rianjs

You didn't address the substance of the argument, therefore I can only conclude that you didn't read more than the first few paragraphs. The article is quite detailed, and plainly states that it's not a indictment of 37s the company, their products, or their business model. Instead, it explains why their business advice doesn't apply to most startups. It goes on to talk about pricing theory as it relates to one specific sector (software) and sectors within software (e.g. social startups vs a value-add, business startup). Pricing is not a solved problem, nor is it straightforward, and the article acknowledges this fact, and elaborates on it.

As you didn't address any of this, I can only conclude that your post is a knee-jerk defense of a company you like which relies on an ad hominem attack in an attempt to discredit the author, rather than making any useful arguments yourself.

You need a certain ad-to-content ratio to qualify for bulk mail postage rates.

Microsoft is not a monolithic entity. Might one of their famous executives hate certain competitors? Yes. Do their employees, on the whole, hate the competitors that exist in their myriad markets? Probably not.

So if Steve Ballmer = Microsoft, then sure, Microsoft hates their competitors. But if not, then no, they don't.

> Except that there was no investment to make Reddit more profitable. Arstechnica, Wired and Reddit are all owned by CN, not only does Ars and Wired have more employees

Ars has 9 employees, and a number of contract/freelance workers, including myself. That's not exactly a huge company. There were layoffs last year where the number of full-time staff was cut by ~half.

Anything done by Ars to be more profitable has come from within Ars itself, and the staffing to make it happen has come out of Ars's budget, not from the parent company's.

>specifically hired to bring in advertising and do market research

I don't know where your information is from, but it's wrong. Ars uses CN staff, as part of its business department. Presumably the same people that do reddit and the other Wired Digital properties. Each segment has its own budget that it must stay within. During rough times (last year, for example), the budgets may be cut, but often what revenue does come in doesn't cover costs. These cyclical fluctuations are painful, but expected in markets where advertising is the primary source of revenue. In this respect, the parent company floats the properties for a short time.

It's when the phenomenon is consistent -- as in reddit's case -- that this becomes a problem.

>Reddit traffic blows both Wired and Ars traffic out of the door, in every sense of the word. How much traffic per month specifically does Reddit get? Here is a snapshot from one of Reddit employees: http://i.imgur.com/mirir.jpg

That's less significant than you think. reddit's audience is diverse because it covers so many things. Not all pageviews are created equal. MySpace is the obvious posterchild for this phenomenon. There were rumors before the financial crisis that you could buy 1000 pageviews on MySpace for a penny. I don't know if that's true or not, but certainly Ars commands far more value per 1000 pageviews than that. Pre-acquisition, they did their advertising through Federated Media, and here's a screenshot of what ads cost at that time:

http://rianjs.net/media/2008/ars-federated-media.png

Because reddit doesn't really have a niche -- unlike Wired or Ars -- their audience is less desirable. Look at the stats about readership in that screenshot. That's the most desirable niche for advertising, and commands the highest CPM rates. I would be very surprised if reddit's audience was anything like that, given the fairly emo nature of many of their subsections. reddit is more like Facebook in its approach to advertising. I suspect it's harder for them, though, because the drill-down tools for targeting are more crude because Facebook is far more structured that the "Wild West" nature of reddit.

> They always had Subscription, but only recently they started to heavily promote their subscription model, presumably because they can't get enough money.

That's not correct, either. Ars was started in 1998, and the subscription model started in ~2002 and was a voluntary donation model that got users the "et Benefactor" title, and not much else. This wasn't enough after the initial bolus of donation money was spent down, and several of the forums went subscription-only. (The off-topic forums.) Later on, other things were added to make it more appealing to front-page readers that never make it to the discussion forums. An ad-free version of the site didn't exist until the most recent major revision to subscriber benefits.

> If you actually took the time to read the reddit blog post and the subsequent discussion on that subject you would have known that the whole purpose of that blog post was to generate conversation within the reddit community to see what they would more convenient with, which include discussions about having recurring paying model for customized option (including custom reddit email and other features). The whole idea was to generate conversation and see how many people are willing to pay if they try to go for a subscription model.

I skimmed it, but after I wrote my first reply. In a case like reddit, it's probably going to take a few iterations to come up with a sustainable business model. reddit is fundamentally different from a site like Ars or wired. It doesn't publish its own content, and its audience is diverse. It also eats up far more physical resources, thanks to its larger scale and dynamic nature.

