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I was under the wrong impression that this [1] was the announcement blog post for Yep. As I read the comments here initially, many mentioned that blog post and

I was under the wrong impression that this [1] was the announcement blog post for Yep. As I read the comments here initially, many mentioned that blog post and I did not pay attention to the date on it and just took it for granted. [2] It seems that the 'announcement' post I was referring to isn't fresh announcement for Yep but a 2019 blog post by the founder explaining the concept. In any case my math was meant to be a critique of the proposed model, not any particular product, and I still stand by that analysis. There was no malice intended. Thanks for holding me accountable. [1] https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-did-google-fail-to-build-a-non-evil-platform-3a054f996ea9 https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-di... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31615194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31615194

bryans 4y ago
> In any case my math was meant to be a critique of the proposed model, not any particular product, and I still stand by that analysis. Except that your conclusion was to declare that search ad revenue is "not much" money, which is both plainly false and extremely strange for you to say, given that the entire premise of your own search engine is to take ad revenue out of the equation because the company profits and personal costs of ads to the end user are too high. So, I'm really not sure why you would stand behind an analysis that hundreds of millions of dollars is an "unviable" and irrelevant amount of revenue. When Kagi is bringing in $365M/year, feel free to make all the declarations you want about $328M being "not much." Until then, you're being hypercritical for no apparent reason -- with the results being identical to malice.
- freediver 4y ago
  You are putting words in my mouth and starting to get personal at the same time. My conclusion was that the idea of profit share sounds good on paper but the math does not check. The reason I say that is because math does not care about my feelings, what you or I want or what the idea suggests. It has to work. If Kagi had $300M /year extra, and shared that money with 10M websites, that would be $30 /year or less than $3/month to a website owner. In my opinion that is not how you make impact and the cost of distributing this money would be more than what is being distributed. It is a terrible idea. Now what can make impact is you take $300M and invest in something that can scale.
  - bryans 4y ago
    > You are putting words in my mouth Please quote me, because I never put any words in your mouth, and accusing me of doing so is brazenly false and escalatory. > and starting to get personal at the same time. Bringing attention to the hypocrisy of your baseless claims is not a personal attack, particularly when the only question raised was your own company's status and publicly stated philosophy about the industry being directly discussed. You are not a victim in this situation. > My conclusion was that the idea of profit share sounds good on paper but the math does not check. This is the exact claim that you just accused me of "putting in your mouth," so you're doubling down on your completely faulty analysis, while also claiming I've somehow antagonized you into doing so. > If Kagi had $300M /year extra, and shared that money with 10M websites, that would be $30 /year or less than $3/month to a website owner. In my opinion that is not how you make impact As folks in this thread have explained to you multiple times, there is no such thing as an even distribution of traffic. In reality, the content creators who currently get very little search traffic won't be affected by this additional revenue source, but they aren't expecting to and nobody is claiming that they will. Whereas a content creator who does receive a lot of search traffic would see an increase of revenue that is significant relative to their overall income. You are still trying to push these fundamentally absurd notions that all content creators have the same sized audiences and that the search engine should be responsible for their baseline revenue -- and if the company doesn't meet those literally impossible requirements that no other business in the world would ever be held to, then the concept is somehow inherently flawed and won't have any relevant impact. > and the cost of distributing this money would be more than what is being distributed. You're inventing problems that don't exist. The advertising and content industries have utilized minimum payouts for decades. The claims process could be as simple as a site verification code, which has also been used for decades by thousands of companies. > It is a terrible idea. Now what can make impact is you take $300M and invest in something that can scale. This explains everything about your commentary, and I find it to be anti-social at its very core. You appear to be plainly declaring that money can only be impactful when invested in large businesses that "scale" -- scale at what, nobody knows, but apparently scaling is inherently beneficial to society in some way -- and that supporting small businesses is a "terrible idea." That is illogical, harmful and completely unjustifiable.

bryans 4y ago

> In any case my math was meant to be a critique of the proposed model, not any particular product, and I still stand by that analysis. Except that your conclusion was to declare that search ad revenue is "not much" money, which is both plainly false and extremely strange for you to say, given that the entire premise of your own search engine is to take ad revenue out of the equation because the company profits and personal costs of ads to the end user are too high. So, I'm really not sure why you would stand behind an analysis that hundreds of millions of dollars is an "unviable" and irrelevant amount of revenue. When Kagi is bringing in $365M/year, feel free to make all the declarations you want about $328M being "not much." Until then, you're being hypercritical for no apparent reason -- with the results being identical to malice.

freediver 4y ago
You are putting words in my mouth and starting to get personal at the same time. My conclusion was that the idea of profit share sounds good on paper but the math does not check. The reason I say that is because math does not care about my feelings, what you or I want or what the idea suggests. It has to work. If Kagi had $300M /year extra, and shared that money with 10M websites, that would be $30 /year or less than $3/month to a website owner. In my opinion that is not how you make impact and the cost of distributing this money would be more than what is being distributed. It is a terrible idea. Now what can make impact is you take $300M and invest in something that can scale.
- bryans 4y ago
  > You are putting words in my mouth Please quote me, because I never put any words in your mouth, and accusing me of doing so is brazenly false and escalatory. > and starting to get personal at the same time. Bringing attention to the hypocrisy of your baseless claims is not a personal attack, particularly when the only question raised was your own company's status and publicly stated philosophy about the industry being directly discussed. You are not a victim in this situation. > My conclusion was that the idea of profit share sounds good on paper but the math does not check. This is the exact claim that you just accused me of "putting in your mouth," so you're doubling down on your completely faulty analysis, while also claiming I've somehow antagonized you into doing so. > If Kagi had $300M /year extra, and shared that money with 10M websites, that would be $30 /year or less than $3/month to a website owner. In my opinion that is not how you make impact As folks in this thread have explained to you multiple times, there is no such thing as an even distribution of traffic. In reality, the content creators who currently get very little search traffic won't be affected by this additional revenue source, but they aren't expecting to and nobody is claiming that they will. Whereas a content creator who does receive a lot of search traffic would see an increase of revenue that is significant relative to their overall income. You are still trying to push these fundamentally absurd notions that all content creators have the same sized audiences and that the search engine should be responsible for their baseline revenue -- and if the company doesn't meet those literally impossible requirements that no other business in the world would ever be held to, then the concept is somehow inherently flawed and won't have any relevant impact. > and the cost of distributing this money would be more than what is being distributed. You're inventing problems that don't exist. The advertising and content industries have utilized minimum payouts for decades. The claims process could be as simple as a site verification code, which has also been used for decades by thousands of companies. > It is a terrible idea. Now what can make impact is you take $300M and invest in something that can scale. This explains everything about your commentary, and I find it to be anti-social at its very core. You appear to be plainly declaring that money can only be impactful when invested in large businesses that "scale" -- scale at what, nobody knows, but apparently scaling is inherently beneficial to society in some way -- and that supporting small businesses is a "terrible idea." That is illogical, harmful and completely unjustifiable.