“Ugly” Sites that Make Millions (and What We Can Learn from Them) | Hacker News Reader

“Ugly” Sites that Make Millions (and What We Can Learn from Them)

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71 pointsdmix52 comments

It's worth noting, that all of the sites shown share another thing in common.

They were all established / founded in the early web. I'm not saying that there was not competition, or that their success was because they were first - they still gave superior products which beat any rivals at the time.

However, trying to draw parallels with these site's design and success today is not totally relevant. If you launched either of them today as they were / are, they may not succeed (despite as we know, the core product / service / functionality being great).

Rob Walling writes in his book that these days: 'It's Market(ing) First, aesthetics second and functionality third'.

Firstly you need to have a market for your product and hopefully be able to market it well enough to get people to 'want your product' / know you exist.

Then when they look at your site, you need the aesthetics to give a first impression of your product and gain trust from your customers in your product. It doesn't matter if your service / functionality is brilliant. If you can't get the user to even try you over any competitor, then you've wasted your time.

Then thirdly, if you're lucky to achieve the top two - give your customers a good user experience / functionality they want, so hopefully they pay / keep coming back.

The reason the sites given in the example can happily remain ugly, is because they already have the user's trust and are a known 'experience'. Therefore the aesthetics don't need to work as hard to make an impression as say a newly formed start up today.

- EDIT... I'm not saying that a site which is kept basic in design can't be successful. Infact, I agree quite heavily with the principle of keeping things simple and have blogged about it in the past.

Perhaps the original author should've done the article on one of the many great sites over the last few years, which have embraced this 'Keep it simple and clean' attitude. Hacker news being a perfect example.

You're using a site right now that wasn't established early in the web, doesn't have great aesthetics or marketing, and seems to be doing okay.

HN isn't wildly successfull. More importantly, it doesn't try to be, which is one reason it keeps its relatively "ugly" design.

What's ugly about it? There are some warts but overall I find it refreshingly clean (compared to e.g. Reddit).

Reddit is also pretty "ugly". I put the word in quotes on purpose, since both are very functional and clean. On the other hand, they definitely don't have a particularly beautiful design, as most designers would tell you. They're enough for what they do, but they don't make you say "wow, what a beautifully designed site". That's my opinion, plus (I think) a common consensus among HN users.

ugliness is also about functionality and not only style, and IMHO there are a couple of usability aspects in HN which which can be considered as problematic, just from the top of my head:

1. lack of search 2. "expired links" when clicking on "more", without any description of what is going on 3. "expired links" when you are commenting and take much time to submit your comment 4. no hints during comment reply saying whether there are any formatting rules/conventions which can be used (like quoting, lists etc) 5. no possibility to do comment preview

I agree that at least for some of these there is some rationale behind, but still it's far from being "simple because perfect".

Hacker News doesn't exactly make millions (at least not directly, and not in the short term).

There is a difference between 'clean' and simple, like hacker news (which is good) and ugly / cluttered like many of the sites shown as examples in the post.

But it isn't making millions.

You got me there, but I am not sure it matters. Like hacker news, Google and craigslist (and to some extent the other two) make their money from having a large number of users who don't directly pay anything for the service. Are you arguing that if hacker news were somehow monetizing it's traffic people would no longer be willing to tolerate the design?

In other words, do you think a free service that was created recently and isn't especially pretty can be successful, but if the site is generating revenue from those users the design becomes problematic?

(btw I think ebay is the only truly ugly site in that article, and I think hn looks just fine).

YC puts effort into Hacker News to find new prospects for investing and, secondarily, to have a solid place to read interesting stories and try out language-creation.

How are you able to assess the ROI, when even YC takes a 5-10-year look at their portfolio, and a 100-year look at language design?

It had marketing. I'm sure you've heard of Paul Graham. His (well known in certain circles) name carries with it some marketing. I found this site during one of my visits to his essays site.

plentyoffish does not fall into the established / founded in the early web category.

