19 ms·

Does Sponsoring Daring Fireball Work?

256 points by saddington 12y ago

sgustard 12y ago
TLDR: "Yes, DaringFireball worked for me."
- saddington 12y ago
  HAHA. I should add that...
bglazer 12y ago
> I went on to grab a net-revenue (profit) of just north of $32,000 for the month of December, 2014 That's pretty darn impressive. Congratulations! Excellent copy writing on your desk.pm landing page as well.
- saddington 12y ago
  I did a much bigger FY2014 retrospective today: http://blog.desk.pm/2014-yir/ http://blog.desk.pm/2014-yir/ Hopefully that paints a better picture.
- atourgates 12y ago
  I like the feel of the landing page, but I have a hard time figuring out what desk is. I don't know how it compares to other markup editors or distraction-free writing environments (I currently use and love Ulysses, and have tried several other similar apps), I don't know the details of its blogging platform integrations, or how it manages media. Without that info, I'd be happy to try a demo, but not risk $30 to figure out if it's an app I can use. It's obviously working well for conversions, and other people feel like they're getting enough info to risk $30, but I'd need quite a bit more information than the app's website currently gives to know if it's a purchase worth making.
  - saddington 12y ago
    This is great feedback and something I can do better. I had actually done a retrospective on the change of the landing page but you're right... it still needs improvement. At some point I'll probably hire a "real" designer to help me... since i'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination.
    - atourgates 12y ago
      I wouldn't even say it's a design issue. More of an information issue. If there's no demo available, I need (as a potential purchaser) quite a bit of information to know if it's worth risking my $$'s. I'd say some combination of screenshots/gifs or screencasts going through the program would be great. Or maybe more of a focus on the workflow, or maybe just expanding your features section to be illustrated with screenshots form the app showing how features are used. Honestly, some of the best descriptions of the program are in App store reviews where it's compared to other distraction-free/markup writing environments. Also, congratulations and good luck!
      - girvo 12y ago
        I'd argue that design and information are (or, should be) inextricably linked. Your advice is sound however!
wodenokoto 12y ago
Congratulations to the author and a succesful campaign. My favourite part of his post reminded me of a quote my marketing professor once told me "The most important thing in a marketing campaign is a great product" Had desk been a poor product, I doubt the Halo-effect would have happened.
- jonstokes 12y ago
  I dunno dude, I bought it, tried to use it, and quickly discovered that it's a pretty poor product. I won't go into it here, because it's off-topic and I left a two-star review in the App Store anyway. But my impression of the app is that its success is mainly due to marketing savvy and the current infatuation with "minimalist" writing apps that use Markdown. So I would say yes, DF advertising clearly worked here, and props to the author for also getting extra mileage out of it with this post + HN hit. Not only is his promotion on DF and followup blog post a model of How It's Done, but his entire blog is really well-done from a marketing and SEO standpoint. Lots of relevant internal links, good photography, great design, and posts that are devoid of keyword spam and are just the right length and reading level. Anyway, great design, very savvy marketing and SEO, wrapped around a buggy app that ticks a lot of the currently trendy boxes and contains some shocking deficiencies. And if I sound irritated for being taken, it's because it cost me $30, which is what a mature, quality, premium app like Pixelmator costs.
  - syllogism 12y ago
    And now this post makes Gruber excellent cash, so maybe Gruber thanks Desk again. Definitely excellent strategy. (Not that the post is insincere of course.)
  - saddington 12y ago
    You can always get a refund for the app... and I'm really sorry it didn't work for you. It's honestly really tough being an indie developer... I have to do EVERYTHING related to not just building the DAMN THING but all of the business, marketing, Q/A, financials/accounting, blogging... the list is eternally-long. v1.0 was lucky... in a lot of ways. v1.1 addressed a shit-ton of issues... v1.2, out in a week (hopefully) will add a major user-requested feature... it... just... takes... time... when... doing... it... alone... thanks Jon for the comments. I'm doing my best.
cmyr 12y ago
Really interesting to see these numbers. I've been reading DF for years and years, and its is the only advertising model I've encountered that doesn't grate. His advertising is considerate, audience appropriate, and vetted. I feel good supporting his advertisers, because I feel good supporting him, and because they're just consistently things I'm happy to hear about. I would really love to see more independent journalists follow his model, although obviously his market is more suited to this model than some others are. Still, I think there's a lot to learn, here.
- daigoba66 12y ago
  I think another reason the DF advertising model is so successful, for both the publisher and the advertiser, is that the advertisements don't distract from the publisher's content. And in this case it plays really well with the primary means of publication for DF, RSS. Consider "traditional media": radio, television, and print. Yeah, we all love to hate commercials, etc. But compare it to the Internet, which is a complete cesspool. I use my hometown newspaper as a example (http://www.ajc.com/ http://www.ajc.com/). Many websites are completely unreadable, and/or require a supercomputer to fully render and execute the CSS/JS. And I believe it's fairly common knowledge now that these types of advertisements are hugely ineffective for the advertiser.
