DJN

There seems to be a severe case of group think on HN today.

Why are so many people raining on Dave? The points he makes seem to make a lot of sense.

I'm pretty sure that an agenda that will attract the smartest angel investors for a meeting will stretch far beyond "collusion to bring valuations down".

The fact of the matter is that owning 1% of a company that exits for $100mm is far better than owning 10% of a bankrupt startup. These investors know this better than anyone and I'm pretty sure that increasing the size of the pie, attracting more startups, increasing the number of exit channels etc were the chief points of discussion and not "how do we make sure we own 10% instead of 5%".

Having said that, it's pretty much Dave's word against Mike's and I'll pitch my tent in the proven serial investor's camp any day.

"innovation & investing is not about price. it's about finding great entrepreneurs to build solid companies, and solve customer problems"

That's the reason why I WOULD DO BUSINESS with Dave.

Anyone who as followed Dave even remotely over the past half decade will understand and appreciate his style.

He says it as it is and that rare candour is something special in the venture capital business.

Well said. This morale of this story is in line with an old adage - Nothing goes for nothing.

When you don't pay for a service, you shouldn't expect anything in return. A guarantee of perpetual free access has to be paid for somehow and if they are not making money from ads presumably because nobody's seeing or clicking on them, then all bets are off!

You get what you pay for. Next time look for a price tag.

Think about it this way, if you can segment your traffic into valuable niches (e.g females, 18-30 in NYC, who are searching for shoes), you can sell your traffic at a far higher CPM.

That's where Trafficspaces excels - ad targeting.

All impressions aren't equal so you shouldn't treat them as such. The key is being able to unlock the value.

There are alternatives. Google 'em

http://www.google.com/search?client=ms-rim&hl=en&q=s...

I feel you bro. It is definitely complicated. I've got a few gray strands to prove it whilst developing Trafficspaces (a SaaS ad manager).

It started as a hobby but once I got into it, I got sucked in by the challenge of simplifying all that complexity.

For most people, the adserver is just the UI. The complex calculations, ad targeting, and scalability issues are just abstracted away into the abyss. Then there are those heidenbugs that occur at a frequency of 1 in a billion transactions, which can consume your entire weekend! Grrrh!

I kinda feel sorry for OpenX though. Their codebase is probably unmanagable by now. I'm sure their devs wish they could just throw it all away and start afresh.

Dude, if u need a decent ad server as an alternative to OpenX, I'll suggest. Trafficspaces.

I designed it and it's one of my proudest pieces of work (if I may say so myself) :)

Warning: its a premium service

http://www.trafficspaces.com/tour/

Care to cite your sources on that one?

Dude, the prayers last for about 5 minutes each and it only occurs 5 times a day, 2 of which are during normal working hours. I assume it's fine to let someone knock off work for 10 minutes a day. Heck, I know loads of people who spend hours "working on Facebook".

> If you really have lots of questions to ask the users, don't do it all in one go

This doesn't apply to all cases. It works well for sign-up forms but there are cases in which it's better to focus on early user engagement at the expense of a short form.

For example, in cases where the user is expected to create or design something for use later, it makes sense to immerse them in the creation process even if it means your form is longer than normal. The key thing, imho, is to keep the number of pages down to 1 (or max 2) and give live feedback.

More details in my earlier comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1655871

I feel you on the multiple page thing. It increases abandonment like crazy. Here's our first hand experience:

We used to have a 5-stage ad campaign creation process in our SaaS self-service ad manager. Once we started measuring cart abandonment rates, we noticed that users dropped off after the first 2 steps. It gets even worse if you require users to sign-in first

The solution: 1. We replaced it with a 1-page process 2. This is the crucial bit. We allowed users to create their ads BEFORE signing up.

By seeing a live preview of their ads, we engage them early and dramatically improve conversion rates.

The morale of the story is that keep the steps short (even if the form is long) and provide instant gratification.

Here's a link to the form on our demo site : http://demo.trafficspaces.com/advertise/cart/new/?adspid=153...

Targeted advertising? Classified ads? Sounds like music to my ears.

See trafficspaces.com

We wrote a an entire 7-part series on how to sell ads online. The main points were

   1. Have an outstanding product (i.e. audience) to sell.
   2. Hire a dedicated sales person.
   3. Provide a self service ad management system.
   4. Show detailed traffic statistics.
   5. Sell exclusivity.
   6. Let the market determine the price via an auction.
   7. Simplify the advertising process.

