Comment by replicatorblog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by replicatorblog | Hacker News Reader

I'm a tech writer, with a child, and wouldn't write about this. It's a really cool story and a neat company, but it's got a few things working against it:

+ Small Audience — Most tech writers get paid by the pageview. The realistic market of readers for this kind of story is probably in the hundreds, maybe low thousands. My wife loves the site, but wouldn't give a fig about the financials. There's a market for investors or competitive intelligence, but it's a very different kind of business.

+ Bad Timing — If this happened in the midst of the Groupon craze you'd be reading all about it. Now that "Daily Deals" have become an elephant's graveyard of broken dreams and wasted billions it's not that interesting in a meta context.

+ What's the Hook? — It's a big number, but a "boring" business. A company called Wayfair in Boston is in a similar spot. They're a massive ecommerce company dealing in home goods, but you've probably never heard of them. They have nice offices, but not crazy ones. They use a logical, but unexciting tech stack. Which would you rather read:

- Seasoned entrepreneurs utilize proven business fundamentals to build niche ecommerce website with steadily growing, but modest profits?

or:

- 6 Unbelievable Tech Tricks these College Students Used to Get a $4B Buyout Offer from Facebook in 18 months!

Your first headline may be dry, but headlines like "6 Unbelievable Techniques Two College Students Used to Get a $4B Buyout Offer from Facebook!" sound like spam to me.

Sensationalism will always work to grab eyes but I don't think that particular brand of headline sensationalism is going to work forever.

Having a reputation for quality journalism makes a news business sustainable, not headline tricks.

"One weird trick to make $4b! See why entrepreneurs hate him!"

Just to amplify your point, I'm actually seeing a lot of faux-content that's exactly like this, and I'm sick of it already. I've never clicked on it and every time I see them my resolve hardens further.

They don't sound like traditional ads, as they're maybe one or two shades away from "one weird trick." They're just too on-the-nose. "One thing which makes alzheimer's worse," "what cruise lines do to fill empty cabins," "10 signs of an affair." I feel dirty just typing these.

> "10 signs of an affair"

Stuff like that pre-dates "one weird trick" adverts.

Oh, sure. It's not "new" in that you'd see it on magazine covers or whatever. And it's not any more appealing in this context, either.

Congratulations, you just discovered "growth hacking"!

I've heard the term before but this is the first time I had cause to look it up.

And now that I've read it: shouldn't you be offering condolences rather than congratulations?

The book http://trustmeimlying.com/ talks about this and the financial motivations behind this. In the age of the pageview journalism the main distribution channels are social networks and Google News, and on those channels headlines are the only thing that people pay attention to.

lol, epic sixpackshortcuts reference.

Or the third option to get a larger audience if you want to write about the IPO

"Why the tech press is ignoring companies huge IPO"

I met Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian at a book signing recently. Alexis mentioned that Digg was all the rage in the press when Reddit was on the rise. I understand you saying that this company has a small audience, bad timing, and an insufficient hook. However, it seems that experts often make the same mistake over and over again. As Nassim Taleb would say, tech journalists appear to be Fooled by Randomness. They latch on to the Snapchats of the world and refuse to explore the hidden gems because they don't fit into the trendy, flashy mold.

He's just being honest and saying one will get more page views than another, not evaluating the merits of the underlying businesses. Perfectly rational since it's what he's been incentivized to care about.

There is more US IPO activity going on right now than makes the headlines. You really have to subscribe to an IPO specific news source or blog.

Take this with a grain of salt, I haven't read the S-1 and I don't know much about Zulily.

However, they have shown up as a top US display advertisers going back a year or more. Groupon was in the same spot, buying up massive quantities of inventory to fuel their growth. Before buying in take a close look at how much of their growth is purchased, along with the retention of those purchased users.

Other recent IPOs, like Retailmenot, have even deeper issues (almost complete dependency on free traffic from Google for trademark company names.)

Yep, Chegg is Valley-based tech-driven non-parent company, but coverage of the IPO was pretty much amiss from the tech blogs.

Oh, there's a lot more to it than that. "Trendy and flashy" really is not a factor.

Reddit didn't get a lot of press attention because -- among other things -- the people behind it were not easy to find and talk with. (They still aren't.) If as a journalist I can't connect with you to, say, fact check something I'm writing, your chances of being covered are much lower.

Plus, when Reddit was on the upswing, there were a _lot_ of competing sites that were trying to be "Digg for [niche]," such as DZone as "digg for developers" and dotnetkicks as "digg for the .net people so we can be even more granular," and agileblend and so on. Not to mention older sharing sites like delicious (which is, um, still around?). So initially it seemed like "yet another link sharing site," and one that was far more confusing even to us tech press geeks.

In a way, this speaks to the concept of journalism in an echo chamber and being fooled by randomness. Ultimately, people (including journalists) are bad at prediction. The "accessible" founders that get noticed first get the press' attention. Next to market companies get labeled as [First mover] for [niche].

"Accessibility" has a lot to do with one's connections with journalists and perhaps location to some extent. It seems like a broken model is being used to determine what is newsworthy in tech.

I'd take location out of it. Just as good developers learn to communicate over distance (e.g. over IRC), so do journalists. I know remarkably few tech journalists who still live in the Bay Area.

All good points. People just don't want to recognize what you are saying is true because they want to believe the press is about truth and not about pageviews to make money. The time that this isn't the case is when there is enough advertising money that you can afford to do the stories that have "value" (subjective value anyway).

"What's the Hook?"

One hook that would get the tech press interested is the involvement of a "legacy" (borrowing from Animal House) which the tech community cares about and salivates over. Like Peter Thiel or Jeff Bezos or such and such angel or VC firm etc. Alternatively a celebrity getting behind it would be a hook. Like Ashton Kutcher, Madonna, or even Louis CK.

Why is it not possible to write something about 'How is this Daily Deals site succeeding when Groupon is such a huge failure?'

Because that would take creative journalism. "X ways that such and such did such and such" is much easier.

On topic: I respect you professional opinion, but I'd click on a link that talked about daily deal business models that succeed--in obvious opposition to the infamous Groupon. You'd be writing for investors and the anti-bubble crowd, is there no reward for that?

Off topic: this is not the first time I've seen tech journalists referring to themselves as tech writers. I always thought tech writing was the unsexy job of documenting corporate middleware. If what you do is not journalism, is it just "writing?" If documentation writers aren't tech writers, what are they? "Doc writer" might be more accurate, or better yet, "tech doc writer," but that doesn't seem to be the norm either.

The story about Daily Deals is that although Local Daily Deals such as Groupon and Living Social went through boom and bust the Online Daily Deals such as Woot, Tanga and Zulily did very well before Groupon and continue to do so. That is why Local Daily Deals businesses have expanded into that market with Groupon Goods and LivingSocial Shop.

I do have some data to back that up with Deal Drop (www.getdealdrop.com) which pre-dates Groupon and Tech Drop which I released yesterday (www.getdealdrop.com/blog/tech-drop-android).

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