DHH: Fuck the Real World
rubyrailways.com
rubyrailways.com
People tend to dislike the way their advice is definitive, they see a trait of arrogance in that. Me, I think of it more as being non-fuzzy, they cut through to the gist and the focal points.
Timing is everything. Users had to go through this severe disillusionment before anything like Rails could have every been accepted. If it wasn't DHH, it would have been someone else. Its the message and timing of it, not the messenger that is generally more important.
Also, do not get me wrong. I'm actually not a Rails fan nor a serious opponent of it, use what works for you. Rails only gets half the equation right in my opinion. Rails too severally bastardizes MVC and lacks quality internals (hopefully Rails 3 will change some of this). What Rails does right is the accessibility of its APIs/DSLs, convention over configuration, etc...btw, all been done before the dark cloud of Java rolled onto the scene. Just goes to show how starved the web dev world was to flock to only half a solution. Turns out this was exactly the half of the equation they were starved for.
On what point specifically? I really would not trust advice from him on how well advertising models work. Seek out someone who has made a money from advertising and trust them instead.
If you've already decided to offer a paid product, 37signals, fogbugz etc all seem to have good things to say on that model, but taking their advice on which model to choose seems like a very bad idea to me.
Of course advice from someone who has had success with both an advertising and a pay model would be the ideal, but lacking that I'll settle for advice from someone that has actually had success.
Come to think of it, I can't recall having read about a company that has had success (as in making enough money to live on within a year or two from launch) with an advertising model. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, just that it seems to be an outlier.
Charging for your products, on the other hand, is a well-proven model that has worked for hundreds of years. This is how the vast majority of companies generate cash. I just think it's refreshing to see someone that actually comes out and says it, instead of all this get-big-fast hype that only worls out well for an absolute minority.
Also check out sitepoint 'websites for sale'. Quite often they include figures on revenue. Just scan down those and see how much they're making from advertising.
It's just less news worthy so you don't hear about them - "Another website makes lots of money from adverts" - big deal. Also lots haven't gone the VC route so they don't try to court the press/blogs/etc quite so much.
The issue I have with companies that get big with ad income as a model, is the massive amount they spend on servers, offices, tons of employees. If they kept lean they could be making a lot of money.
- two are getting revenue from affiliate marketing
- one is advertising porn
- one has advertising income of $500 monthly
- one has ad revenues of $3000 monthly.
The rest sell actual products that they charge for.
I still don't think advertising is a model that works well for most companies.
That's like saying there haven't been any IPO's today, so IPO's aren't possible.
Also it's probably slightly rarer to see profitable ad-supported websites actually come up for sale, since often they take nothing to run, so people hang onto them.
What are the advantages to the advertising model from a business perspective? I see obvious downsides; ad placement is a careful balancing between frustrating/confusing your users and making money off of them. Costs aren't related to the useage of your product, etc.
I think you vastly underestimate (by many orders of magnitude) the length of time businesses have been successfully charging money for their products.
They're saying "don't forget about the regular old proven model of charging money for your product — it's still relevant and it has these great attributes, here's our experience with it".
Don't take their advice personally, because it's not. They're just broadcasting their own experience.
People will say brilliant things and a bunch of total complete bullshit both using "bad words" and not.
Again, I suggest going after the idea rather than attacking individual words -- it's a signal of inability to criticize everything else.
There's no prize for saying the same thing with less swear words but as each word, including swear words, carries its own emotional aura and meaning, you _must_ use them where necessary to convey your thought.
In this case the thought was about humorous, uncompromising denial of blocks set by the perceived reality. Something a teenager would say when denying authority or looking to think out of the box, created by the religious past.
If you need word "fuck" to be in the text, then please god-fucking-damnit put it there!
On the other hand, I did. And now I'm in college having the time of my life analyzing frequency responses of signal filters, and doing only peripheral amounts of coding. Shows how much what you did as a kid has a bearing on what you end up doing later in life :)
If you hate to be the prude (the only prude), well, I think you might as well get used to the hating.
We should continue to self censor the F-word.. but not for the reasons you think.
It simply becomes less effective/refreshing/honest/direct/entertaining the more you use it.. its such an important and nice word, we need to ration its use in order to preserve its role in the language.
I've always considered that aspect to be entirely brilliant.
Reading their cook books or watching their tv shows isn't going to propel you to their level of skill or put them out of business, just help you a bit a long the way.
The secret to success isn't secret.