Give it a read - http://www.trafficspaces.com/blog/2009/12/16/how-to-sell-ads...

http://www.trafficspaces.com - alternative to OpenX. Bootstrapped and profitable :)

Dude - I know you meant it as a joke but it is still uncharitable.

It's hard to appreciate the other party's POV unless you've lived through the stigma of prejudice that's perpetuated by jokes such as yours.

That said, it's okay. Your comment shows you didn't mean any malice so as an implicit apology, it is accepted.

That's a very uncharitable comment.

Millions of Nigerians work honest jobs to feed and educate their children. It's hard enough that they have to live through the negative stereotype caused by less than 0.1% who are bad guys.

Think about that for a second.

Hi Cindy,

I'm a subscriber to your blog and I love your work. I was late to the beta test run so I missed out. I've been waiting on the sidelines for the big launch and whilst I think the pricing is pretty decent and fair (after all, it is pretty close to our pricing at Trafficspaces - http://www.trafficspaces.com/plans/), I instinctively predicted this sort of backlash, especially because there was no free entry plan, however limited.

Having said that, I'm sure your decision was well thought out. After all, you are in the funnel optimization business.

A quick shout out to Neil Patel - a very smart chap.

Good point but over a long term, markets simply aren't that volatile.

@fookyong's comment contains a lot of truth. If using Kissmetrics on a "Kissmetrics-optimized" site generates diminishing returns, surely that is a cause for concern. The original author's change rapidly enough to suggest that your experiments will yield increases in ROI

Checkout this post in our series on How to Sell Ads Online.

http://www.trafficspaces.com/blog/2010/01/13/how-to-sell-ads...

It talks about setting up an auction instead of a fixed price. It is an efficient way to find the market price for your ad space.

Yeah, I totally switched off when I read that phrase. Taking a dig at the British is totally unnecessary and betrays the author's childishness. He needs to get that chip off his shoulder.

It takes away from his otherwise, carefully constructed argument.

Trafficspaces

"...helping legislators and intelligence agencies understand how to use the social network for campaigning, reaching out to their constituencies and in their regular line of work."

Hmmm...I wonder what "regular line of work" Facebook is helping the CIA with.

Very impressive. Excellent example. Kudos to mugtug.com

The series is essentially trying to make the case for self service advertising.

It makes sense. GAM and OpenX are good systems that will both work well for people that rely (or want to rely) mostly on ad networks and occasionally get a few direct sales enquiries.

However once you move into the realm where lots of advertisers are contacting you directly, it is much much better to have an self-service ad management system.

Think of Facebook, it makes a large majority of its revenue from self-service advertisers. Not GAM, not OpenX but Facebook Ads. http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/09/18/facebooks-self-ser...

Hi Ben,

I appreciate your concern about scaling your service but I think you should consider a fremium business model that allows you to accommodate more free users at lower cost.

Instead of logging tens of millions of events for free users, you could log just a subset, which will allow you to use far fewer servers whilst allowing free users to "evaluate the usefulness of your new service".

It will also make sure that the future of your startup is not wholly dependent on external investors.

We've done something similar with Trafficspaces. We run our service off Amazon's cloud system, which gives us a lot of flexibility.

If you need assistance on how to structure your freemium model to make sense, send me an email at niyi [at] trafficspaces [dot] com.

It is easy to say "just go for it". In reality, it is quite risky.

Theoretically, it is possible to unseat a competitor like Google in search, or Facebook in social networking, but you really have to know what you are doing.

In your case, a better approach is to do some customer development first. Speak to potential users of your product. Find out if they are dissatisfied with your competitor's offering. What will it take to switch.

After that exercise, you should be in a better position to make an informed decision.

I've never used RockYou's apps but I'm totally in shock.

Not so much about the attack, or that it was an SQL injection. Nah, what shocked me is the fact that passwords were stored in cleartext!

Can someone explain what possible use case permits passwords to be stored in cleartext?

@patio11

I've been working on precisely this sort of self-service ad technology for over a year now. Something that can help site owners run a pseudo-Facebook Ads service.

The product is finished and well worth a look. Only wish it was ready before NYT took the plunge :)

www.trafficspaces.com/tour/

I normally generate a JPEG representation of my email address and use that instead of the textual obfuscations.

So far it has worked well.

Good comments all round.

Consider this scenario:

Against all odds, a working, stable product has been built, the business has modest traction but yet to really hit the ball out of the park, the business needs external funding.

How does the single founder overcome the "one founder is too risky" stigma?