significantly change the rates? I know google has been coming down very hard on toolbar makers so perhaps this is googles way of getting out of that biz (And forcing opendns's hand)

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We said browser changes over the years ate into that revenue stream. In other words, as our traffic volume quadrupled, we were essentially making similar amounts of money, rowing four times as hard for each dollar.

Part of it was the browsers, and part of it was us not wanting to do lame techniques like pop-ups, flash ads, and other obnoxious things.

It was an arms race we weren't interested in participating in, and one we ultimately expected to lose. Who wants to fight a battle for a cause they don't even believe in?

I could think of so many things I'd rather focus our engineering talents on than maximizing how many nickels we could shake out of each user. So we decide to do make the change and focus on creating things of value instead.

He apparently didn't read your post. I don't understand why the hate. Your post was very clear on why you did what you did.

PS: I would suggest you get additional DNS addresses that are easier. I mean, google's are so conveniently easy: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. I can readily add them without giving them much thought after any installation.

8.8.8.8 is incredible.

Google's resources to get that > My resources to get that. :-(

Or maybe the truth is just as they explained it? That people don't like ads, that this fact is the most-cited reason people don't use OpenDNS, that they have an even better revenue model now (security analysis), and that by dropping their old way of doing things they will be able to attract vastly more people to use their service which will make their "security big data" even bigger and thus more useful/profitable?

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...

(By the way I think this change is awesome. Now if I could only get my cell phone provider -Tmobile cough- to stop hijacking my nonexistent-domain dns queries)

My guess is that a) the ads on the page don't monetize well, b) the ad networks willing to pay to advertise there are sketchy, and c) users complain.

"the ads on the page don't monetize well"

Agreed. I can't imagine that the average person types in a bad domain name very frequently (compared to, lets say, the number of times they view a Facebook page each day). So you can't really sell a lot of ads this way. Also, if someone makes a mistake with a URL, they're not going to stick around very long to read an ad, since they're already impatient to be somewhere else.

You should see my other response in this thread. Maximizing ad revenue put us in an arms race for a cause we don't even believe in. So why continue it? Our time is far better spent elsewhere.

Then again why engage in this practice in the first place ?

I'm very glad that OpenDNS have done this, as I think it makes them a worthwhile service. I was not prepared to use or recommend them with ads.

However, their lack of transparency on the business justification is a bit worrying.

A possible positive interpretation is that they hope to drive adoption and use this to make more money selling their other services.

We hope users will consider our enterprise security services, naturally. As more than 10,000 businesses already have. That business far eclipses the money we were making from ad revenue and has the nice side effect of directly aligning user-experience with the people paying us the dollars.

> Its nice to say "we stopped doing it because we love our users" but I always feel like there is something more behind the scenes that makes these things happen.

The decision very well was probably made because they love their users. You just have to think about why they love their users (even free ones). The vast size of their userbase is what enables them to sell security services. Without a significant userbase overall, the ability to detect anomolies and security threats diminishes which in turn devalues their security offerings. By making the experience better for their free users, they retain users better and potentially grow their userbase, which improves the capabilities of their paid security services.

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