symptic

The company originated in 2005 and has raised several smaller rounds of capital in the past. They're not a startup anymore; they're a full-fledged business.

See Zynga.

Ninja rockstar awesomeface.

Typical conversion rate is 1-2%. That's at least 40,000 paying customers. At $10/mo (that's the maximum revenue per subscriber) that's $400,000 a month, or $4.8M a year. The key here is they are a growing, revenue-generating company.

The losers are the waiters and employees of the featured businesses. I know plenty of people in the service industry who dread the days their restaurants or shops offer discounts on Groupon. Sure it makes money for the company, but in many cases a Groupon deal kills morale within the business.

That on top of the exploitative nature of many (most?) Groupon users, where they buy a Groupon and never revisit the business after they use their discount.

Groupon is a great business, but some concerns about the quality of the leads arise. We need the Glengarry leads.

100,000 at $1 CPM = 100,000 * .001 = $100

If you are just throwing up a generic banner ad network, it's probably close to $.10-.25 CPM. Then multiply by how many ad units displayed per page (networks usually don't allow any more than 2-3).

So: 100,000 * .00025 = $25; x3 = $75

Very rough estimates. With a site with such a particular niche, he can probably get a higher CPM. I also count 7 ads on the home page.

Industry self-regulation. Affiliates need to in most cases, to preserve "traffic quality."

I was referring more to the black hat tactics many affiliate employ successfully. That as well as how many affiliates can easily shark a product with negative smear campaigns and SEO tactics to remove their competition from top Google spots. A reason you see many sites with generic Google listings in the first 10 results.

In most cases, the only reason an affiliate will send a viewer to a landing page is AdWords' strict rules about arbitrage, or some other rules set by the affiliate network. Google wants to provide its users with as good of content as they can manage, but they know affiliates are a large portion of their AdWords spenders. It's a delicate balance.

Many affiliates send users to landing pages or their own sites for their own tracking and data collecting purposes as well.

I used to make a healthy living designing landing pages for affiliates. Several of my clients were making several million a year (all made a "healthy" living) and I was bringing in several hundred a day from just designing landing pages. I left because I couldn't handle that "gray area" people talk about, but I swear those are some of the most intelligent and hardest working people I've met. Shame many are missing that deep entrepreneurial spirit many here on HN have.

The problem isn't that college-aged kids are performing poorly. The problem is that we've raised kids in an educational system that is dying and underfunded at the early levels. We cut physical education, art, music, cancel recess, and expect kids kids to grow up fine while learning subpar English and Maths. Universities have to lower their standards to help provide a job market for these children with under-developed fundamentals.

His portfolio should be relative to what he wants to do in the future. If he intends to do full-scale designing, then of course he should focus on getting that into his portfolio. But if he intends on doing quick, small design deals, this is perfect.

Time invested is not a measure of quality.

I wonder how much these changes correlate to funding.

"And admit that the waters around you have grown, and accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you is worth savin', then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin'."

Most of the icons on the site are part of an icon set which is easily found. Been using IconFinder for a short while and it's a great service.

What makes sense for one company may not make sense for every other. Groupon is great at what it does, so I don't see a point of being critical of something that isn't an expense unless the company opts into it. From my experience, Groupon tries to help you understand full well what you are getting in to.

The truth of the matter is that many business owners don't make the right decision 100% of the time, especially when it comes to new marketing opportunities and trends. Every brand is different, and it's every brand's responsibility to represent itself how it wants to be seen. Blaming Groupon for lowering the value of your brand is projecting your failure to maintain that on a company who offers a great service.

Nothing.

What Rowe is saying is that without those people, you wouldn't have the freedom to "follow your passion." I don't see why you're so critical of what he's saying.

Manual labor is rewarding. It may not scale, but my guess is you'll feel a lot better internally when you finish building that shed than when you create a feature for your web app. He is celebrating our capacity to more or less 'suck it up' in order to get a task accomplished, and the sort of character that builds in oneself.

How does this translate to something you may be working on? There are tasks with running a business that you may not particularly enjoy, but it's your job to just get it done.

Respect hose who do the work that you don't want to. Embrace then, because they have a bigger impact in your life than you seen to acknowledge.

Thanks for the kind words Jon. Didn't expect to see you around on HN. :)

So that's why the Gulf has been so brown my whole life...

Seems to me they do it to continue innovating. A company who stops innovating is one who then can only grow through conservation and focusing on efficiency. Now whether or not they are spending time innovating in the right areas is a debate to be had, but my personal opinion is the new layout sucks. For Google, it feels bloated.

Can almost see my building from there!

I can verify that Infochimps has had this in the pipeline for well over a year. I met with Flip Kromer a long while ago and he was excited about it then.

That makes you look an insufferable ass just the same.

I believe you mean, this particular Atheist believes that. Don't generalize.

Apple products tend to be used by a particular demographic while everyone else uses Microsoft. Is it really a surprise that the largest user base also has the most "gullible" people?

Dustin was the cause of Mr. X losing his job, so I have a hunch he feels like he needs to give the man whatever help he can. And the point of the guest post is to leverage Dustin's reader base to build attention to his name. His blog gets barely 1/50 the traffic Dustin does, I'll guarantee it. Now it's probably closer to 1/20. Sounds good to me.

Anything from John Chow's website is incoherent self-serving drivel as part of his marketing funnel to get you to help him make more money... so he can blog about how he makes more money.

This article had good intentions, but guest blogging on John Chow's website is doing him a disservice.

While we're being pedantic: Tim Ferriss did a good job at this