thedarkginger

For anyone more knowledgeable in the online music industry than I, what's the deal with this?

> “For music streaming start-ups, 70 to 80 percent of revenue, in the best case scenario, goes to rights holders from the word go,” Mulligan said. “If the streaming service is acquiring users but not monetizing them yet because they have free users without a scaled ad business, then those costs still need to be paid even though there is no revenue.”

My understanding was that Soundcloud's core product is delivering more independent and self-created content (Chance the Rapper dropping Acid Rap) vs. allowing a user to find a Kanye West track (Spotify, Apple Music, formerly Tidal).

If that is the case, then why do the Soundclouds of the world have a licensing rights issue at all?

Not a registered Medium user. I assume you mean a reader gets 50 claps to give out, right (not "can clap" something 50x)?

This was mentioned briefly in the article on the backdrop of how the major players are running away from text -- but as some context -- this really has been a bleak summer for sportswriting.

ESPN started by laying off ~100 employees, with the biggest cuts coming to writers in their declining coverage of baseball and hockey.

Fox Sports, who is trying to become the Pepsi to ESPN's Coke, then followed by laying off every writer on staff in their "pivot to video" (go to their home page now, and you will not find a single link to a text piece).

Vice Sports then joined the party last week by closing shop as part of Vice's expansion into international markets at the cost of getting rid of their sports editorial team.

Not sports directly but MTV did the same thing with their writing staff, including a lot of their high profile writers like Holly Anderson.

With all of these being part of the magical "pivot to video," you have to think it's mainly driven by optimistic hopes that video CPMs will rise in a way that display ads have not for publishers over the last 10 years.

Would like to hear any success stories for media (and speciifcally sports media). I've been running a sports blog for 5+ years and don't use Patreon but have seen many friends start that effort in the last year.

To be honest, I don't think I have ever seen anyone making more than $200 or so a month (which is probably better than if they were CPM only but not enough for a real sportswriter to pay much more than their internet bill unfortunately).

First off, really rooting for the Athletic, because I genuinely hope there is a place for good sportswriting in the future (and underlying that hope is that a business model will emerge that allows that to happen).

As a big college football fan though, your comment highlights one of the challenges I think they face with the "go local" strategy.

If the sports news/writing ecosystem were just bland ESPN-type coverage, I think there's a really clear value proposition. The reality is that there are a ton of other players with a local voice that users can get to for free (from the old school local beat writers to SB Nation's sites that represent ever major local team).

The bet they're making seems to be that there's room for a quality content provider, and I hope that ends up being true.

For anyone interested (I was...), here's a good recap of Forbes' "contributor" model which is based in 'entrepreneurial journalism.'

Non-professional writers get paid based on unique visitors (like presumably with this piece). So you get what you incentivize.

http://www.poynter.org/2012/what-the-forbes-model-of-contrib...

Who is the payment processing leader at this point for digital payments? I assume Stripe, no?

I mean, if you are anti-union, it's a pretty genius play politically because it legalizes and incentivizes free riding.

Unions exist on dues. As organizations, they were already weakening, and then if you further limit membership, you've really undermined their ability to collective bargain.

If you're in the U.S., this is an interesting layer to the labor rights debate: "right-to-work" states.

Now 28 states (including all of the South, where wages are low) have passed laws that guarantee those who opt out of unions in unionized workplaces receive the same benefits as those who are members.

As you'd guess, that works really effectively to undercut the appeal of joining a union.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law

What's the way forward for Medium? At first, these types of partnerships seemed promising.

Now they tried the Medium memberships, and that doesn't seem to be catching any steam.

> HBO explained that the decision for Miller to depart the show was a mutual one.

This is disappointing.

Have never worked in a non-open office plan so I can't really conceptualize this but sounds interesting.

So if I envision a floor, do you just have rows of 2-person offices with hallways in between?

This is big news for Detroit. Probably along with the train station, the Packard Plant was a symbol of the D's blighted era.

If you're wondering what this looked like before, Anthony Bourdain made a stop to this site on his show a couple years back, now getting $20M+ in development:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpF8eZ3bPqE

Lot of good things happening there right now.

It kind of blows my mind that even real, serious journalism outlets cheapen their product like this (nearing the mid-2000s music lyrics website threshold).

Got a NYT digital subscription to see if it was worth it, and I like it. Would be more likely to keep going if it extended to other publishers, and I could consistently access an ad-free, ad-blocker gate free experience.

This aspect is what makes me think Snap might be a canary in the coal mine.

In the temporary image space, virtually all of the innovation has come from that company, whether it's the initial concept, expanding scope with stories, adding visual effects, etc.

In the end, it might not matter. Facebook repeatedly cloned Snapchat's features, starting with the Poke app in 2012 that Zuck reportedly wrote code for himself.

The result? They jammed it into all of their products (Insta, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.) and seem to be riding the network effect to success.

Not saying that smaller players can't win, but man, brute force and a big network were really effective this time.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-app/

Sluggish user growth probably doesn't look much better when Facebook's overt effort to clone their product seems to be working.

Instagram Stories alone already outpaces Snap 200M to 166M. Looks like an uphill battle from here.

http://www.thefader.com/2017/04/14/instagram-stories-more-po...

Ask HN: A core component of Musk's strategy is radically reducing the cost of underground drilling (now 14x slower than a snail, evidently).

Considering how drilling underlies many existing big businesses (oil wells, civic engineering) in the status quo, this seems like a pretty ambitious proposal.

Can there really be a Moore's Law-esque progression in drilling?

Honest question: can you think of any examples that are not already trendy cities (as the case has been with those three) where large tech companies have made serious investments that led to a big, negative social outcome?

