Let's Buy Hackaday | Hacker News Reader

Let's Buy Hackaday

indiegogo.com

54 pointsevlapix43 comments

Or we could setup a free wordpress site and spread the word that the new Hackaday is at newsite.com, and not completely waste $540,000. What a disgrace.

Do they really want to do that to the current owner? Maybe they want to stay in good term with him..

Uh. The whole thing is "Help us raise 500k so we can no longer have Jason Calacanis affiliated with HackADay."

Everything else is staying the same...

Jason Calacanis want to sell Hack a day, if all editor decide to quit and abandon him, they are acting against him... it's a owner but I guess it's also a friend. It's also the one that invested in that project, that believed in them...

Would you do that with a friend? Start a business with him and then years later, when he decide to sell his part, you just flee and start from another name, avoiding to buy his part?

If he no longer wants to take part in it (it sounds like he already isn't) then I see nothing wrong with the others splitting off and doing their own thing.

The impression I get is that the people behind this project (raising the money) are the ones doing the hard work anyway -- they are the ones who should be rewarded, IMO.

Edit: I was gonna throw $25 their way just for the hell of it. I don't visit the site so, in all honesty, it doesn't matter to me if they reach their goal or not. I was feeling nice, though, and then, as I'm skimming over the page, I see that anyone who gives < $100 is apparently a "tightwad".

I'm keeping my $25 and I'm going to spend it on myself instead. If they want to keep their web site going they can follow joonix's suggestion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6045796.

10 years worth of articles have value, I bet 80% of their monthly traffic comes from search engine. No amount of opening up a new free hosted wordpress blog and calling it the new hackaday is going to change that.

You might not see value in it, but I wouldn't be too surprised if some big blog network snaps up hackaday soon.

With a little bit care you can make some serious money with that much traffic, even if most of the traffic is tech savvy and some of them might use adblock and generally immune to traditional ads.

Right. It's a business. I don't get any of the ad revenue. Why am I being asked to donate money for what's essentially a private equity buyout?

Oh I misunderstood, I thought you were referring to the value of the blog.

Exactly. Personally, I'm super focused on not giving Jason Calcanis any of my hard earned money.

I saw they were going to sell Hackaday the other week and created my own alternative: http://hackeveryday.com

Would love to get a few authors /submitters on board and keep the site free. There are better ways to spend that $500k.

Just so we're clear, I'm putting money towards it so someone else can buy it & make profit? Not sure what I'm getting out of this deal that I'd get it some private company bought it on their own.

Yes, seems like we're supposed to fund these guys buying it so it will supposedly be "cooler." They're going to have the "current writers and editors" own it, but they're at odds with other writers and editors, it seems.

Nary a buck was given.

Just to clarify a single point here. There are no writers or editors at odds with eachother. Brian is doing this in an attempt to buy it from Jason. I'm moving on to other things regardless of what happens at Hackaday. We're all super good friends and get along great.

As for the rest of the thoughts and concerns, well, not my problem!

I read that you had come to an impasse about how the site should be run with a competing group also seeking to acquire the site.

I didn't mean to imply anything too nebulous, and of course defer to you on it...you guys wrote it in the first place, and I simply meant to reference it.

I guess the possible future owner will want to keep some profit for himself instead of investing it on the website and he will probably want to avoid any controversial subject. It means less budget and article less interesting... This is what you get if some private company bought it.

> I'm putting money towards it so someone else can buy it & make profit?

More accurately, you're buying it for them.

So the owner get's to sell completely on his terms?!? Sounds like Calacanis is going to make out like a bandit.

How about we don't bother and just subscribe to the Adafruit blog, which covers similar ground but is generally more interesting and timely (IMO)?

(Though, granted, it does include ads for Adafruit products, which isn't an issue for me since that's some great targeted marketing).

I have nothing against Hackaday, I've followed the site for years, but I'd rather spend money on cool products at Adafruit than toss it into a vague blackhole for purposes I don't quite understand with no guarantee the site will even remain up or relevant to me.

Their blog is fantastic actually. And while there are ads for adafruit items, you'll notice there are literally no other ads. zero.

Hackaday has adsense, so if you're not blocking it, you get the usual banners.

I don't understand what the money buys you. Just fork it, set up a new Hackaday and raise money for a specific purpose. Not to make the people behind the original site rich.

