6 ms·

But Tew was the first to do it, which left a lot of people wondering why they didn’t think of it first. Lots of people thought of it, but discounted it because

But Tew was the first to do it, which left a lot of people wondering why they didn’t think of it first. Lots of people thought of it, but discounted it because it was a dumb idea, missing one crucially important ingredient: page-views. Anybody can put up a web site, it's getting people to look at it that's hard. And once people are looking at it, it's easy to sell ad space. What no one could have known, including Tew, is that the story was going to get picked up by the media, which would generate his page-views for him. Nowadays, lots of people are trying to hack the concept of virality, which despite the name is really more a matter of climbing the media hierarchy rather than spreading in some kind of peer-to-peer manner. You get picked up by a few small tweeters or bloggers, then by bigger tweeters and bloggers, and then by major media, and---voila! You cash in and look like a genius. But everyone else is trying to do the same thing, and no one has a repeatable recipe for virality, so in the end it's largely a matter of luck.

dennisnedry 10y ago
Agreed, kind of like gambling.
IgorPartola 10y ago
I'm not sure that nobody has it. It's basically a matter of hacking the system to get cheaper CPM than what you can get with ads. If ads are the market index fund, you are trying to beat it by exploiting some oddity in the system. Once you do so on a large scale, the market adjusts and the oddity either goes away, or becomes useless. But I can think of a few ways to do this: - Produce awesome content. Remember the Old Spice YouTube channel where they set up and produced videos for a few days in real-time response to people tweeting at them? That got lots of people looking at their product. Sure, it was an expensive stunt, but a stunt that worked. I bet it'd work again and again, as long as it's not done too frequently. - Send out brand ambassadors into random communities. There are lots of brands present as specific people on places like Reddit, Imgur, etc. They are not customer service, they are not there as the official faces of the brand. They are just there to hang out, shoot the shit, and occasionally give out some free stuff or do something "awesome", "rad", or whatever. - Provide comprehensive media kits to journalists. The dirty secret is that nowadays people who make money by writing articles need to write lots of them. Do 90% of the work, and they'll jump on the opportunity to customize it a bit, and post it immediately. They get to take a longer lunch break, you get free page views. - For small or personal projects, go and do the "Show HN" equivalent on various communities. Even if they generally don't allow self-advertising, the rule is usually overlooked if you don't push too hard, and just present it as "I made a thing. Check it out." - Start a KickStarter campaign for no reason. Ideally, if you can afford to not hinge your business on it, you can just use it as both a pre-order platform, and as an easy way to grab attention of lots of people. - Sell $1 bills for $0.90. That worked really well for Uber. It can work for you too!
- ZainRiz 10y ago
  > Sell $1 bills for $0.90. That worked really well for Uber. It can work for you too! Huh? What's the story there?
  - IgorPartola 10y ago
    It's mostly sarcasm, but Uber is one example of several companies whose business model was to disrupt an entrenched industry by providing more value than they were charging for, capture market share, then raise prices. Basically, initially it was cheaper to take an Uber than a Taxi. Currently that's no longer the case.
    - Finbarr 10y ago
      In the SF Bay Area it's still way cheaper to take Uber than a Taxi.
      - guyzero 10y ago
        In the one urban area that has the worst taxi service in the US, Uber is winning. Great!
        MichaelBurge 10y ago
        I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you claiming that they're losing in every single other market? At least in Portland, I've never taken a taxi in my life, but have taken probably a dozen Ubers.
        BeetleB 10y ago
        >At least in Portland, I've never taken a taxi in my life, but have taken probably a dozen Ubers. Which is one reason why Uber is winning. You do not even bother to check taxi fares. I checked Uber rates to get to the airport. Not cheaper than taxi - about the same.
JohnHammersley 10y ago
I remember this at the time -- Tew invested the initial earnings he made (<£2,000 IIRC) from selling ad space to friends and family into buying media coverage, which kickstarted the whole thing. So whilst he was lucky, he did kind of make his own luck by putting the money into it -- he could have just taken that money and sat on it.
- JohnHammersley 10y ago
  From an article in 2006: "His friends and family paid the first $1,000 dollars, which he spent on a press release. That small publicity gave his site more traffic, which in turn persuaded more advertisers to have faith." Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4585026.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4585026.stm I remember from the TV news coverage he talked about how he'd sent that press release out to hundreds of news outlets. So I feel he (in part at least) made his own luck on this one.
- notahacker 10y ago
  I seem to recall reading that Tew spent up to 20% of his targeted million dollars on PR[1]. Which would suggest that he had a very good understanding of page views being the important ingredient, a good story for traditional media being important (more so at the time) to get there, and more faith in what he was doing than anyone else that had the idea of creating a pure web page billboard. [1]IIRC it was discussed in Paul Carr's Bringing Nothing to the Party, which isn't exactly complimentary about Tew
- vannevar 10y ago
  Thousands of people send their press releases out every day, and most of them are never seen again. I stand by my assertion that it was largely a matter of luck, and while Tew no doubt knew he needed publicity, he had no reliably repeatable way of getting it. He was very fortunate with a dumb idea that fit someone's need for a good story at the time. There are thousands, maybe millions, of other dumb ideas that would make equally good stories but are not picked up. Statistically, it would indeed have been a better move for Tew to take the money and sit on it, just as it is a better move for a lottery player to save their $2. But it's certainly a lot more fun to gamble it. And unlike a lottery winner, in business if you win with a dumb idea, you not only profit, you look like some kind of savant.
jlarocco 10y ago
Funny story about that. I worked on an internship back in 2004, and one morning my manager walked in and asked a coworker and me something like, "Do you think people would buy pixels on a website?" We asked what he meant, and he explained this exact idea. Of course we told him it was dumb and nobody would buy pixels and it would be pointless, and how would anybody find it, etc., and he decided not to do anything with it. Then, about a year later, this site came around, made the news, and sold out in no time. Like you said, there's a lot more to it then just putting the site online, but I've always felt a little bad for dismissing it so quickly.
m4tta 10y ago
Lots of people thought of it, but discounted it because it was a dumb idea An idea that costs almost nothing to do with almost nothing to lose.
- vannevar 10y ago
  Almost being the operative word here. Compared to the eventual payoff, yes, almost nothing. But I'll bet Tew actually spent quite a bit of time working on the idea, time he might've spent on something else with much better prospects for success. He's a classic case of survivor's bias: we only know about him because he was successful. We don't know about the thousands of others that pursued similarly dumb ideas (maybe even the same one) and failed.