  - saddington 12y ago
    This is one of the reasons I've been a fan and reader of his blog... I feel like his model really "works" and I don't get offended at all. John has the right to decline any offer to advertise... (obviously) and keeps the bar high.
- jonas21 12y ago
  I'd rather not. It introduces a pretty big conflict of interest (for example, Gruber would probably think twice before writing something negative about a former sponsor when he's on the record endorsing them) and blurs the line between advertising and editorial content. As mentioned in the article: > the cost today ranges between $8,000 – $10,000 dollars per placement and you get to write your own post, essentially Maybe this isn't a big deal for DF, but I can imagine this would lead to a total lack of trust for other independent journalists.
vondur 12y ago
If you have a Mac App or iOS app, Daring Fireball would be a great place to advertise. I'd like to here from some of the web apps that are promoted, do they have a same uptick in subscribers?
- saddington 12y ago
  Right... I wouldn't have dropped any coin on DF if I was showcasing another app or web-based service... I just wouldn't have been as confident on the possible return.
- zerohm 12y ago
  Azure Mobile has been a sponsor. I guess at that point it becomes difficult to even extrapolate the impact of the sponsorship...
  - petercooper 12y ago
    Yeah. The acceptable cost for acquiring a customer for something like Azure, AWS, Heroku, New Relic, et al. dwarfs the cost of most advertising that reaches the ideal audience (so, yeah, ROS banner ads on Yahoo might not cut it). I'm in the email newsletter space and had the cloud division of a very major three letter company send me an IO to buy >$100k of advertising without us ever having communicated before - I couldn't fill the order as we don't have that sort of capacity, but it blew my mind and certainly got me thinking about where to take the business.
wlesieutre 12y ago
A previous amusing note from Gruber[1] on his sponsorship system and a sales email from Taboola, purveyor of the obnoxious click-bait grids that you're starting to see all over: > Speaking of revenue and pageviews, true story: I got an email yesterday from a sales rep at Taboola, pitching me on running their ads on DF. It included this line: “I see your site is not monetized at present, and I think there is room to do so in a non-intrusive manner that can still make you money.” > I don’t know what I love most about that. I think it’s that from the eyes of someone who sees Taboola ads as “non-intrusive”, what I’m doing at Daring Fireball doesn’t look like “monetization” at all. Needless to say, I find Taboola ads to be highly intrusive. (You may not be familiar with the “Taboola” name, but you’ve seen their ads. They look like this[2].) I really like what he does, and it makes the rest of the web remind me of the bloatware loaded Windows installs on every PC that isn't sold directly by MS. Short term money at the cost of a slower and more annoying experience that users hate in the long term. [1] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/10/09/more-df-rss-feed-sponsorship-openings http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/10/09/more-df-rss-feed... [2] http://daringfireball.net/misc/2014/10/not-intrusive-at-all.jpg http://daringfireball.net/misc/2014/10/not-intrusive-at-all....
- hullo 12y ago
  Taboola and that ilk are seriously the devil. I can think of no other development in the last couple of years(or: that became popular over that span) that has done more to degrade the qualitative experience of web browsing.
- kachnuv_ocasek 12y ago
  How you dragged "bloatware loaded Windows installs" into this I don't understand.
  - code_duck 12y ago
    I believe the comparison is that a website loaded with useless, distracting junk that functions is a similar situation to Windows laptops that come with distracting, useless software that pretends to be something desirable. In each case, the user experience is significantly degraded in exchange for the vendor receiving payment. This comparison make sense to me.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
I suspect this is a lot more informative about the future of journalism. The 'old school' magazine/newspaper group was all about getting 'readership' and then 'blasting their eyeballs'. And there was a tremendous amount of loss to their madness. 6 months after a magazine was published it was entirely unlikely that someone would pick up that issue, see an advertising message, and act on it. But on the web the long tail is the long tail. Search engines can pull an article out of the mists of time and that advertising is still intact. So you're exposure is very different. Combining that with the curating effects of a trusted source, and you get a solid advertising value for the right brands. I expect it will be "successes" like DF which inspire additional people to create this sort of content and that seems to be a good thing for everyone (advertisers and readers).
- MCRed 12y ago
  Sponsored posts might come up in long tail searches, but most of the pages on the DF site, at least, are monetized with a display ad on the left. This will show the current ad at the time of the page view, not the ad at the time the article was written.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    > This will show the current ad at the time of the page view, not the ad at the time the article was written. Which is awesome. When I thumb through old BYTE magazines they have ads for companies that don't even exist any more. :-)
- saddington 12y ago
