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"The freefall of Demand serves as a cautionary tale for hype in the Internet age: No company burns so hot that it can’t cool off." What a crock - what cautiona
by tomasien 13y ago
"The freefall of Demand serves as a cautionary tale for hype in the Internet age: No company burns so hot that it can’t cool off."
What a crock - what cautionary tale? A company that grew really fast, is still producing lots of cash, and is already public? Companies rise and fall and are dependent on lots of other forces. Airbnb could crash any time if cities decided they don't want it (I doubt it will), same with Uber, and TONS of companies are in some way dependent on Google not shutting them out.
Seems like this was a pretty crappy business with extremely low value added to the world, but it's so obnoxious to hear every single company that starts to decline or doesn't grow the way we thought it would as a "cautionary tale". Companies grow, companies die.
- adventured 13y agoHow do you figure Demand Media is producing lots of cash? Their business is struggling just to break even on an operational basis, and has been for years.
- tomasien 13y agoBecause it says in the article that several of their businesses are producing lots of cash, just not growing. This is not to defend the business, I have no interest in doing so, but the ONLY thing about this that is even reasonably a cautionary tale is building a business that has no intrinsic value to anyone. Those businesses have little chance, but that's the point they're making when they declare it a cautionary tale.
- DoggettCK 13y agoI do have an interest in defending the business, because I work for DM, specifically engineering an analytics platform for Pluck. DM has a reputation on here as some sort of shitty content farm, but that's just a fraction of what we do. Maybe that's just the only part of the business the markets care about. At least for my group, sales rings the dinner bell announcing a new contract frequently enough that it's driving engineering insane. They need to move that damn thing over by marketing.