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Comment by gotts | Hacker News Reader

Good for CSS-Tricks team but Why does DigitalOcean need it in the first place?

Is it some kind of purchase of real estate for future permanent advertisement of DO?

I've spent some time with Digital Ocean team members, and they're dead-set on having the best technical content on the internet. It's been a core to their growth strategy so far:

- Target long-tail searches -- queries where there may not be a lot of volume but also not a lot of competition

- Stand out with very good content (not just SEO filler)

- Build trust with the dev community

This is a time-consuming and expensive strategy. So acquiring large tranches like this makes sense.

I've personally learned insane amounts from their tutorials even though never trying their services. I believe they are a paragon of quality information. Based entirely on their guides I would recommend their other services above aws, simply because I can see that they understand the underlying principles required to effectively handle what they are selling.

I've used some of the tutorials for help with dev server setup (self signed cert and some other things). They're well written and they work. It helps keep me using their services, though the tutorials are generic enough to work everywhere ( I used the instructions on a vagrant/virtual box instance too..)

That makes sense and aligns with my own experience with Digital Ocean content. I've often found it to be very easy to read while remaining technical.

Sounds like Stack Overflow's early growth strategy, minus the wiki aspect

DigitalOcean writes a ton of tutorials: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials

That is to say, syndicated content is already a part of their SEO strategy. The question now is how they’ll fit CSS Tricks into that mosaic. Maybe just simple ads and links? Maybe moving it under the DO domain with 301s? We shall see.

>Maybe just simple ads and links? Maybe moving it under the DO domain with 301s? We shall see.

I think they shouldn't touch it and let CSS-Tricks continue to do their own thing.

I imagine they'll put links into their strongest pages and then eventually 301 the domain. In a comment above they mentioned DO has also acquired Scotch. io and that 301s to DO now.

DO has really been expanding their SEO in terms of the generic "How to install X on Ubuntu" search term (albeit, this is particular for CSS-tricks). I often see them ranked near the top for many of these searches. I think it's a great addition if that's what DO is going for.

I think @XCSme stated it best with their comment: "...Web developers are a big slice of DO's target market...". I don't know about you but I firmyl believe that both CSS Tricks and Digital Ocean produce some great content for an audience that is undertaking their own web projects - like web devs. I use DO for my personal projects, and also dive into CSS tricks when i need to look stuff up. But i have to imagine that maybe DO is also seeking to get the business of folks who might not be web devs...maybe folks who would traditiuonally want to learn new stuff on the legacy shared web hosts, but who heard from their techie friends that they should move to a provider like DO (or linode, etc.) in order to grow. Maybe a bit of a long-tail audience, but who knows, maybe there are tons of them out there? These not-yet/not-really web dev folks often need a little helping hand - hence the need for more and better guides (not just tech guides, but hand-holding content)...so when i see things in that light, then this kind of acquisition makes sense...in fact, i would guess everyone wins; the consumers; CSS Tricks team; and DO...at least i hope.

Being a media company that happens to sell SaaS subscriptions is becoming a popular way to solve the traction problem.

I immediately had the same question. My current theory is that this will be used to attract front-enders to their App Platform (which they've been investing in and pushing hard for a little while now).

Margins are pretty great for app platform so that's an area I would expect investment in.

In some ways, CSS-Tricks is a competitor to Digital Ocean's technical article marketing strategy. They are pretty high up in the search results for plenty of different technical answers, even beating out StackOverflow pretty often.

DigitalOcean does a lot of content marketing through guides and tutorials. I assume this purchase is for similar reasons.

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