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Many people would kill to have a site with millions and millions of uniques. If monetization HAD to be the primary focus, they could make money. Growth and prod

Many people would kill to have a site with millions and millions of uniques. If monetization HAD to be the primary focus, they could make money. Growth and product is the top priority. Unfortunately for them one of those is suffering right now.

JohnTHaller 13y ago
A site with millions of uniques doesn't = revenue. Nor does it equal success, interest from investors, etc. Source: running a ~2m unique site right now.
- deletes 13y ago
  I have used your site quite often and was wondering why did you decide to make the downloaded program be wrapped with your executable? Why not just have a .rar/.zip of the actual program.
  - JohnTHaller 13y ago
    Quite a few reasons: http://portableapps.com/about/what_is_a_portable_app#whypaf http://portableapps.com/about/what_is_a_portable_app#whypaf
    - deletes 13y ago
      There are sound arguments towards it. But Better Upgrading scares me.
      - JohnTHaller 13y ago
        It shouldn't :) Back with Firefox 1.x I think, we were using ZIP files and always supported unzip over the old one. But we ran into a situation where if a file was there from the previous version, it would remain since the new version no longer had that file. Oddly, the new version would try to use the old file and crash. That was back when I was only doing Firefox and Thunderbird, I think. As we added in apps like OpenOffice and GIMP it became much more of an issue. So, we have the PA.c Installer able to take directives like whether or not to preserve everything in App, whether to preserve or remove specific files, whether to preserver or remove specific directories, etc. In addition to overwriting the existing files with the new ones, of course. This made life a lot easier on everyone. And users didn't need to worry about manually deleting specific directories but keeping others when updating. You just point the new version to the same X:\PortableApps\AppNamePortable directory and it intelligently upgrades. It even supports custom code for things that fall outside those simple keep/preserve so we can specifically remove certain settings on an upgrade where a given app breaks its own settings and doesn't support the old ones, etc. For example, I just wrote the package for FreeCommander XE Portable for the publisher to release. The new one doesn't support the old settings and will break if they remain, so I have the installer back them up within Data (just in case the user wants to revert manually later). I then had it read the preferred language from the old settings and write them into the new ones for the user for convenience. I could get more explicit and read/write other settings as well if I had the time.
- poopsintub 13y ago
  What kind of revenue are we talking about? A few ads on each page can bring in a few grand or more a month. I'm not sure this is rapGenius's end-game though.
  - JohnTHaller 13y ago
    A few ads via AdSense brings in less revenue than you think it does.
    - poopsintub 13y ago
      I think I'm spot on. Maybe even under-estimated. Feel free to prove me wrong. Here's a site with nearly 3 million impressions a month, making $2200. A year or two back when they were "hot", those ad spots were selling out each month: http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/125 http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/125
- jonathanjaeger 13y ago
  I'm not trying to equate traffic to success or future income. But the original comment was snarky and implied that Rapgenius doesn't make money so there's no financial loss. This loss of traffic will hurt the future monetization of the site and its products.
  - JohnTHaller 13y ago
    In that case, it could hurt potential future revenue. But, again, that's something RapGenius should have thought more about before cheating.

JohnTHaller 13y ago

A site with millions of uniques doesn't = revenue. Nor does it equal success, interest from investors, etc. Source: running a ~2m unique site right now.

deletes 13y ago
I have used your site quite often and was wondering why did you decide to make the downloaded program be wrapped with your executable? Why not just have a .rar/.zip of the actual program.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  Quite a few reasons: http://portableapps.com/about/what_is_a_portable_app#whypaf http://portableapps.com/about/what_is_a_portable_app#whypaf
  - deletes 13y ago
    There are sound arguments towards it. But Better Upgrading scares me.
    - JohnTHaller 13y ago
      It shouldn't :) Back with Firefox 1.x I think, we were using ZIP files and always supported unzip over the old one. But we ran into a situation where if a file was there from the previous version, it would remain since the new version no longer had that file. Oddly, the new version would try to use the old file and crash. That was back when I was only doing Firefox and Thunderbird, I think. As we added in apps like OpenOffice and GIMP it became much more of an issue. So, we have the PA.c Installer able to take directives like whether or not to preserve everything in App, whether to preserve or remove specific files, whether to preserver or remove specific directories, etc. In addition to overwriting the existing files with the new ones, of course. This made life a lot easier on everyone. And users didn't need to worry about manually deleting specific directories but keeping others when updating. You just point the new version to the same X:\PortableApps\AppNamePortable directory and it intelligently upgrades. It even supports custom code for things that fall outside those simple keep/preserve so we can specifically remove certain settings on an upgrade where a given app breaks its own settings and doesn't support the old ones, etc. For example, I just wrote the package for FreeCommander XE Portable for the publisher to release. The new one doesn't support the old settings and will break if they remain, so I have the installer back them up within Data (just in case the user wants to revert manually later). I then had it read the preferred language from the old settings and write them into the new ones for the user for convenience. I could get more explicit and read/write other settings as well if I had the time.
poopsintub 13y ago
What kind of revenue are we talking about? A few ads on each page can bring in a few grand or more a month. I'm not sure this is rapGenius's end-game though.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  A few ads via AdSense brings in less revenue than you think it does.
  - poopsintub 13y ago
    I think I'm spot on. Maybe even under-estimated. Feel free to prove me wrong. Here's a site with nearly 3 million impressions a month, making $2200. A year or two back when they were "hot", those ad spots were selling out each month: http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/125 http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/125
jonathanjaeger 13y ago
I'm not trying to equate traffic to success or future income. But the original comment was snarky and implied that Rapgenius doesn't make money so there's no financial loss. This loss of traffic will hurt the future monetization of the site and its products.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  In that case, it could hurt potential future revenue. But, again, that's something RapGenius should have thought more about before cheating.