Makes sense to me. Don't really see why users expect Conde Nast to send money down the chain. CN/Wired Digital is in business to make money, and it's clear that reddit's model isn't working. If the site provides utility to its users, it makes sense that some might be willing to pay extra.

What's going to happen is that the donations will create a little bolus of cash -- not nearly enough -- and then run out of steam. Then the reddit guys are going to have to go back to the drawing board to figure out a long-term solution. This will probably be a subscription model that offers benefits that non-paying users don't get. This works better when you have content that people are willing to buy, but communities by users for users don't generally monetize that well, I don't think. What they might consider doing is figuring out what their "niche" is. Technology? Off-topic stuff? Something else? Then monetize the resource-drainers that don't fit with this mission. They could probably talk to Ars Technica about that, seeing as how they're also a CN property, and have nearly a decade's worth of experience in monetizing a dedicated community of users.

If they don't figure it out, reddit will go out of business. Conde Nast isn't in the business of subsidizing money-losing propositions, nor is any other company. And there's no reason they should be.

That's not correct... you can, in fact, polish a turd.

http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/mythbusters-polishing-a-turd...

:P

Web hosting is the closest thing to Perfect Competition, in the economic sense, that I've been able to find. I wouldn't go anywhere near the field. There may be some niches (cloud?) that haven't reached the level where there's no producer surplus, but cloud hosting isn't as straightforward as vanilla hosting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition

Dropbox?

Don't need engineering experts to run a cleanup, which is inherently a management/organizational undertaking, not directly an engineering problem. Familiarity with the subject material is really all that's needed. They need to be able to put the problem and proposed solutions into context, and have a basic understanding of what makes sense and what doesn't so they can guide the things.

If these people were on the ground floor, working on the minute technical details, I'd be more worried. As they aren't, I'm not.

(And reading the comments on the Yahoo article are worse than your average YouTube comments. It's mind-blasting.)

The tl;dr version being: You can't have stable governments and institutions without having a viable economy underpinning the whole thing. In this respect, this find is very good, and will encourage outside investment.

It's good that Afghanistan has a resource potentially more valuable than the drug trade and its inputs.

Without a doubt. Best TV show I ever saw was HBO's "John Adams". If you haven't seen it, you should. It's based on the letters John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, before, during, and after the Revolution.

I debated it, but figured that most geeks are sci-fi types, and probably many HN readers had read ASOIAF. :)

FWIW, I'm running Chrome (on Windows), and I had no problems.

There's not as much reason to bet against student loans as there was securitized consumer debt and/or MBS. This is because student debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy.

Yeah, those people DOA are cheaper than surviving, if you ignore what kind of wealth a person is likely to create by being alive. AFAIK, the latest numbers on acute MI survival are ~30%, and getting better in recent years due to the widespread adoption of the CHAMP protocol. Rates go up if things happen in a certain sequence of events, within certain prescribed timeframes. Medicare is beginning to compensate at a higher rate based on how well hospitals perform in cases like heart attacks. (And other common procedures/infection rates.) I'm not familiar with the specifics.

I don't disagree on running the numbers on primary care, but any savings is likely to be trivial next to other areas of improvement. "Fixing" medmal is likely to be bigger than changing primary care, and the latest numbers on that (Amitabh Chandra, 2008, IIRC) are $50bn/yr. Medmal rates don't keep pace with the rest of health care inflation, so this is basically a one-time discount, and in terms of overall health spending, $50bn is only like 2%. In addition, even in states which have instituted some kind of tort reform, it hasn't changed how medicine is practiced, which is the ultimate cost driver. (Refs available, I'm just not at my primary computer.)

It was very depressing to watch "health care reform" become "health insurance reform" sometime between late 2008 and summer 2009. The two aren't the same, and insurance reform won't due anything in the long run because demand for health care services is relatively inelastic, as you had mentioned, and I had alluded to before. Very depressing.

Warning: meandering, incomplete response follows...

Yeah, the HSA + high-deductible combination definitely has an effect on low-hanging fruit like primary care stuff. I don't know if it's been measured, but it intuitively makes sense. In terms of health care inflation, however, this is small potatoes. When a heart attack runs ~$80K for a course of treatment... well, primary care is pretty small. A normal course of cancer treatment (chemo + radiation) can run $200K and up. In this respect, controlling costs at the PCP's office has very little effect on overall health spending trends.

