The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition From Startups

Same article (without paywall) was submitted and discussed two days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14970877

In case anyone from WSJ or other paywalled content producers reads this: I notice myself sharing far less when I hit a paywall even if I used one of my "free credits" because hitting a paywall is shitty to the people clicking the shared link. If it's important information, I will actually find a different source and share that.

So you shouldn't worry about lost subscription revenue, you should worry about lost relevancy. Lost relevancy will result in your CPMs on ads being a Mashable rate, not a WSJ rate.

Publishers that do this will literally nickel and dime themselves out of relevancy. But whatever, I don't read WSJ or the economist anymore because paywalls and they're not the only (or even best) analysis online. Sad to see the mighty fall though.

Same deal with "We noticed you running Adblock :-(..." Most tech savvy people have Adblock. Many of them have many more followers who do not have Adblock, and those people get their links from social streams. So again, you're not turning away adblockers, you're turning away their friends and leaving the public consciousness.

Monitoring and copying potential threats at early stage is an obvious and effective strategy. This is the unpleasant thing about many startups, technology is a commodity, the big players can simply copy it (or buy it if they think it's cheaper).

Honestly, I think it's unfair. You can put effort into making an amazing though-out product with a lot of novel ideas behind it, but the big players can simply copy you and use their monopoly power (network effects, integration into existing product, marketing) to make a superior product.

The problem is that companies like Facebook or Google are monopolies which use their monopoly profits to further expand their imperiums. In a competitive market, profit margins around 30 % would be impossible, because a competitors would push the prices close to 0 % margin (btw, the "real" profit margin is much more than 30 %, because these companies put lot of resources into research, buying overpriced startups, and in general are not very efficient with money). This just sucks in my opinion...

"Mr. Zuckerberg is sensitive to anything that might disrupt Facebook, even the teeniest startup, say current and former executives and employees. "

that says it all. Facebook is vulnerable and has a limited life span. The idea is out of the bag. It has a high chance of going away just like myspace and others before. Z. knows it and it seems will protect it at any cost.

When you suppress competition instead of reinventing yourself and retaining/attracting users that way - you are basically done.

read here if paywalled http://archive.is/LUAA8

Paywall

surprisingly, i also got the paywall

can't read it due to the paywall.