  In addition, I think the ultimate litmus test is whether or not they create "value" for readers... or is it just marketing fluff? Even with my own blog post I tried to create value for people reading it... and making sure they could not just read my experience but learn something from it for their own usage.
jusben1369 12y ago
This was very helpful and thanks for publishing. Right near the end you just touched upon what i think is an important topic (perhaps its own post) If you could chart it your first exposure to John's (or anyones) audience is probably 80% of the bang for the buck. Sponsoring again 4 to 6 months later really only exposes you to net new readers since your first exposure or those that missed your first exposure and/or weren't a good target then but are now. If John is charging the same amount for each sponsorship the pricing model is broken for both of you. It sounds like you're underpaying for the 1st one and overpaying for additional and vice a versa for John. In general it's just something worth noting for anyone who advertises via such distinct channels (Imagine if HN let you do the same thing how your traffic and sales would be impacted by the 1st time you were on the homepage for 8 hours vs if you did it again 3 months later)
- saddington 12y ago
  This is a great point and something that I thought was going to "pay off" but didn't. The results were significantly different but still beneficial... what I should have done is waited a few more months to dive in. Will I do this again? Probably... but not until a major release, like a 2.0...
- comex 12y ago
  On the other hand, repetitive ads are less interesting for the reader (at least, I feel that way when reading DF), so they have a higher 'cost' to Gruber. Though this is more relevant to multiple consecutive sponsorships than a few of them spread over months.
Multiplayer 12y ago
Great post. Thank you for sharing all of this - really great information and I'm thrilled for you that you took a risk and it really paid off. Cheers to that! That said, your site has so few images on it of the actual product, that for a price of $30, I feel like you are holding back for a reason. I buy anything and everything, but this doesn't feel right. When someone displays their admittedly very nice logo far more than the product I get a flashing warning sign. My 2 cents. When I can either get a demo or see more of the product I will probably buy. Again, congratulations on your successful launch!
- saddington 12y ago
  I appreciate that a lot! To answer your question, i had actually was trying to explicitly move people to the app store to "view" the images there... but i could do a better job of providing those screens... thanks for that!
livestyle 12y ago
What's often under appraciated about sponsored content is that it does seem to be catching on as valuable channel to acquire customers not just branding exposure. Here is a case study from Dash as well. https://syndicateads.net/casestudy/dash.pdf https://syndicateads.net/casestudy/dash.pdf (Full disclosure I'm on the team at SyndicateAds)
atYevP 12y ago
Yev with Backblaze here -> I'm a bit late to this party, but I can tell you that advertising with John has worked for Backblaze from a monetary perspective. It's a mutually beneficial sponsorship. John's used us in the past, Marco uses us on occasion, and due to that, the ads are read with a certain knowledge of the product and ring more "true" than a lot of things that I hear on various podcasts and websites. The majority of the ads we've done with John are sponsorships of "The Talk Show", but those have been quite successful.
jtheory 12y ago
This section confused me -- can anyone explain? > I was so unprepared for this deluge that it stunted what was already going to be a banner month as I simply did not have enough review copies and tokens to go around. I ended up having to wait-list over 30 prominent blogs which hurt my momentum severely. He's selling software, right? It sounds here like he hit problems that simply shouldn't exist for a digital product. Is this an AppStore-specific problem? If so, why in the world should it work that way?
- saddington 12y ago
  I'm given 100 "tokens" or "review copies" to give away for free per every single release via the MAS. Essentially, I ran out and couldn't give free copies for review for big name blogs and news sites and thus lost a lot of opportunities for free press.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    Could you have simply wired them $29 to buy the app? Or would that be seen as dishonest.
    - saddington 12y ago
      it could be interpreted as dishonest in a number of ways... since the blog post and/or review would no longer be an unbiased review... but rather there was now a financial transaction and thus introducing motive for a more positive review. it now is a "sponsored" blog post instead of an impartial review.
      - xuki 12y ago
        Couldn't you just build them a beta build? It seems like a no-brainer.
        saddington 12y ago
        i suppose, but there would be parts that would probably "break" and thus creating a false or "incomplete" experience. you're right though, there are some other possibilities, i'm sure.
programminggeek 12y ago
I think his model works well for his blog. Not all blogs work well with this model and it doesn't necessarily scale well to a large news org. For what he does and how he does it, this is a cool model for both him, his audience, and apparently the advertisers.
- dazne 12y ago
  Yes. Couldn't agree more. There're other bloggers in the tech/culture space like Jason Kottke of kottke.org, and Jim Dalrymple of The Loop, who make far less from advertising/sponsorships than Daring Fireball.
saddington 12y ago
I've done a quick RETROSPECTIVE on how this "viral event" impacted sales: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8959967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8959967 :) Thanks everyone! That was fun.