Information asymmetry is significant, but it's most significant at the specialist level. How is a patient to know that long-run (5 yr) outcomes between surgery (we're doing something!) and physical therapy (hard, time-consuming, no sense of immediate satisfaction) are identical for something like herniated discs? And perhaps even better if you factor in potential surgical complications? So there's definitely that aspect to consider. Also, an orthopod is incentivized to do the surgery because we exist in a fee-for-service cottage industry. This doesn't mean they'll always recommend surgery, but there's always the financial incentives to consider. We reward more care in the US, not better care. But this isn't exactly news.

To go back to the primary care type information problem... this is solvable to some extent. The Internet has certainly brought a huge volume of distilled knowledge to the masses. WebMD and the Mayo Clinic site are excellent examples of this. Unfortunately, they aren't very good at providing physiological context when explaining mechanisms of action (whether we're talking disease processes or their treatments), and this results in poor consumer understanding of what's going on in the big picture. When I was in pharmacy school, this was a common problem when counseling patients. It was quite common for an engineer to understand how this one drug worked on this one problem, but they didn't know how it fit into the big picture that is their body and how it might affect their body's homeostatic balance, especially if they did X or Y while taking the med. It didn't even occur to them to find out. This is where these information sources aren't enough, and where expert knowledge from someone who thinks about this stuff all the time comes into play. People have a frighteningly cavalier approach to taking pills... even smart, educated people. I suspect it's a cultural thing.

Anyway, this lack of context problem is particularly exacerbated in psychiatry, neurology, and any other specialty where what is unknown is greater than what is known, especially when you start taking into account non-physiologic factors like cultural context.

WRT guidelines: they're always changing as new information becomes available. The definition of obesity is broader today than it was 20 years ago. (And accounts for some of the increase in incidence.) Even guidelines for "simple" stuff like ear infections (otitis media) change with some regularity, if you follow organizations like the AAFP.

The fundamental difference with health care in the US is that we ration based on ability to pay, rather than need. I know more about health care from both the ground-floor clinical side and big picture economic side than I know about probably anything else. If I were an investor, I wouldn't invest in health insurance startups or pharmaceutical startups. There's simply too much risk relative to the potential upside. I think this is to be expected in an industry where the low-hanging fruit has largely been plucked, though. What's left are niche diseases which aren't huge profit centers, as a rule.

I'd actually love to know if there's any meaningful data on health care startups vs pure technology startups WRT return on investment, broken down by type of health industry.

Conceptually simple, but the licensing agreements with the labels would kill you, not to mention the problems with divvying the money amongst the artists that you decide to "keep."

That brings me to another problem: you'd have to pay $25/month for this service. $5 for unlimited streaming (the Rhapsody way), $20 for 20 tracks at $1 each. Or you could do 5/15, or something like that, I guess.

It's a lot of risk for not-so-much reward, and as such is a bad investment proposition from where I'm sitting. If I were a VC, I probably wouldn't invest in such a company. It'd be much easier for an established player to make this happen. They have the infrastructure already built, the legal expertise to make it happen, and the connections in the industry already.

"Founded in 2008, nHealth was built around a high deductible insurance plan model that utilized health savings accounts and kept costs down making consumers more involved in their healthcare decisions."

Demand-side reforms don't work particularly well, because health care is the only market system where supply drives demand (people don't buy health care services like they buy cell phones; doctors prescribe it because the information asymmetry is too great for it to be a consumer-based decision). Just ask Singapore.

http://www.healthbeatblog.org/2008/07/health-care-in.html

So while nHealth's model might work amongst the young and healthy -- a very desirable demographic -- it doesn't scale very well, and they'd be powerless against the inexorable health care inflation (13%/yr last I checked), even as core CPI is at 1% or less. Right now, the only thing that even comes close to the health care inflation is education inflation.

I'm inclined to think that having perfect information (or as close to it as possible) can lead to "analysis paralysis". Generally speaking, the more information you have, the more you can see all the possible upsides and downsides that might occur as the result of a given choice. This makes everyone prone to not making a choice at all -- some people manage this tendency better than others -- and this can be worse than making even a bad choice. While you were trying to optimize an outcome, the opportunity passes you by.

In this respect, imperfect information can make a difficult choice easier to make. So yes, so there is such a thing as too much information. Some people just manage it better than others.

