Is there some place to get it cheaper? Just for rule of thumb checking AWS (with their new pricing) it would cost ~$72/year for the 200GB storage alone, without factoring in any cost for transferring data, requests, etc.
I'm curious if there is a way to get storage cheaper than their existing $50 for 200GB/year. And yes, I know Flickr is free, but I mean from some place where the pricing isn't in exchange for some "to be determined later" monetization angle.
Dreamhost offers unlimited storage, and if you buy two years up front it's $3.95 a month (I think this might be a promo, I'm paying closer to 9 a month but it's worth it). I've been with them for about ten years and they're swell.
Me too. Even if I never use this font, I've gotten enough benefit from Font Awesome over the past year that I feel like I should support this guy in continuing to do awesome things.
- I had the project specifically spelled out in my employment agreement with them since I had already been working on it for a while. I started working for them because I genuinely believed in their mission, and there was a certain allure of a steady paycheck after freelancing for a while. I made the decision to leave after about a year of trying to juggle both.
- By the time I left HubSpot was 50 people and they had plenty of funding, so while perhaps they would have liked for me to stick around, there's nothing I did that has ultimately contributed to them becoming the billion dollar company they are today (a nice humbling lesson for the youngster I was back then...).
- I actually think doing this (as long as you can keep it clean legally and actually own what you're building in your spare time) far outweighs quitting your job before starting a company. I wrote a post on Quora about this in a little more detail (http://www.quora.com/I-plan-to-quit-my-job-at-a-software-com...)
Oddly enough, in 2011 I was employed by BeaconAds, which licensed BuySellAds' technology, while I built a student news aggregator startup (I know, I know).
Indeed, there are many folks doing this very successfully. It's certainly not for everyone though, and does require a bit of work. We actually work with a bunch of folks who are doing this successfully over at a side-project of ours: http://syndicateads.net
Through our marketplace we don't track any personal or sensitive info about users, or use it to figure out which ads to display. The most sensitive info we use to show ads would be geo-location (just country...). Advertisers are selecting the sites they want to advertise with based on the sites topical area vs. us coming up with some magical algorithm that matches an ad with a user.
We've had some folks request to be paid out in Bitcoin. We're open to doing this once we have a handful more (or so) ask for it... the tricky thing is that you then have to play the exchange rate game and withdraw money from BuySellAds when it's "favorable" for you to do so, since the advertisers aren't actually paying you in Bitcoin.
An ideal setup is one in which you utilize about a handful of different companies in the "Tier 2" position. Probably no more than a handful though, because after that it gets hard to manage and rather convoluted.
Tier 1 is your directly sold ads (stuff you sell on your own directly to an advertiser or through a company like BuySellAds).
Tier 2 is where the AdSense's of the world will live. It really depends on your "niche", but in general the best options tend to be: AdSense, Rubicon Project (if you're big enough), PubMatic (again, if you're big enough), or a "niche/vertical" ad company that focuses on sites like yours. By-and-large, AdSense "owns" this space outright, and even if you're using a program like ours (http://buysellads.com/publishers/unreserved) for your "non-reserved" inventory (stuff that isn't sold direct) there's going to be SOME mix of AdSense (or AdX) in there.
Ad money certainly isn't easy, and more and more is going to go toward those publishers creating great content and curating high-value audiences (i.e. not user generated content...). The days of "set it and forget it" are over for most publishers who aren't interested in earning pennies on the dollar. If you can't sell ads directly through a service like BuySellAds or on your own, well, I wish you luck :)
It's not all doom and gloom though - we see publishers make quite a bit of money all the time. It ultimately comes down to the quality of their site, it's content, and the users.
We've noticed a decrease in tier 1 advertisers over the last 18 months. We get a million+ uniques per month and are very picky about the ads we run. The decrease in tier 1 has been small businesses who have become concerned that their ads may be misconstrued as 'link buying' and will cause them to be penalized in Google's search so all that is left for us are the large brands. Many of the small businesses had been advertising with us for over five years.
We've been considering BuySellAds because of the high quality of the ads we see them run on other sites.
What's scary about that is that your advertisers' perception seems to be hurting your business, but for something that (by all reasonable imagination on my side...) shouldn't actually be true.
I'd love to see if we can help debunk your advertisers' fears.
Yes, that is the problem. However, I know that at least one of them was penalized for using TextLinkAds and stopped advertising with us because they decided to adopt a scorched earth policy in an attempt to have manual penalties removed. They simply tried to remove all possible links to themselves that they had paid for.
I'm afraid the issue is not as black and white as I'd like it to be.
I do not believe that Google would intentionally punish sites for buying legitimate advertising.
You can't make a connection direct enough, but well, yeah, that happened and happens all the time. Penguin update is all about that. They may be sincerely thinking that penguin stops direct link buying so that you have better results or more natural results.
The outcome is that shitty results are still all over the place, good content is not king and if you want to advertise without any risk you go through Adsense.
That is particularly true in smaller markets where Adsense is the only possible player unless you're big enough to have different deals with classic media agencies (those who manage all kind of ads -- print, tv and web.
Hi Todd. I just asked a competitor for his company's policy on App Store browser hijacking [1]. I.e. Ads that automatically open iTunes or Google Play. What is your company's policy regarding this extremely shady underhanded practice?
Our policy is basically to just never be shady... shady stuff is best left for other folks who enjoy making a quick buck. We just don't deal with shady stuff like this.
I mean ads that use JavaScript to automatically open app stores without the user actually clicking on an ad, just by viewing a page.
I'm seeing this practice increasing and spreading. It must be effective.
I've seen it on some big web properties. The other day I was browsing the Guardian and boom, iTunes opened. If spent some time afterwards on my PC and Fiddler duplicating the views using a faked user agent to watch the redirects and cookies. It is slyly done. Normally it only happens once per session. They drop a cookie so that they don't persistently annoy the user, just once in a while.
Tier 1 is definitely the way to go - on the site I run, which I see as being great content with a high-value audience, we can direct sell an ad for 6-8x what we'd pocket from Google for the same real estate.
Todd,
I signed up with BSA today after seeing your comment here. You do not use HTTPS for publishers to log in. This does not inspire confidence in the company.
Well, Rubicon for example has 700 sell-side partners [1]... so, very large. PubMatic, I believe, is similar.
Your other options for mixing stuff in with AdSense would be to find some fairly targeted affiliate programs; however, it's tedious and requires quite a bit of upkeep.
There was a time last year when they banned us (BuySellAds) from advertising on AdWords. I doubt that it was any sort of intentional target toward us; however, it seemed rather convenient to ban us for having customer testimonials where our users spoke of earning more money through BuySellAds than through AdSense.
It took me a while (month or so) and dozens of emails to get our AdWords account un-banned by them, all while using the AdSense landing page to show the contrast of the language they use to advertise their OWN products and how it was much more aggressive than the language we use (through customer testimonials) to advertise our product.
We didn't read too much into it though, as I suspect they had better things to do than strong-arm a (comparatively speaking) super-tiny competitor.
