Hacker News Reader

Comment by tracyhenry | Hacker News Reader

This is very nice idea. Glad you find a model to make this a viable business.

I wonder in the long run how do you decide what data/vis to publish? People care a lot about trendy topics, e.g. mars rover now, GME short squeeze a few weeks back and wildfires last year. But those are short-lived, which might not be as profitable as things like COVID and election?

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In these early days we perhaps spend more time thinking about this question than any other. After speaking with hundreds of news publishers, the truth seems to be that certain topic areas have "staying power" while others are more fleeting. For example, rental price trends, real estate trends, economic data (e.g. unemployment rates), environmental issues (e.g. air quality)are always relevant. The other nuance is that these topics have constantly updating data feeds since the the realities of the world are constantly changing. Kind of like the Pareto principle.

Understand. It's unfortunate that those fleeting trendy datasets are hard to monetize. At the same time they seem equally important in terms of the degree to which people care about. Just look at the stuff on r/dataisbeautiful, which is a mix of the two. IMO fleeting datasets could be pretty good marketing if done right.

It's true. The one-off data viz often get the most engagement. For marketing purposes, this is fantastic. As a company, however, our product is more "sticky" the more often the underlying datasets update since the content would always be fresh. I like to say it's kind of like a Netflix movie except you don't mind watching it again and again :-)

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