The Only Metric That Matters: How many are really using your product? (2017)
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Or maybe there are other metrics that matter.
good enough to raise money, or good enough to keep working on a feature or product, or good enough to believe the product will grow into something much bigger someday.
In the last sense, 4chan is probably in the top 10 of websites that have impacted the web/world the greatest over the last 15 years.
/pol/ started the extreme Trump support, and made supporting him fun and memey, ultimately leading to /r/The_Donald, and his eventual election to POTUS. That has had quite a large effect on the world.
They've done gobs and gobs of things related to VG, hoaxes, cultural obstruction, etc.
They are quite influential, just not in the way we typically think about influence.
/r9k/ played a big role in the whole incel thing, Elliot Rogers was treated as a sort of deity there before he went on a rampage.
Are there any serious, in-depth studies, stories or books or whatever about 4chan? I feel like politically and culturally, 4chan is one of the most important sites on the internet. I'd like to read more on its influence
http://tanasinn.info/wiki/Complete_History_of_4chan appears to be a (small) stab in that direction
I'm pretty sure this only started afterwards, but I could be wrong. There are histories of 4chan, but they are usually incomplete since the number of users who kept track of things all the way from the beginning are few.
After the rampage he definitely got a lot more attention, but he definitely had a strong presence before.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/why-we-cant-have-nice-things
I'm friends with the author and we were pretty close with when she was writing this. She would tell me about her research, which involved a lot of lurking on 4chan and talking with people there in an official journalistic capacity. I haven't read the book, but it might be worth a peek. She was very much interested in not dismissing it as sociopathic boy behavior, but in understanding what drives intelligent people to troll.
But is that impact positive? If 4chan disappeared overnight, would anybody care?
Malaria has a huge impact on the world too, but I think we'd be better off without it.
Probably the people that use 4chan.
4chan is very contrarian, usually against the leading opinion. The narratives discussed in its boards usually slowly starts to influence more mainstream targets, starting with reddit, 9gag equivalents, meme, eventually Facebook until it becomes mainstream enough, leading 4chan to abandon it and switch sides.
4chan used to be quite liberal, a long time ago, then the "mainstream" opinion went to liberal. In the last few years 4chan became very conservative (/pol/ especially) and convervative & reactionary movements are now what they are, growing in Europe, trump got elected, etc.
Now, slighly, you can see 4chan moving away from strong conservative & reactionist views to a more low-key liberal view, again. /pol/ opinions start to get rejected or mocked by other boards, people are bored with the constant alt-right spam and I believe this will leak into mainstream media in few years, that will be the next turn in mainstream opinion.
Don't get me wrong, I am well aware of 4Chan's influence on internet culture and how things go viral by the will of 4Chan. But even still I think you're ascribing 4Chan a little too much credit here.
This is for pre-revenue companies. The expectation is that se will turn into revenue in many tech business models. Certainly for the type where you have to capture a dominant fraction of users to get the hockey stick curve.
Tracking revenue only would not reveal problems in the long-term benefit of the product - it would be more like a proxy for marketing actions, not for the core product benefit.
Still my favorite heart-rate enabled wearable out there!
New firmware and Android release coming soon that likely will help with your issue
The reason to track any metric is to know if you should continue, stop, or go all-in. If you are flatlining - or going down - that's a HUGE sign to quit. If you have steady growth, easy as she goes. Explosive growth, you might want to double down.
You could be profitable with 1 user that pays way more than the rest (e.g. the only "business plan" user, or an user that use the application more than the others on a usage-based plan). If losing that customer means going out of business than the company is not healthy.
I don't think you should do it that way though.
It's better to have 100 customers, each responsible for 1% of your income.
Source: self