Guest98123

It looks like their traffic has been fairly flat. I'd guess just over 1,000 unique users a day based on their Alexa rating, and a number of sites I run for comparison numbers. At the peak of their popularity, it would have been closer to 2,000 unique users a day.

It's incredibly small for the amount of media attention they received. I think shutting down is the right, and responsible move here.

I went to a store in my city that just opened a few weeks ago. They advertise as being paperless and cash free, and only accept debit/credit. I think it's the first time I went to a store that refused cash.

Header bidding. You sign up with a number of popular bidders (OpenX, AppNexus, Rubicon, AOL, Criteo, Sovrn, etc), and they all bid against each other in real-time. You then relay that bid to AdX/AdSense, and Google attempts to outbid that offer. Then, you display the ad from the highest bidder. This happens for every single ad impression.

Overall, this usually provides a 30%+ increase in revenue over running just AdSense.

"The numbers given in this article do not account for any AWS reservation. However, they all account for Google sustained use discount (30% automatic discount on instances that ran for the entire month)."

I'll never understand why people keep referencing that 50% cheaper article. They take into account the 30% monthly discount from Google, but ignore the 47% discount I currently get from Amazon by reserving my instances for a year. Why? Well, because the author thinks "Reserved Instances are bullshit!".

Now, I agree reserved instances are not ideal, but if you're trying to write an article about pricing, it's absurd to exclude such a discount. It's obvious the author was just going for click-bait.

Whether you're on Amazon or Google, one thing is certain, we're going to have some amazing services and options available due to the competition between the two, and both of them fighting for market share.

I'm on AWS at the moment, and I'm in no hurry to jump ship, because I know Amazon is going to be forced to stay competitive with comparable services and pricing. In 3 or 5 years, if there's a clear winner, I'll make the switch, but for now, it's going to be fun just watching everything unfold.

I've spent a couple of years in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia. All of those countries are incredibly safe. The worst that ever happened was a couple of taxi drivers trying to charge me double what a local person would pay. I'd rank Montenegro and Serbia a little below the others, but don't get the wrong impression, they're still very safe.

Croatia is one of the safest places I've ever lived. I think I'd rank it higher than Canada. I hitchhiked in Slovenia and all three times I was picked up by women (I'm male), once by a mother and her daughter, once by two friends, and once by a mother and her son. How many places in the world do women trust picking up random male hitchhikers? That gives you an idea how safe these places are to live.

It's good for advertising. For example, Facebook analyzes all of your photos, and realizes there are a high number of images with sailboats.

That means you might have an interest in sailing, travel offers, or outdoor equipment, and Facebook can test that theory, and see if related advertisements have higher conversion rates.

It's also beneficial for user engagement, and by analyzing your photos, Facebook could recommend related groups in your area, or upcoming sailing events.

On the other end, imagine you make cosplay outfits for a living. You want to promote your business. Wouldn't it be efficient if you could only show your advertisement to Instagram or Snapchat users that post a high percentage of cosplay photos? That would result in a much higher click-through rate, and they could charge a higher premium for those targeted advertisements.

Or, what if you run a wallpaper site, where users upload wallpapers? You could automatically categorize and tag those images for users to search. Or, if someone is viewing a wallpaper of a sunset, you might want to show related sunset wallpapers that could interest them. That's pretty powerful. You could upload one million photos, and with a little work have them all nicely arranged in categories.

I'd focus on better understanding an AWS workflow, and use the credits to cover those small fees that are going to add up during your experimentation and testing.

For example...

Setup a web server, and database server in a VPC.

Configure your security groups and network access.

Buy a domain, and configure Route53 to point it to your servers.

Launch a simple website.

Try scaling your storage drives up or down.

Move your CSS and JS files to S3.

Setup CloudFront as a CDN for your S3 files.

Setup ELB (Elastic Load Balancing).

Take a snapshot and AMI (Amazon Machine Image) of your web server, and configure an autoscaling group so your web servers scale on demand.

Design a backup solution for your database, such as automatically encrypting and dumping it to S3 IA (Infrequent Access) every night, and having outdated backups automatically delete after N days.