For me, information consumption is a substitute (in the economic sense) for television. It's a leisure activity. It fills the gap when I'm not doing Real Work. When I get bogged down, I just declare RSS bankruptcy and start over. shrug

I bought EditPlus (www.editplus.com) way back when I was in high school (NT4 days), and the license is still good for newer versions. I've lost the license twice, don't have the CC or email address it was registered to, and Sangil has been very responsive about getting me my license info even without that stuff.

Since I bought it, they've added code folding, which is really nice. It's really just a plain jane text editor with pluggable syntax highlighting. The ability to save to a remote server is really nice, too, especially if you're doing remote dev work. I just wish it had SFTP support instead of just FTP. Or SCP. Whatever. Something more secure.

It's incredibly fast and lightweight, and I've never felt a need to use anything else.

I've also been known to use jEdit, nedit, and vim, depending on what type of environment I'm working in/through.

Time spent and value created are only barely correlated. Anyone who's worked for someone besides themselves is keenly aware of this. ;)

This is true even in process-oriented jobs, though to a lesser degree than creative jobs.

"1. Down time is useful for, oh, things like co-ops.... It's also part of the research university way of doing things, which 7 wants to abolish."

Most students have no interest in doing research. Most students have no interest in grad school, aside from paying the idea lip service. Higher education needs to reflect this reality. (And of course accomodate those that who are legitimately interested in these things. It's not really a one or the other thing.)

I'm also not proposing "no vacation". You could easily have 4 week breaks between each of the trimesters, for example. I think having no breaks at all would be a disaster.

"2. Some places like MIT let you test out of many/most classes; if appropriate, you can take the final and that counts, whatever the result."

Most students don't go to MIT, and most schools don't allow students to test out of anything except intro classes, and even that's only through the AP program, which is not available in all high schools. Choosing a university that educates maybe 1/10 of 1% of college students and holding it up as though this is readily available to everyone else isn't terribly useful. And it doesn't indicate that the majority of the system is broken.

"3. "Mandatory, off-topic courses" are all part of the ideal of a liberal vs. vocational education. While I feel that's been mostly perverted into modern liberal/radical indoctrination and note that outside of MIT and Caltech the reverse doesn't hold (as of the late '80s the math "requirement" at Harvard was proving you could do algebra), I strongly believe there's value to it and would prefer reform to abolishing the concept if that looks at all practical."

You lost me at "liberal/radical indoctrination".

Anyway, the point was that taking classes doesn't make you well-rounded, because those that have a hunger for knowledge will pick it up anyway, and those that don't, won't. In short, it's a waste of time for both parties.

"5. Offline is an increasingly interesting option, but I think we're a long way from it being a substitute for good versions of the real thing (a involved student body, people with a clue doing the teaching, etc.; plus there's the issue that US broadband is a less than ideal platform to attempt this from)."

US broadband (or lack thereof) is largely a red herring. It doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be good enough. And it is, for most of the population. There are rural areas that are underserved, sure, but most people have access to broadband if they want it.

"6. Co-op is again vocational in focus, and one wonders if the author is aware that taking all this too far will be eating our seed corn by not producing the next generation of academics."

Doing co-op does not preclude becoming an academic. In any event, there are far more grad students who hope to be professors than there are slots for them on the other end.

"7. In my and my friends experience, a real world class researcher who's also serious about undergraduate education (if not always entirely competent in doing it) is vastly superior to mid-tier school professor who's research is nothing to write home about and who envies his betters. At the "bottom", the community colleges and their one step about 4 year equivalents where the professors are their to teach with no pretenses about doing serious research can provide some truly excellent education in well established areas."

Yes, this is the point.

"In the case of those needing post-graduate education (e.g. for those fields where a Ph.D. is the minimal level of education)"

Are the tiny minority of students.

"Bottom line: fix what's broken rather breaking everything and starting from scratch. There's going to serious leverage here as the US higher education bubble starts popping and I suggest ruthless use of that."

That's not a particularly fun thought exercise. ;)

There's no RSS feed.

Cool, that works pretty well, actually. Except that it doesn't index quite a few blogs. I did create my own RSS feeds for a couple of people, though. Double excellent that if the entries are dupes in Google Reader, reading an entry in one section causes it to disappear from the other.

I had considered a LUG, but I only have one computer, and I'd prefer not to dual boot. I'd prefer a platform-agnostic programming group, if such a thing exists.

Ah, sorry. My first draft had my location.

I'm ~20 minutes north of Boston.