I guess the money here buys you the domain name but more importantly the traffic associated to it. If you fork it, you need to do a lot of SEO and hope that one day you hit the stats of hackaday.

So I figured, but my stance is that in the long run the repute and traffic would not matter. I'm more in favor of the OSS-mentatlity: fork it. I've never believed in crowd-sourcing funding for a buyout as I have little faith in the that the market is working when the buyer is not paying out of his own pocket and after all you're only exchanging one private owner for another.

I completely agree, in that case it makes no sense: why should I chip in for someone else to be the owner.

What SEO? If the community wants it, they can move to the new site without spending $500k; and the traffic will follow the content.

community is "direct traffic" only, I'm don't know what % of their traffic is organic but I assumed it's a huge chunk. Having the community following you to the new site is one thing (assuming you're able to make it known to all of them without access to the original site's twitter account/newsletter...) but it really solves a small part of the problem.

I've got much respect for Jason Calacanis and his "This week in startups" Youtube channel, but I don't see how this benefits the contributors. Half a million donations and the users don't reap the dividends of investment, or earn an interest in the site?

Either the site should be sold as an investment so someone gets a real financial interest, or someone should just make "newhackaday.com" as a non-profit and move everyone over there.

From Calacanis recently on Twitter:

"Need designer to work gratis on wearable computer mockups for editorial. grt exposure/u own content. ping jason AT inside.com"

https://twitter.com/Jason/status/352489885682241536

He's making five figures a month from this (Hack-a-day) site, putting that back into other startups, looking to get half a million out of it, and wants a designer to work for him FOR FREE!?

Yeah, now I'm even happier that I decided to keep my money.

Before contributing, you should probably read this:

http://hackaday.com/2013/07/15/were-going-to-buy-hackaday/#m...

Fascinating, I liked this bit, "Here’s the skinny: if this campaign is funded, the writers and editors of Hackaday will keep doing what we’re doing. If we’re successful, we’re going to write up more hacks than we are right now,"

Reading through that particular link its clear that the challenge here is a business model that pays the writers and editors enough money. Raising 500K isn't going to get them a business model. Which explains the second question I had when I read the headline, which was "Why aren't they getting investment from a venture fund?" I'm guessing they are still working on a model going forward which would make an outside investor nervous.

The other thing I wonder is how their traffic has been changed by Google Reader going away, if at all. That's because I'm generally curious on that question. It seemed to me that it was a big traffic generator but I didn't have any proof one way or the other on that.

I think the Hackaday site can shed some light on this. It appears that the owner wants to sell and the community wants to buy to preserve it.

http://hackaday.com/2013/07/15/were-going-to-buy-hackaday/

I find it hard to believe it is worth $500,000. Jason is going to be making some easy money.

Have you read the blog post? They are making $14k a month, I know nothing about website valuation but I thought 36 months was the norm.

Would you give me money to buy a website I work for at 36 months, then I keep all the profits?

I would if it was a website that I liked and that we will be sure to keep the same quality of content. Does even Hacker News can't see values in content?

So I'm supposed to give money so two managers can buy out the shareholder of a company, with no expectation of returns. I'm sorry, is Hackaday a charity? Am I getting a return on my investment here? Am I getting any of that $14k a month? Let me get this straight, I'm giving money to two guys to do a buyout of a site that makes $14k a month, and I don't get a piece of the cash flow?

This is all so preposterous, I don't know how Kickstarter is even allowing this to happen on their site. Calacanis is one hell of a scammer.

I guess you consider content doesn't have value then? This is the return. If it's not enough for you, nobody force you to give. This is the beauty of crowd funding.

8-12 months worth of revenue is typical... this is roughly three times that amount.

People paid billion dollars for site that makes $0 money.

With that traffic, this is not a bad deal at all.

"If this is funded, what’s stopping you from buying Hackaday, then selling it and keeping the money? The same could be said if Jason sells to someone else. At least with this plan there’s some accountability."

Is ^this really true? I don't think so.

Uh, selling a link for $10,000? Really people?

That's against Google's rules and doing that could get them banned from Adsense and then it's bye-bye to that easy $14k/month recurring revenue...

Odd they list Page Views and not Unique Visitors - page views as a valuation metric really isn't THAT important, as you can inflate/deflate it using design (i.e. split articles onto multiple pages, etc...)

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