On the flip side, I can think of two success stories. I'm a Pittsburgh native, and my family is still there. The influence of CMU has long been beneficial to the region. The recent fight for AI talent by the likes of Google and Uber have been a source of pride for Pittsburghers generally (though I'm sure folks in academia have concerns) when things like the Uber self-driving experiment launch on their roads first. My grandmother - who has never been on the internet - called me when she read it in the newspaper.

After undergrad, I worked for a large tech company that put an outpost in the Detroit area. There had been rumors this company may leave town (which did not happen), and the local papers and city were deeply disappointed at this possibility. When they ultimately announced they were actually expanding their office, it was considered a big win in the media.

So yeah, this is a very different cultural and economic experience than my current one in the Bay Area. I do agree with you though -- going into cities with competitive housing markets and trendiness probably just puts you on a crash course to similar problems in your new locale.

Fortunately, there are a lot more cities in America that do not have those issues and actively seek business development.

The Craigslist way to brand that would be: "Courtesy ambient rain noise for improved sleep environment."

Maybe I am reading into this but I feel like the author makes this sound nefarious and really uncommon.

When I was moving to the South Bay and had only two weeks to figure out my plan, can't tell you how many somewhat affordable room rentals in non-luxury apartments had crazier setups.

Some of my favorites: 1. Spacious open room with bed (it was someone's garage with a sheet down and a mattress on top of the concrete)

2. Pretty common: nice place but you were not allowed to use the kitchen

3. Converted Living Room (no joke, the photo was a twin bed in a living room with Office Depot boxes to create a divider)

So yeah, I get why someone would share a room in exchange for having some amenities.

It's kind of crazy. People really care about their homes, right? So when bad things happen, posting photos like these confirm potential hosts' worst fears about having their place on AirBNB.

I'm surprised that they don't go out of their way to help their hosts (i.e. buying things online was unfamiliar for users, so Amazon typically is pro-consumer any time there is a dispute and refunds your money immediately, in my experience).

Totally agree. The only advantage I could see them working is being able to act as a central platform for paid outlets.

Digital subscriptions (NY Times, Washington Post) have seen a boost since the election in the U.S., but does anyone pay for multiple subscriptions? It's frustrating - even as someone who really wants to support media - that each outlet has their own barrier.

This is so different from how we consume other media (video: Amazon Prime, HBO, Netflix; music: Spotify, Apple Music) where I can get access to a library and it makes the tradeoff with finding a free version online easier to deal with.

To my knowledge, major publishers have never tried this and they instead are caught in the digital impression arbitrage game.

Admittedly, Medium doesn't have those publishers on board but I do think that's an angle the market has not tested/figured out.

Have always been interested in why few startups try to do this. "Netflix for journalism" seems like such a low hanging fruit pitch, at least to get funding that you'd think more folks would have at least tried.

After moving to the crowdfunding model, what was the primary problem? Were the unit economics not conducive to retaining good writers who would attract readers, or conversely was there no way to sustain a margin for the platform?

I think the key point is the declaration that they would move from the ad-revenue model.

Actually thought this was kind of funny at the time because a few reaction pieces were like, "they are being mysterious about their new business model."

This was clearly going to memberships. If you aren't trying to mine traffic for ad dollars, that leaves one other monetization avenue (other than like, an NPR "donate and get a tote bag" strategy).

Don't think that's a bad idea intrinsically, but not sure what content Medium provides me that I can't get elsewhere right now. Most of what I can remember reading on their platform is basically LinkedIn Influencer stuff but on a nicer interface.

Since the article stresses repeatedly that Amazon is all-in on produce... I think this is a big question for their ML approach.

One of the annoying parts of not-really-self-checkout that is available in big grocery stores today is that you have to scroll through a screen, choose the correct brand (i.e. Dole Banana), and then weigh it before it prices your order.

Wonder what their strategy is to price variable weight products (i.e. produce) without introducing new friction into the user experience

I know this discusses a few strategic plays Amazon is making but shortfalls of the self-checkout project (AmazonGo) are interesting:

"In its video touting Amazon Go, the company said it was aiming to open the site to the public in “early 2017,” and it hasn’t provided an update to that timing. But the technology has been crashing in tests when the store gets too crowded and requires human quality control, people watching video images to make sure customers are charged for the right things, according to a person familiar with the plan."

Not super familiar with image recognition but do you think that's just a failure of the training data set or a much more complex technical problem?

Thought it was useful to give the reason he was quitting, as indicated by the text.

Guess it didn't help here. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"That was not the reason for Jones’ departure, sources said, even though it meant that Kalanick was bringing in a new exec who could outrank him. Instead, these sources said, Jones determined that the situation at the company was more problematic than he realized."

Remembered that that the book Launch Pad chronicled them - then as Rap Genius - quite a bit. Here's what they said back then:

"This is what a lyrics site looks like now. You go, you get a big ringtone ad. This is terrible! Where can you find the lyrics?" [Lehman] then mocks the site, as the crowd laughs at the absurdity of an ad for breakfast cereal next to the lyrics of Lil' Wayne...

"We're basically going to dominate the lyrics space. We're going to kill MetroLyrics, kill all these sites. After that, all texts. Poetry. The Bible. Literature. Tax code."

Strangely, the other areas are mentioned in a blur, with no mention of what will actually be next after rap lyrics."

Followed them for a while because I do think their core competency had a lot of value (having a rap lyrics site with no pop up ads alone pretty much did that...)

Kind of a bummer that they raised at such a high valuation and repeatedly set their sights on scaling to areas with minimal chance of success.

Also always thought about how the need for annotations is probably a lot lower in other genres / types of text content. I rarely need an abridged Wikipedia-level explanation of who Donald Trump is, but these kinds of clues tend to be key in interpreting the wordplay of hip hop.