256 points by saddington 12y ago

sgustard 12y ago

TLDR: "Yes, DaringFireball worked for me."

saddington 12y ago
HAHA. I should add that...

bglazer 12y ago

> I went on to grab a net-revenue (profit) of just north of $32,000 for the month of December, 2014 That's pretty darn impressive. Congratulations! Excellent copy writing on your desk.pm landing page as well.

saddington 12y ago
I did a much bigger FY2014 retrospective today: http://blog.desk.pm/2014-yir/ http://blog.desk.pm/2014-yir/ Hopefully that paints a better picture.
atourgates 12y ago
I like the feel of the landing page, but I have a hard time figuring out what desk is. I don't know how it compares to other markup editors or distraction-free writing environments (I currently use and love Ulysses, and have tried several other similar apps), I don't know the details of its blogging platform integrations, or how it manages media. Without that info, I'd be happy to try a demo, but not risk $30 to figure out if it's an app I can use. It's obviously working well for conversions, and other people feel like they're getting enough info to risk $30, but I'd need quite a bit more information than the app's website currently gives to know if it's a purchase worth making.
- saddington 12y ago
  This is great feedback and something I can do better. I had actually done a retrospective on the change of the landing page but you're right... it still needs improvement. At some point I'll probably hire a "real" designer to help me... since i'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination.
  - atourgates 12y ago
    I wouldn't even say it's a design issue. More of an information issue. If there's no demo available, I need (as a potential purchaser) quite a bit of information to know if it's worth risking my $$'s. I'd say some combination of screenshots/gifs or screencasts going through the program would be great. Or maybe more of a focus on the workflow, or maybe just expanding your features section to be illustrated with screenshots form the app showing how features are used. Honestly, some of the best descriptions of the program are in App store reviews where it's compared to other distraction-free/markup writing environments. Also, congratulations and good luck!
    - girvo 12y ago
      I'd argue that design and information are (or, should be) inextricably linked. Your advice is sound however!

wodenokoto 12y ago

Congratulations to the author and a succesful campaign. My favourite part of his post reminded me of a quote my marketing professor once told me "The most important thing in a marketing campaign is a great product" Had desk been a poor product, I doubt the Halo-effect would have happened.