dennisnedry 10y ago

Agreed, kind of like gambling.

IgorPartola 10y ago

I'm not sure that nobody has it. It's basically a matter of hacking the system to get cheaper CPM than what you can get with ads. If ads are the market index fund, you are trying to beat it by exploiting some oddity in the system. Once you do so on a large scale, the market adjusts and the oddity either goes away, or becomes useless. But I can think of a few ways to do this: - Produce awesome content. Remember the Old Spice YouTube channel where they set up and produced videos for a few days in real-time response to people tweeting at them? That got lots of people looking at their product. Sure, it was an expensive stunt, but a stunt that worked. I bet it'd work again and again, as long as it's not done too frequently. - Send out brand ambassadors into random communities. There are lots of brands present as specific people on places like Reddit, Imgur, etc. They are not customer service, they are not there as the official faces of the brand. They are just there to hang out, shoot the shit, and occasionally give out some free stuff or do something "awesome", "rad", or whatever. - Provide comprehensive media kits to journalists. The dirty secret is that nowadays people who make money by writing articles need to write lots of them. Do 90% of the work, and they'll jump on the opportunity to customize it a bit, and post it immediately. They get to take a longer lunch break, you get free page views. - For small or personal projects, go and do the "Show HN" equivalent on various communities. Even if they generally don't allow self-advertising, the rule is usually overlooked if you don't push too hard, and just present it as "I made a thing. Check it out." - Start a KickStarter campaign for no reason. Ideally, if you can afford to not hinge your business on it, you can just use it as both a pre-order platform, and as an easy way to grab attention of lots of people. - Sell $1 bills for $0.90. That worked really well for Uber. It can work for you too!

