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DuckDuckGo FOSS Donations 2010
- karl11 16y agoAt 10% of gross revenue, these donations would indicate DDG pulled in ~$19,090 in 2010.
- chamakits 16y agoI was thinking this exact same thing, and I really hope that isn't the case, as they are pretty awesome.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoIt's right. You expected more?
- burgerbrain 16y agoIt is my impression that the operator is already in money, he's doing this for the hell of it.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- robryan 16y agoIt's pretty good considering that many startups are burning through VC money at this stage in their lives and the competition it is up against. Sure it could be more aggressively monetized, but if is bringing in enough to cover expenses why not focus on building a user base rather than cashing in.
- stanleydrew 16y agoThis means the $7000 billboard on the 101 in San Francisco was a significant portion of revenue. Gabriel, looking back on that, do you think it was worth it, and would you advise other startups to try it given similar revenue numbers?
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoAbsolutely.
- axod 16y agoPresumably it's the sudden jump on Jan 3rd onward here? If so seems like money well spent indeed. http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
- rudiger 16y agoI'm reminded of the only time Twitter ever spent money on marketing (SXSW 2007)[1]. They negotiated with the festival to put flat panel screens in the hallways. They paid $11,000 for this and set up the TVs themselves. [1] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-process-involved-in-launching-a-start-up-at-SXSW/answer/Evan-Williams http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-process-involved-in-launchi...
- ashleyw 16y agoI'd say most of the traffic came indirectly via press who covered the story, rather than the actual billboard itself. It's been done, and I don't think the press will cover the same story twice, so don't expect the same results DDG had.
- avar 16y agoThis is fantastic, too bad you'd never see something like this from a company on the stock market.
- axod 16y agoI'm pretty sure hundreds of large companies make donations, allow employees time to work on FOSS, and so on. Still awesome to see duckduckgo do it of course.
- Matt_Cutts 16y agoI like Google's Summer of Code program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code . If you can get programmers writing open-source code when they're still students, a fair number of them might continue to contribute to open source over their career. I really like Gabriel's idea too. Donations to open-source (or groups like the EFF) are great for the net.
- ideamonk 16y agoAnd a few of the students even donate all the money they get from Google Summer of Code program. Atleast one of my friend did this - http://www.python.org/psf/donations/ http://www.python.org/psf/donations/ [ #2 Shashwat Anand ]
- cdibona 16y agoAlso, a fair number of whole projects take the organization donation and donate that to organizations like the FSF and SFLC. (they get 500$ for each student they mentor) Chris (disclaimer: googler)
- avar 16y agoThey make donations. But they don't donate 10% of their yearly revenue, even though their business often completely depends on FOSS software.
- callahad 16y agoYet another great reason to use DDG. Similarly, Gandi's support of Debian is a major reason I use them for all of my domain registrations.
- dotBen 16y agoI'm not sure what Gabriel's aspirations are for raising venture capital in the future, but abstracting this out... I'm wondering whether a VC would have concerns about investing in a startup that had already made such a public commitment.
- jdp23 16y agoGreat question. I'm working on finding that out myself.
- jjm 16y agoI donated money AND sweat to half of these projects in addition to several others personally, before I went and started my startup. I hope people contribute outside of their 'corporate profits' both monetarily and with some elbow grease.
- cperciva 16y agoFor the past two years I've donated all of Tarsnap's profits for December to the FreeBSD Foundation. (Considerably more than 1/12th of the annual profits, due to Tarsnap's growth -- last year it worked out to 15%.) Good to see that I'm not alone. :-)