What all these sites have in common is that they provide the visitor with something they want. No need for fancy graphics if you have something to offer that they cannot get elsewhere (for free).

While I agree with the author's points of keeping things simple and the importance of a good product / functionality underneath the aesthetics.

Plentyoffish was one of the first / earliest online dating site which went free, when all competitors charged a fee. Thus making it the first / earliest in that category.

These days the internet is saturated with free dating services.

I just felt, that the author mistakenly picked a bunch of sites which had an edge (of being in the early web) and therefore aesthetics didn't matter to get a following.

I feel there are plenty of examples of modern sites / services that are new and demonstrate the keeping it simple / clean design perfectly well!

There was also the fact that he says Google's biggest selling point was its simple design. Yes Google's simple design was a breath of fresh air compared to the cluttered yahoo portals of the world. However Google's biggest selling point was that it's search algorithms were undeniably brilliant.

The quality of the searches you got in Google beat any competitor and that's why many (including myself) made the switch!.

Actually, Plenty of Fish is the best example of success due to being early. The site lacks any kind of special features that distinguished it from its competitors.

Success came from being an early entrant into the SEO game and recognizing ahead of others that AdWords could support a totally free site.

Also, Adwords-based business models probably do work better due to being ugly - the ads are both more likely to blend with the rest of the site content and more likely to be clicked by users actively wanting to leave the website for a better one.

Where Plenty of Fish succeeds more than thousands of similarly ugly ad-based sites is by being big enough, useful enough and famous enough for people to come back.

How was PlentyOfFish "early"? According to Wikipedia, it was founded in 2003. Similar sites had been around long before that, e.g. eHarmony (2000) and match.com (1994).

As has been said. Match / eHarmony were not free services. That was what made PlentyOfFish unique at the time.

If you go and find the founders blog you can track the entire process of the site (like BingoCreator), including his girlfriend holding a (2 month) paycheck from google adsense for $450,000

I think these are all extremes that illustrate a point though. A less extreme point is airbnb's website. It's not necessarily ugly. However, it's definitely not going to win any awards for beautiful design either. And most importantly, the company's founders could definitely have come up with something better if they put their minds to it.

The point is that a startup can grow with a design that is a bit lacking as long as it does something that people want to use.

I would certainly keep Google out of the "founded in the early web" group. Google was established in 1998, well after big names like Yahoo and Altavista were the most common names in search.

Also, I wouldn't classify Google as an ugly site either.

If you look at the growth/adoption curve of the web there is no way you can't call 98 early.

I can say that ugly sites often monetize better if I look at it though a domain name investor lense. Those parking pages which are specifically designed to make you click a PPC ad... little industry secret is: uglier=more clicks.

I don't know why, I could hypothesize all day, but that's just what years or experience and talking with others with experience tells me.

stackoverflow.com wasn't established early on and doesn't have a great UI and it's doing fine as well.

You don't have to make millions either, if you make 100's of thousands or 10's of thousands with an 'ugly' site (tarnsap not all that long ago was a nice example of an 'ugly' but money making website, my own site is another one).

Why limit the lesson to an arbitrary monetary cut-off. Ugly does not mean that you're going to be burning cash without a return, and the fact that there are such sites that make millions make it perfectly clear that there need not be an upper limit to what you can achieve with an 'ugly' website.

Design is important, but you can overcome a bad design with a customer need.

The question to ask then becomes, what could you do if your site looked good and you had a customer need?

Amazon has one of the most cluttered web UI's I've seen and yet they succeed because they deliver something real that people want: you can buy stuff there and they mail it to you, and the web functionality at least allows you to do that. Ugly and busy as heck UI though.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I've been impressed with Amazon. What eCommerce sites are doing a better job? If you are looking at the US you have Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Target (based on Quantcast traffic). Throw in Overstock and a handful of others, but Amazon still seems to be way ahead of everyone else.

