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I don't care so much about the content here, but it's interesting to note that they've "paywalled" their content by making you submit your email. It's probably

I don't care so much about the content here, but it's interesting to note that they've "paywalled" their content by making you submit your email. It's probably so that they can spam you in the future with their newsletters that feature their portfolio companies and what not. Not saying this is bad, but it shows how the priority has shifted. For the last couple of years it was trendy for VCs to blog. Basically VCs became marketers. They call it "inbound marketing". Basically they use content to gain mindshare so that founders will think of them when it's time for them to raise money. But now that this channel has become commoditized--basically every VC firm has a blog and anyone can write analysis content on Medium--and people's average attention per publication has gone way down, they have shifted their focus from "inbound marketing" (basically a brand marketing) to "direct marketing" (A fancy term for spam email marketing). What's interesting about this is that VCs are now more blatant about the fact that they're using content as marketing.

spamillion 9y ago
paywall Oh, I wouldn't label this a paywall as such, since the requested information is not challenged with verification of authenticity. They aren't making you verify your email, before showing you the rest of the article, and this permits you to use "test@example.com" as the token acknowledgment of their solicitation. This rates on par with a CAPTCHA to read the full article, since the user merely needs to adhere to the [a-z,A-Z,0-9]@[a-z,A-Z,0-9].[a-z,A-Z,0-9] regex, to dismiss, and providing a real email is an option, indicating that they're willing to accept junk data as part of their collection of subscribers, since mailing list email bounces aren't a disaster. You only have to submit an email, not your email.
tedmiston 9y ago
> I don't care so much about the content here, but it's interesting to note that they've "paywalled" their content by making you submit your email. The text link at the bottom "Continue without an email address" worked for me, as did Reader mode in Safari.

spamillion 9y ago

paywall Oh, I wouldn't label this a paywall as such, since the requested information is not challenged with verification of authenticity. They aren't making you verify your email, before showing you the rest of the article, and this permits you to use "test@example.com" as the token acknowledgment of their solicitation. This rates on par with a CAPTCHA to read the full article, since the user merely needs to adhere to the [a-z,A-Z,0-9]@[a-z,A-Z,0-9].[a-z,A-Z,0-9] regex, to dismiss, and providing a real email is an option, indicating that they're willing to accept junk data as part of their collection of subscribers, since mailing list email bounces aren't a disaster. You only have to submit an email, not your email.

tedmiston 9y ago

> I don't care so much about the content here, but it's interesting to note that they've "paywalled" their content by making you submit your email. The text link at the bottom "Continue without an email address" worked for me, as did Reader mode in Safari.