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What ruined Yik Yak for me was making the geographical areas larger so my University's 'herd' included surrounding cities too. Too much noise. This compounded w

by mokash 9y ago

What ruined Yik Yak for me was making the geographical areas larger so my University's 'herd' included surrounding cities too. Too much noise. This compounded with the removal of anonymity led to me deleting the application. Wonder if it is possible to run an app like this at cost somehow.

Alex3917 9y ago
> Wonder if it is possible to run an app like this at cost somehow. Given that it's just an API serving short text snippets, the hosting costs shouldn't be more than a few cents per user per year. Let's say you're serving one university with 50,000 students, and your hosting costs are $3,000 per year... Just send out an update email once a quarter with a few ads at the end and you've more than covered your expenses.
- reilly3000 9y ago
  In order to do a quarterly email that pays your the service you would have to achieve a minimum page CPM of $15 which at the industry average rate of $1.50 would need 10 ads sold and trafficked per email. Not impossible, but a lot of effort to source and manage that revenue and/or more frequent emails, larger rates (more sales effort) or ...?
  - sanswork 9y ago
    You could definitely get a much higher CPM based off the locality and demographic. I'm sure there are local food places/stores looking for more student business that would happily drop $1-2000 for an ad that would go out to most of the student population.
    - reilly3000 9y ago
      At least two decades of start ups failing has proven that selling local advertising doesn't scale. However, At this scale that could work just fine.
- simonw 9y ago
  You also need to pay for staff to handle customer and legal complaints. That ain't cheap.
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    Maybe in addition to having your users indemnify you for their UGC in the TOS, you could have users agree to pay you 25k every time they posted something like a bomb threat, rape threat, drug deal, etc.
    - eropple 9y ago
      That would be wholly unenforceable.
      - DonHopkins 9y ago
        Just make them pay in advance. Apple's in-app-purchase system is pretty airtight.
  - MichaelGG 9y ago
    Customer complaints can get a canned response. Legal requests are paid, right?

by mokash 9y ago

Alex3917 9y ago

> Wonder if it is possible to run an app like this at cost somehow. Given that it's just an API serving short text snippets, the hosting costs shouldn't be more than a few cents per user per year. Let's say you're serving one university with 50,000 students, and your hosting costs are $3,000 per year... Just send out an update email once a quarter with a few ads at the end and you've more than covered your expenses.

reilly3000 9y ago
In order to do a quarterly email that pays your the service you would have to achieve a minimum page CPM of $15 which at the industry average rate of $1.50 would need 10 ads sold and trafficked per email. Not impossible, but a lot of effort to source and manage that revenue and/or more frequent emails, larger rates (more sales effort) or ...?
- sanswork 9y ago
  You could definitely get a much higher CPM based off the locality and demographic. I'm sure there are local food places/stores looking for more student business that would happily drop $1-2000 for an ad that would go out to most of the student population.
  - reilly3000 9y ago
    At least two decades of start ups failing has proven that selling local advertising doesn't scale. However, At this scale that could work just fine.
simonw 9y ago
You also need to pay for staff to handle customer and legal complaints. That ain't cheap.
- Alex3917 9y ago
  Maybe in addition to having your users indemnify you for their UGC in the TOS, you could have users agree to pay you 25k every time they posted something like a bomb threat, rape threat, drug deal, etc.
  - eropple 9y ago
    That would be wholly unenforceable.
    - DonHopkins 9y ago
      Just make them pay in advance. Apple's in-app-purchase system is pretty airtight.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  Customer complaints can get a canned response. Legal requests are paid, right?