I'm also impressed with Amazon. They kick ass. They innovate. They execute. They provide something that people actually want. Etc. The only thing I don't really like is that their website design is very cluttered, like cognitive vomit, very distracting. I'd love to see a more simplified, use case-oriented UI wrapper around what they do. Make all the side noise go away.

Amazon succeeds in a similar way to Godaddy and low cost airline sites do - because people go there with the prior intention of buying something and the cluttered interface full of recommendations is more likely to convince them to add to that than put them off. The same doesn't apply to lesser stores that might scare away much of their "just browsing" traffic trying to do the same thing.

Couldn't agree more. I think Amazon really had tried to design based on the user experience at the center and not colors/how it looks/cool AJAX etc. A lot of times you see a big letter from Bezos on the homepage and I think its brilliant. Amazon is basically what every ecommerce should to copy - because they have figured out what works.

People who use Craigslist and eBay are usually looking for cheap deals, and a site that's too slick and colorful probably wouldn't give the same "bargain hunting" feel.

Anyone consider the idea that they might be successful despite their 'ugly' design?

That may be a good thing though. If your product/service is so good that people use it despite not having a super pretty surface/UI, you can still get traction, still make money, and perhaps later give it a reskin. There are some startups which take off and become successful without doing any advertising or significant self-promotion -- they succeed through word of mouth because their product/service is just that good that people talk about it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that was the point of the blog post, was it not?

It's sort of however you want to look at it. The post is suggesting it's "because of" not "despite" the ugliness. I take the above comment to mean that these sites could perhaps be even more successful if designed more aesthetically. Dunno how much I agree with the sentiment (although I don't think it would kill craigslist to use a splash of color), but that's how I take it.

Google is simple. That's not the same as ugly.

I prefer Google's simplicity. Doesn't make my life complicated. Simplicity isn't ugly either.

It's important to understand that the minimalistic design of Google was a response to AltaVista, Excite and other search engines of the time. I mean, those were really ugly and cluttered, and Google's minimalism made it really feel different from the others.

This is something you end up discussing every so often. But I think its not about the fact they have ugly interfaces or that they are successful inspite of the ugly interface. I think its about the fact that they were a certain way then they gain critical mass of users, who got used to using these sites in a particular way, knew what to find where and the familiarity with the interface - however it was - grew stronger and stronger. When this happens, if you decide to suddenly change the interface to make it better/sexier/etc, you might be shooting yourself in the foot. I think its important to understand this aspect when you consider such case studies.

I'd nominate reddit as a fifth, more recently-made one.

I actually don't think it's ugly--but I'd argue that it's as spartan as Google (considering its different functions), which did make the list.

Reddit is somewhat different from the others in that it's not insanely profitable. That itself is largely down to the deliberate design decision not to clutter it with ugly ads.

Everyone is forgetting that each of the example sites is also fast, even eBay. That counts for a lot in return-ability. One of the amazing things about Google in the early days was how damn fast it returned results. It was easily 2-3x faster than the competition at first, or at least appeared to be so.

So design follows function and function follows the needs of your customer. A bit obvious, but true.

This article forgot to mention ugliest of all - Facebook.

I wonder how you define ugly? To my eyes, Facebook ranks relatively well amongst the major sites on the Internet.

Well, I'm using it for few years now and UI is confusing, it got better, but still confusing. Conceptually, it's a mess: wall-to-wall, message, feed, notification, boxes. Visually, well, it's just doesn't look that nice. And why or why do they show events that I already declined?

Design matters when there is great competition.

Design always matters - but good design does not necessarily equate to "pretty"

Most of these aren't ugly, just minimalist.

Stupid fucking article with no concept of design or what makes websites successful.

Wrote in some detail on this subject a few months back (and wound up in HN Monthly thanks to you guys upvoting!):

http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/increase-your-conve...

anyone with even an elementary understanding of conversion testing and optimization knows that "great" design != great conversions/sales/success

http://www.jeopardytickets.tv/

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