jonstokes 12y ago
I dunno dude, I bought it, tried to use it, and quickly discovered that it's a pretty poor product. I won't go into it here, because it's off-topic and I left a two-star review in the App Store anyway. But my impression of the app is that its success is mainly due to marketing savvy and the current infatuation with "minimalist" writing apps that use Markdown. So I would say yes, DF advertising clearly worked here, and props to the author for also getting extra mileage out of it with this post + HN hit. Not only is his promotion on DF and followup blog post a model of How It's Done, but his entire blog is really well-done from a marketing and SEO standpoint. Lots of relevant internal links, good photography, great design, and posts that are devoid of keyword spam and are just the right length and reading level. Anyway, great design, very savvy marketing and SEO, wrapped around a buggy app that ticks a lot of the currently trendy boxes and contains some shocking deficiencies. And if I sound irritated for being taken, it's because it cost me $30, which is what a mature, quality, premium app like Pixelmator costs.
- syllogism 12y ago
  And now this post makes Gruber excellent cash, so maybe Gruber thanks Desk again. Definitely excellent strategy. (Not that the post is insincere of course.)
- saddington 12y ago
  You can always get a refund for the app... and I'm really sorry it didn't work for you. It's honestly really tough being an indie developer... I have to do EVERYTHING related to not just building the DAMN THING but all of the business, marketing, Q/A, financials/accounting, blogging... the list is eternally-long. v1.0 was lucky... in a lot of ways. v1.1 addressed a shit-ton of issues... v1.2, out in a week (hopefully) will add a major user-requested feature... it... just... takes... time... when... doing... it... alone... thanks Jon for the comments. I'm doing my best.

cmyr 12y ago

Really interesting to see these numbers. I've been reading DF for years and years, and its is the only advertising model I've encountered that doesn't grate. His advertising is considerate, audience appropriate, and vetted. I feel good supporting his advertisers, because I feel good supporting him, and because they're just consistently things I'm happy to hear about. I would really love to see more independent journalists follow his model, although obviously his market is more suited to this model than some others are. Still, I think there's a lot to learn, here.

daigoba66 12y ago
I think another reason the DF advertising model is so successful, for both the publisher and the advertiser, is that the advertisements don't distract from the publisher's content. And in this case it plays really well with the primary means of publication for DF, RSS. Consider "traditional media": radio, television, and print. Yeah, we all love to hate commercials, etc. But compare it to the Internet, which is a complete cesspool. I use my hometown newspaper as a example (http://www.ajc.com/ http://www.ajc.com/). Many websites are completely unreadable, and/or require a supercomputer to fully render and execute the CSS/JS. And I believe it's fairly common knowledge now that these types of advertisements are hugely ineffective for the advertiser.
- saddington 12y ago
  This is one of the reasons I've been a fan and reader of his blog... I feel like his model really "works" and I don't get offended at all. John has the right to decline any offer to advertise... (obviously) and keeps the bar high.
jonas21 12y ago
I'd rather not. It introduces a pretty big conflict of interest (for example, Gruber would probably think twice before writing something negative about a former sponsor when he's on the record endorsing them) and blurs the line between advertising and editorial content. As mentioned in the article: > the cost today ranges between $8,000 – $10,000 dollars per placement and you get to write your own post, essentially Maybe this isn't a big deal for DF, but I can imagine this would lead to a total lack of trust for other independent journalists.

vondur 12y ago

If you have a Mac App or iOS app, Daring Fireball would be a great place to advertise. I'd like to here from some of the web apps that are promoted, do they have a same uptick in subscribers?

saddington 12y ago
Right... I wouldn't have dropped any coin on DF if I was showcasing another app or web-based service... I just wouldn't have been as confident on the possible return.
zerohm 12y ago
Azure Mobile has been a sponsor. I guess at that point it becomes difficult to even extrapolate the impact of the sponsorship...
- petercooper 12y ago
  Yeah. The acceptable cost for acquiring a customer for something like Azure, AWS, Heroku, New Relic, et al. dwarfs the cost of most advertising that reaches the ideal audience (so, yeah, ROS banner ads on Yahoo might not cut it). I'm in the email newsletter space and had the cloud division of a very major three letter company send me an IO to buy >$100k of advertising without us ever having communicated before - I couldn't fill the order as we don't have that sort of capacity, but it blew my mind and certainly got me thinking about where to take the business.

