Companies in burgeoning industries at this scale are concerned with longevity, specifically outlasting their competitors. Not short term profits.
They are thinking more along the lines of "how can we make 10 billion dollars per year, for the next 150 years." Think General Electric.
That's why they require huge amounts of money from investors, so they can aggressively grow to a size where other companies can't touch them.
The huge amount of capital is sort of like a moat.
When you're larger, you have something called economy of scale. Which means you have enough resources to do stuff the smaller guys can't do.
When you're larger, you also have something called a data advantage. Which means you know so much more about your customers, you can predict things and make decisions the smaller guys can't.
Someone please create a browser extension that automatically adds every word you "Look Up" to an Anki stack. My vocabulary would be vastly improved if I had this, I always find myself looking up the definition of the same complex words over and over again that are for whatever reason slippery for me to remember.
I think it's a lot of fun and they pulled some interesting data from it. There are far more pressing concerns in the world right now, people have sex sometimes NBD.
I own a similar content network, but we have since broke it up into multiple niche properties to avoid having one massive neck to choke like Upworthy.
In the past fb has issued domain wide bans on properties I've owned if we were getting a little too savvy in exploiting their edge rank algo.
This "pass thru" traffic is amongst the least valuable on the internet, believe me, we have tried everything under the sun to monetize visitors, adsense, every ad network, affiliate, etc.
Believe it or not the best thing we've figured out is to use the authority of a massively viral website to help us rank terms in google on the backend. All comes full circle, lol.
Calling it right now.
No one just takes down an app that is generating $50k+ day in ad revenue. This might just be a brilliant PR stunt, should drive several million downloads today. No way is the app coming down tomorrow.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! What specific actions did you measure to determine a winner?
Noticed you answered the question above.
*Was just clawing my eyes out browsing craigslist for NYC spaces, remember hearing about you guys a little while back, thanks for refreshing my memory ;)
Motion Seconded. To the best of my knowledge this is not an economically viable traffic inflation technique in todays ecosystem.
Possible, but not much value for an arbitrage savvy publisher.
Not going to name names, but a good deal of fuckery is afoot in under article link exchange widgets. You know the ones, the boxes with link bait thumbnails that show up on a good deal of popular entertainment sites. Dealt with a lot of fake traffic coming through from the link exchange network. It appeared other publishers were sending tons of fake bot clicks to our site, in order to give themselves a higher amount of free reciprocal traffic from the link exchange.
The logic is also based on the the idea of an equal trajectory for the company regardless on management.
The landscape is too uncertain to ever know if you could have achieved the same level of success. It's a what if scenario, a sunk cost and out of your control the moment it happens.
It's two different scenarios so you always have the nagging question in mind if you could have done it on your own.
I would've liked to see something creative more along the lines of enhanced functionality for brands to reach their current followers. Maybe specialized "Grab Deal" buttons.
Anything but TV commercials.
May god have mercy on their souls if they attempt some kind of youtube style locked video ad model.
They are thinking more along the lines of "how can we make 10 billion dollars per year, for the next 150 years." Think General Electric.
That's why they require huge amounts of money from investors, so they can aggressively grow to a size where other companies can't touch them.
The huge amount of capital is sort of like a moat.
When you're larger, you have something called economy of scale. Which means you have enough resources to do stuff the smaller guys can't do.
When you're larger, you also have something called a data advantage. Which means you know so much more about your customers, you can predict things and make decisions the smaller guys can't.