jwesley

I think the point of the article is that straight statistics like that are not always accurate. For example, what if a player allows the person he is guarding to score more points on average, but during the time is he is on floor, the opposing team tends to score fewer points. This is easily possible if the player is a great help defender who tends to stray from his own man to help his teammates.

Great article. As a basketball player in my youth, I always struggled with the dynamic of selfishness and selflessness inherent in the game and this was best attempt I've seen at explaining it. There really are so many way a player can help his team that do not improve, and even decrease, his stats. The use of statistical methods to identify this, like Moneyball did for baseball, is fascinating.

I'm sure the scientists behind this are on top of that. Just does not make sense for someone writing an article to be part of the control group.

Something that insightful makes me upset at how pathetic the media is. Millions of dollars spent creating hundreds of hours of coverage, and all of it together will not be as informative as a blog post some guy wrote in an hour. Can't the networks get someone like him on the air?

I think HN has a few advantages that give it a fighting chance:

1. It's not a business, or at least a direct one, so the site owners are not focused on growing the audience infinitely. 2. It is not dependent on advertising revenue, so there is no pressure to go "mainstream" to attract bigger advertisers. 3. The members are passionately self policing. Seems like every other day there is a thread about HN going off the deep end.

The publishing of these books has nothing to do with a need for information about Twitter. It's a ploy to make money off all mainstream people who hear about "that Twitter thingy" in the media.

Absolutely right. Mixx is miserable. If Digg can't manage to sell itself, what chance do 3rd rate copycats have? It doesn't even send significant traffic to stories on the front page. The only thing it's useful for is submitting your blog posts for SEO purposes.

The more appropriate parallel would be "I made $2 million with a book".

John Chow's blog is such a joke. It exists to scam newbies. Shouldn't you be busy making money online?

I see karma as a way to motivate more activity on the site. It turns participating into a game that you can win, which gets people's competitive juices flowing. We all love measuring ourselves against other people.

Everyone CAN start a blog and use it to market their business. If that is the only marketing channel, attributing the success of the business to it is not that big of a stretch.

I wonder what Dan Lyons was thinking with his initial column. He's obviously a smart guy. He knows the blog landed him a book deal, his new job at Newsweek, and internet notoriety. He knows there is money to be made through and around blogging, so I'm inclined to think it was an intentional publicity bait, which is working amazingly well.

Otherwise, I am constantly amazed by how dense people are about the value of internet traffic. Like just having a ton of visits is the only thing the matters. Visitor intent is just as powerful a factor in the equation.

Don't get all defensive bro. It's cool to get paid.

Jizsploojo

How I SEOed my website to make more sales!

Moral of the story: beg borrow and steal to get to the top of search results, if that traffic is valuable to you.

I usually pick a theme I want my site to have, like "education", then do a Google image search for the term to see how others have represented it with color. After getting a basic idea of what color I like I hand it off to the designer with very general suggestions. I have learned this is one area I am better off delegating to someone more talented.

You are not the only one. There are a few companies with very similar services, like MoFuse. Is there anything your company offers that can differentiate you from them? If not you might have a hard time gaining traction against VC funded players with a big head start.

Why do you keep the good domains private? I bet the affiliate commissions from showing off these domains would be much higher than the revenue from membership fees.

No one is rushing out to register gibberish domains. If anyone wants too they have plenty of other opportunities to do so. Nearly all domains still available are not intrinsically valuable - they generate close to zero type-in traffic for squatters to live off.

Everyone here on HN is genius, so even if a few get knocked off there are plenty to step up and replace them.

Yea, it's a total SEO play. Just look at the way they interlink their pages and shamelessly promote high search volume queries like video games.

Anyone else feel the site is getting too self referential? I noticed the lag as well, but is this worthy of a devoted thread taking up space on the first page?

The recent surge in self referential threads has felt Reddit-esque.

I think the last point is the most important:

"6. Everybody seemed to feel the web game has shifted to the higher level. A lot appeared to feel that small publishers and sites would start to be squeezed out of the market in the coming years."

This is true, but I don't think it's completely accurate. To succeed as a small publisher, you will need to be remarkably talented and know how to efficiently market your site.

Gone are the days of lame content sites succeeding on pure bulk, like About.com. Except for Mahalo I guess.

The lawyer mentioned was clearly a dope. The story said he accepted a loan for over $100K without knowing what the interest rate was or who he was borrowing from. Sure, they might have pressured him (like car dealerships do), but you'd have to be moron to get suckered that bad.

Exactly. The post does not include a single year-over-year comparison. Because of seasonal variations, year-over-year is the only valid revenue comparison in most industries. Do the writers at TC not remember that little consumer tradition of holiday gift giving?

Either they chose to ignore YOY so they could use contrarian (optimistic) headlines to get attention or they are utterly clueless. In the first case, that's blatantly unethical reporting.

This thread on WickedFire mentions the post on HN and predicts Grants offers with soon be banned too:

http://www.wickedfire.com/affiliate-marketing/50846-get-your...

It was on the same forum I read about diet offers getting banned. I don't think there was any official statement by Facebook on the matter.

Reverse IP look up can be helpful, as well as info from the Who Is database. Check out abouthisite.com, they have some functionality along those lines.

I would also recommend using Yahoo Site Explore and the Google link: operator to look at back links.

Yea, those grant offers are run by affiliate marketers. It's a major scam. Basically they offer to send you information on grants for the cost of shipping (like $4.99 or so) and then charge your credit card for $90 a couple weeks later.

FB banned diet related scams from their ad programs a few weeks ago, so I'd expect them to ban these types of offers as well once the word gets out. These types of scams are the internet's dirty little secret. Google, Yahoo, et al have no problem letting people advertise them either.

Very interesting article. I think this is where the VC business is heading. Startups will either bootstrap or take very little capital and then receive larger investments when they have matured to profitability.