Perhaps the job is to find that point, and they found it. Or perhaps they're nowhere near that point and the management team just did a shitty job scaling the business.
First, I'll start by saying that, personally, I'd rather run a ViralNova than a Buzzfeed. However, to answer your question, the reason that a company like Buzzfeed would add that many more employees is because of the idea that the economies of scale would work in its favor. Let's make up some numbers and say with two employees, Viral Nova was doing $20MM. The idea is that with 100 employees, they could potentially grow to $100MM and the incremental cost of those employees at say a $50K average salary would only be an additional $5MM. And then you add another 200 employees and add another $100MM in revenue for only another $5MM in salaries. Add 500 more employees and you get to $500MM in revenue, etc. Of course there's other overhead costs like office space, etc. but the incremental cost of growing those aspects of the business become less and less compared to the revenue growth. Obviously in this case, the revenue growth didn't scale to the level that they hoped for, but that's the principle behind the growth in employees. There's also many other social and cultural factors as to why you would want to build a Buzzfeed versus ViralNova that could be a full essay of its own.
Wow this is great news. I was the type of person to not even give thought to these types of diseases, thinking they only applied to poorer populations in less-developed nations. When I went to a destination wedding in Jamaica two years ago, I laughed at all my friends who I thought were being excessively paranoid in constantly applying bug spray for fear of mosquito born viruses. You can imagine what happened next: I was infected with one of those viruses - Chikungunya more specifically - and it was one of the worst year and a half experiences of my life. I've just recently completely gotten over it, but man has the experience changed my outlook on these kids of things.
You're misunderstanding. I'm not taking a stance on whether this is an accurate analogy or not. I'm just stating that the OP is misinterpreting the author's thesis by nitpicking a small point the author make's out of its context. Reread the article, then look at the point OP is making in the full context.
Regardless of the semantics, I think you're missing the point of what he's saying. His overall argument is that DFS is more similar to casino blackjack than it is different.
Perhaps it has to do with the amount of money that's being invested in these late rounds. When you're doing 10k angel rounds, you spread the money around and hope one of the companies take off. When you're investing tens of millions of dollars at nine and ten figure valuations, you do so more conservatively in a way that is more likely to guarantee a return. They're not saying they don't believe in the companies at this point - in fact, you can almost argue that they're saying these late-stage companies are definitely good for the money - but more so that the companies at this point are less likely to make astronomical gains.
That's funny. Just a single anecdote, but the best meal my gf and I had while traveling through Europe was at a "commoner" pub at 2AM after the hotel concierge told me there's no real food I could find at that time.
How can they not be willing to pay a transaction fee from even PayPal for donations? Seems their options right now is to take donations via a service like Paypal with a transaction fee, or just take no donation.
Haha thanks man. I was really just venting some childhood bitterness from over 20 years ago when all my friends got Sega Genesis and I felt left out with my abandoned Turbografx-16. Appreciate it though.
It's actually a big circle jerk that benefits the airlines. Most of the strategies that Ben and his cohorts promote is "gaming" credit card signup bonuses. Basically, sign up for X credit card and get X number of of frequent flyer miles. The airlines sell the miles to the cc companies for much cheaper than a consumer could buy and in return get some revenue and customer loyalty. In the case of co-branded credit cards, there's probably some revenue share going on. The credit card companies then incentivize a new customer by giving X frequent flyer miles after X spend threshold. The CC companies make money by charging retailers a merchant fee for transactions. The bonus miles they give to new customers is often itself cheaper than what they'll earn in transaction fee from retailers, but almost certainly after you take into account the lifetime value of the customer. The customer feels as if they got miles for free or super cheap as they often make purchases they would have made anyway on another card. And of course, bloggers like Ben get paid on affiliate fees for promoting specific credit cards.
Ben's only one of a growing number of high-profile frequent flyer bloggers: http://pointsbuzz.com/. As most of the strategies they promote for amassing ff points revolves around gaming sing up bonuses for credit card fees, the bloggers make money from affiliate fees for credit cards they promote. The airlines don't mind because they sell their miles to cc companies and gain customer loyalty. The credit card companies don't mind because they buy the miles for cheaper and use them as an incentive that is cheaper than the lifetime value of the customer.
"We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site. Dismissing Victoria Taylor was part of a long pattern of insisting the community and the moderators do more with less."
I think this really gets to the heart of it. The moderators of the site only learned of the termination after a celebrity flew out to NY to meet with Victoria and was told that the meeting was cancelled. As expected, panic ensued among the subreddit's moderators. Whether the firing was justified or not, the fact that Reddit's leadership didn't immediately see the consequences of their action on one of their most popular communities just shows their disregard. Or even worse, they realized the consequences and just didn't bother to help facilitate them. I mean these are real people with real meetings spending real dollars for the community, which is all run but volunteers, and Reddit's leadership didn't feel it was important enough to communicate with them to help avoid unnecessary consequences. I understand the frustration.
"Are the ad units too expensive for brand awareness campaigns?"
Yes and No. No, in the sense that they're not too expensive relative to tradition desktop display rates, but yes, in the sense that they don't perform to the same same standards as desktop ads. The exception would be things that are native to mobile like app installs, which are also often incentivized through the various platforms they're advertised on. My theory is that mobile ad rates have to come down significantly to match the performance rates of desktop ads to meet the performance across all sectors, but native specific products like apps are keeping the prices higher in part through better performance but also because they're in a sector that's particularly over-funded right now and can afford the higher acquisition costs while cash is flush.
I live in Boston and literally just spend the better part of my day trying to make a donation. I packed everything up and dragged my stuff downstairs to the concierge desk in my building, walked 15 minutes to my parking garage to get my car, drove back to my building on a busy street and double parked to quickly load up the trunk. Then I drove what should have been a 10 minute drive to the Kenmore Square Goodwill but turned into a solid 30 min because of all the traffic from BU's graduation ceremony. When I got there, all the parking spots were blocked off and police were forcing traffic to keep flowing. I went around the block several times looking for parking before deciding it was pointless. I quickly Googled the next closest Goodwill store, which is in Jamica Plain, and decided to go there instead. There's no graduation in Jamaica Plain today but the Goodwill store there is also on the main road with very little parking...