Figure out how you're going to test new releases, and push updates without downtime.

Use Certificate Manager to generate a certificate and configure your load balancer and server for HTTPS.

Configure notifications with the SNS (Simple Notification Service) so you're alerted of server failures.

Use CloudWatch to monitor your resources and better understand Amazon billing management.

Personally, I don't like it.

As for positives, I think you achieved your goal with the design and interface. It's clear what you were trying to accomplish, and aside from a couple of minor issues, it works, and you executed the concept well.

Now, the negatives. During my first visit I closed the page within a second, and I was going to visit another post on HN instead. I saw the page, figured it was another gimmicky 'terminal' site, and didn't want to go along for the ride. However, I gave in after I closed it, and thought I'd make an effort to leave feedback. So, I revisited and typed 'hello'. The site then asked if I needed help. I typed 'no' because I just said hello, didn't need help or a tutorial, and I wanted to see the content. Well, apparently 'no' was an invalid command, so I typed 'yes', and that caused the navigation to display. In short, skip the help step completely, it's annoying and serves no purpose. Either go from 'hello' to the navigation, or go straight to the navigation when the site loads.

My only other feedback is to scrap the idea and setup a normal website. If I'm visiting your site, I'm looking for your qualifications, and I certainly don't want to jump through hoops and waste time playing a terminal game. In my opinion, it seems amateurish. I'd much rather prefer a one page website that starts with your photo, name, a one line introduction, a few sentences about yourself, a list of qualifications, projects you've worked on, and contact information. I want to scroll down that page in about 5 seconds, and know if I want to contact you.

Could you explain why you think you're in a good position? From what I understand, the comments are owned by the users, and by posting them to IMDb, they allowed IMDb and their affiliates the right to use them.

The users did not give you permission to use their data, and you're not associated with IMDb, and therefore do not inherit the rights.

Lastly, IMDb specifically states that scraping or extracting data is forbidden without written consent.

How many times has WhatsApp been blocked in Brazil? What's your advice for those 100 million users when it stops working? Switch to another centralized messenger, and convince their friends and family members around the world to do the same so they can continue communicating?

What would happen if e-mail didn't exist, and a site like HN listed their WhatsApp contact information instead of an e-mail address? Suddenly, the Brazilian user base here would be unable to contact HN. They might be completely out of luck, or if the user base was large enough, HN could add an alternative contact method for users in restricted regions. "Contact us on WhatsApp. If you're in Brazil, you'll need to contact us on ABC messenger instead. If you're in China, and unable to access both, you'll need to send us a message on XYZ messenger."

All of my sites are fairly diverse. US is the largest region, but it only comes in around 15% of total users.

It's a strong community of users, so I'm going to try the donation route soon, with bonuses for donators.

I tried having someone well connected in my industry directly sell advertising campaigns. They were able to increase ad revenue by about 30k per year. However, I needed to pay them, so at the end of the day it didn't have any benefit, and I went back to using ad networks.

Edit:

I run another site as well that has 5,000 daily unique users and 70,000 daily page views. It has two advertisements, one above the fold on the homepage, and one closer to the footer. It earns about $5 per day. That's it. I don't think many people understand how low earnings are for most sites.

Lots of publishers have been adding more advertisements, and trying to block users with ad block enabled, and it's not because they're greedy, money grabbers, trying to steal all of your information. Most of them are just trying to stay afloat as the ship sinks.

There is not enough money going to content online. How much do you donate to HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, and hundreds of other sites and services you use on a regular basis? I donate $0, and the majority of other people do the same. That's a problem, and we need a solution.

Does anyone else here make their living from advertising? Well over 50% of my users run ad block. I get 1.5 million page views a day on my primary site (4,000 Alexa), and the advertisements cover my AWS bill, and pay me an average salary. That's it, and the profits are dropping every year as more people use ad block.

It's scary. I have a million users, run the business extremely lean with just myself, and I'm barely scrapping by at the moment. If I can't survive, how is everyone else going to survive? Don't get me wrong, I use ad block too for obvious reasons, but we're going to see more and more businesses closing up shop unless there is a better way to monetize content online in the near future.