ZainRiz 10y ago
> Sell $1 bills for $0.90. That worked really well for Uber. It can work for you too! Huh? What's the story there?
- IgorPartola 10y ago
  It's mostly sarcasm, but Uber is one example of several companies whose business model was to disrupt an entrenched industry by providing more value than they were charging for, capture market share, then raise prices. Basically, initially it was cheaper to take an Uber than a Taxi. Currently that's no longer the case.
  - Finbarr 10y ago
    In the SF Bay Area it's still way cheaper to take Uber than a Taxi.
    - guyzero 10y ago
      In the one urban area that has the worst taxi service in the US, Uber is winning. Great!
      - MichaelBurge 10y ago
        I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you claiming that they're losing in every single other market? At least in Portland, I've never taken a taxi in my life, but have taken probably a dozen Ubers.
        BeetleB 10y ago
        >At least in Portland, I've never taken a taxi in my life, but have taken probably a dozen Ubers. Which is one reason why Uber is winning. You do not even bother to check taxi fares. I checked Uber rates to get to the airport. Not cheaper than taxi - about the same.

JohnHammersley 10y ago

I remember this at the time -- Tew invested the initial earnings he made (<£2,000 IIRC) from selling ad space to friends and family into buying media coverage, which kickstarted the whole thing. So whilst he was lucky, he did kind of make his own luck by putting the money into it -- he could have just taken that money and sat on it.

JohnHammersley 10y ago
From an article in 2006: "His friends and family paid the first $1,000 dollars, which he spent on a press release. That small publicity gave his site more traffic, which in turn persuaded more advertisers to have faith." Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4585026.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4585026.stm I remember from the TV news coverage he talked about how he'd sent that press release out to hundreds of news outlets. So I feel he (in part at least) made his own luck on this one.
notahacker 10y ago
I seem to recall reading that Tew spent up to 20% of his targeted million dollars on PR[1]. Which would suggest that he had a very good understanding of page views being the important ingredient, a good story for traditional media being important (more so at the time) to get there, and more faith in what he was doing than anyone else that had the idea of creating a pure web page billboard. [1]IIRC it was discussed in Paul Carr's Bringing Nothing to the Party, which isn't exactly complimentary about Tew
vannevar 10y ago
Thousands of people send their press releases out every day, and most of them are never seen again. I stand by my assertion that it was largely a matter of luck, and while Tew no doubt knew he needed publicity, he had no reliably repeatable way of getting it. He was very fortunate with a dumb idea that fit someone's need for a good story at the time. There are thousands, maybe millions, of other dumb ideas that would make equally good stories but are not picked up. Statistically, it would indeed have been a better move for Tew to take the money and sit on it, just as it is a better move for a lottery player to save their $2. But it's certainly a lot more fun to gamble it. And unlike a lottery winner, in business if you win with a dumb idea, you not only profit, you look like some kind of savant.

jlarocco 10y ago

Funny story about that. I worked on an internship back in 2004, and one morning my manager walked in and asked a coworker and me something like, "Do you think people would buy pixels on a website?" We asked what he meant, and he explained this exact idea. Of course we told him it was dumb and nobody would buy pixels and it would be pointless, and how would anybody find it, etc., and he decided not to do anything with it. Then, about a year later, this site came around, made the news, and sold out in no time. Like you said, there's a lot more to it then just putting the site online, but I've always felt a little bad for dismissing it so quickly.

m4tta 10y ago

Lots of people thought of it, but discounted it because it was a dumb idea An idea that costs almost nothing to do with almost nothing to lose.

vannevar 10y ago
Almost being the operative word here. Compared to the eventual payoff, yes, almost nothing. But I'll bet Tew actually spent quite a bit of time working on the idea, time he might've spent on something else with much better prospects for success. He's a classic case of survivor's bias: we only know about him because he was successful. We don't know about the thousands of others that pursued similarly dumb ideas (maybe even the same one) and failed.