The sad part is he is making an effort here to rank for "Make Money Online", so he can again make money online. Not sure how confident he is in actually doing that, but seems like a somewhat recursive cycle..
I don't buy the "don't have all your eggs in one basket" mantra here. I get that idea if you rely on SEO and you have risky tactics, but in RetailMeNot's case, they have the best user experience and also, up to date coupons and for that reason are the best result most of the time in the vertical.
If this was a publicly traded company that bought links and had a site with a shoddy user experience, I'd get the argument that there's significant risk.
In the history of Google there are very few, if any case studies of sites that A) did the right thing B) were the best result that ended up losing significant traffic. Most of it is "yeah, we were doing this wrong, but it's still not fair..". In Rap Genius' case, they clearly did something wrong.
The only exception to this rule is if Google moves in on the vertical and steals traffic, which is possible with coupons - but there's a significant difference between completely destroying a vertical and impeding on it somewhat. Google has moved in on the airline tickets vertical but the businesses there are still doing just fine (Expedia, Priceline), as shown by their considerable growth in the last year+. It seems likely that if Google moved in on this vertical, it would be a similar impact.
In this article, there's little to describe what RetailMeNot does wrong. Yes, they are somewhat of a parasite, but in many ways they do these businesses a service by lowering purchase friction by creating an elegant experience for users. If their UX was substandard, it's possible customers would get lost and never complete their purchase - this happens time and time again, which is why CRO professionals can get hundreds of thousands of dollars to optimize a conversion funnel. In many ways, RetailMeNot is a piece of that elegant conversion funnel, so they are rewarded as an extremely profitable affiliate for that reason.
Disclaimer: I haven't taken the time to evaluate their link profile so there's a possibility that they are doing something risky there, but from an on-page perspective, they are the best result.
There is a sort of arrogance in assuming that risk = factors outside of your control. Risk is also the likelihood and potential effect of your own mistakes. Think of it from the perspective elf an employee. What are the chances that current of future employees or executives will do something to make Google ban them. Add that to the risk that Google will penalise them for something not previously considered risky.
Anyway, the hole thing strikes me as fairly risky. That’s not bad, you just need to consider that this business is less likely to exist in 10 years than most businesses of its size. That's because of reliance on SEO. It's also the reliance on the coupon codes themselves. That’s not terrible in itself. Risk is allowed.
Facebook, like Google, has the goal of getting users to use their service more - as they are an advertising platform. Google Glass means people will search more - when they're away from the computer. Google investing in better internet means people will have quicker connections, which means they'll again means they'll be searching more.
Here, by increasing the likelihood people are engaged/interested in Facebook status events, Facebook will drive users back to their core platform, whether it's their core app or the desktop version - where they will, indeed, get more impressions for their advertisers. I doubt they are dumb enough, though, to actually do this through the home screen of our phones.
SEOmoz's Fresh Web Explorer is a great substitute for Google Alerts, and it was launched partially for this reason. It's not instantaneous, but it allows you many of the same functions as Alerts, with a much bigger spread.
The only thing I find disheartening here is his discussion of how he lost funding because he told his friend they were struggling and had no idea what they were doing. This implies to me that they were not being transparent with the investor, and in essence were on the verge of "stealing" the investor's money because of it, because his aim was essentially to sell the investor on a thriving business that was in fact not there.
An investor should get a real and full analysis of the business, with accurate numbers, so it should not have come as a surprise or a fallout if someone said they "were struggling", because simply, their numbers and growth should have shown otherwise if they were actually worthy of investment, and no conversation should have been able to sway that.
You should never fear a transparent conversation with others getting back to important parties as long as you really have nothing to hide.
Still building the same company, so we weren't conning any investors. And we weren't doing poorly back then... Just going through some challenges. Site load bringing down servers, hiring, etc. rarely can an investor take the time to really know every possible deal and founder in the seed stage. They're looking at a volume of deals and need to be able to take thin slices of founders to make decisions.
And again, the point of my post is to say... Yes, we're not fully transparent with people because everybody else isn't. We're to blame first for the lack of transparency. I'm making an effort to change this.
What's up with the fake "positive" comments at the bottom of this thread? Makes you think this was manipulated up (every user has -3 karma). Always sad to see and it feels like this has been happening more frequently.
In a post below this, user Asian11 admitted to a group of people being his peers and classmates. They also used the word "we". That seems to be more than 'gut based conjecture'.
That user was created the same day and has only 1 post.
Funny, thats the same background as yourself - now the occurrence of those two similar profiles and comments seems a little more contrived than what was previously suggested.
Also, given the quality of the article in proportion to the speed at which this article was upvoted, I'm not totally sure it wasn't manipulated in some fashion. Decent advice but not worthy of being #1.
If you look at the submitter's content, they comment very little, and they've posted almost exclusively spamming their blog posts and startup. It is a little bit suspicious.
I also suspect a voting ring and was surprised as well that this was the #2 article on HN. I skimmed over the sub-heads and it is full of meaningless platitudes. "Be proactive" "Be outgoing" "Dream big" ?
i am the author of this post. seriously voting ring? guys, the title of the article was "How To Meet Steve Wozniak and President" - that alone drove a ton of clicks, when people found it useful, they upvoted it! I can tell you that in a matter of 2 hours, we got around 50 votes, I suspect no more than 6 of them came from people that I know.
I doubt it's a coordinated effort. Most YC companies will fly to front page regardless of content because other YC founders (that obviously hang out on HN) want to see them succeed.
The net effect is the same but the motive is more noble. You could call it "home court advantage."
It's hard to be too upset by this. If I see a friend's startup on HN, I'm much more likely to upvote.
Well, the company (Virool) is a company that makes your content go viral, so if this is true it's almost like credentials for their company... although shady...
I find it a somewhat interesting contrast between the video where the Kairos society is marketed with big goals like solving the world's problems (e.g., health care is mentioned) in innovative ways, but then the actual companies often seem much less, eh, ambitious.