wlesieutre 12y ago

A previous amusing note from Gruber[1] on his sponsorship system and a sales email from Taboola, purveyor of the obnoxious click-bait grids that you're starting to see all over: > Speaking of revenue and pageviews, true story: I got an email yesterday from a sales rep at Taboola, pitching me on running their ads on DF. It included this line: “I see your site is not monetized at present, and I think there is room to do so in a non-intrusive manner that can still make you money.” > I don’t know what I love most about that. I think it’s that from the eyes of someone who sees Taboola ads as “non-intrusive”, what I’m doing at Daring Fireball doesn’t look like “monetization” at all. Needless to say, I find Taboola ads to be highly intrusive. (You may not be familiar with the “Taboola” name, but you’ve seen their ads. They look like this[2].) I really like what he does, and it makes the rest of the web remind me of the bloatware loaded Windows installs on every PC that isn't sold directly by MS. Short term money at the cost of a slower and more annoying experience that users hate in the long term. [1] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/10/09/more-df-rss-feed-sponsorship-openings http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/10/09/more-df-rss-feed... [2] http://daringfireball.net/misc/2014/10/not-intrusive-at-all.jpg http://daringfireball.net/misc/2014/10/not-intrusive-at-all....

hullo 12y ago
Taboola and that ilk are seriously the devil. I can think of no other development in the last couple of years(or: that became popular over that span) that has done more to degrade the qualitative experience of web browsing.
kachnuv_ocasek 12y ago
How you dragged "bloatware loaded Windows installs" into this I don't understand.
- code_duck 12y ago
  I believe the comparison is that a website loaded with useless, distracting junk that functions is a similar situation to Windows laptops that come with distracting, useless software that pretends to be something desirable. In each case, the user experience is significantly degraded in exchange for the vendor receiving payment. This comparison make sense to me.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

I suspect this is a lot more informative about the future of journalism. The 'old school' magazine/newspaper group was all about getting 'readership' and then 'blasting their eyeballs'. And there was a tremendous amount of loss to their madness. 6 months after a magazine was published it was entirely unlikely that someone would pick up that issue, see an advertising message, and act on it. But on the web the long tail is the long tail. Search engines can pull an article out of the mists of time and that advertising is still intact. So you're exposure is very different. Combining that with the curating effects of a trusted source, and you get a solid advertising value for the right brands. I expect it will be "successes" like DF which inspire additional people to create this sort of content and that seems to be a good thing for everyone (advertisers and readers).

MCRed 12y ago
Sponsored posts might come up in long tail searches, but most of the pages on the DF site, at least, are monetized with a display ad on the left. This will show the current ad at the time of the page view, not the ad at the time the article was written.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  > This will show the current ad at the time of the page view, not the ad at the time the article was written. Which is awesome. When I thumb through old BYTE magazines they have ads for companies that don't even exist any more. :-)
saddington 12y ago
In addition, I think the ultimate litmus test is whether or not they create "value" for readers... or is it just marketing fluff? Even with my own blog post I tried to create value for people reading it... and making sure they could not just read my experience but learn something from it for their own usage.

jusben1369 12y ago

This was very helpful and thanks for publishing. Right near the end you just touched upon what i think is an important topic (perhaps its own post) If you could chart it your first exposure to John's (or anyones) audience is probably 80% of the bang for the buck. Sponsoring again 4 to 6 months later really only exposes you to net new readers since your first exposure or those that missed your first exposure and/or weren't a good target then but are now. If John is charging the same amount for each sponsorship the pricing model is broken for both of you. It sounds like you're underpaying for the 1st one and overpaying for additional and vice a versa for John. In general it's just something worth noting for anyone who advertises via such distinct channels (Imagine if HN let you do the same thing how your traffic and sales would be impacted by the 1st time you were on the homepage for 8 hours vs if you did it again 3 months later)

saddington 12y ago
This is a great point and something that I thought was going to "pay off" but didn't. The results were significantly different but still beneficial... what I should have done is waited a few more months to dive in. Will I do this again? Probably... but not until a major release, like a 2.0...
comex 12y ago
On the other hand, repetitive ads are less interesting for the reader (at least, I feel that way when reading DF), so they have a higher 'cost' to Gruber. Though this is more relevant to multiple consecutive sponsorships than a few of them spread over months.

Multiplayer 12y ago

Great post. Thank you for sharing all of this - really great information and I'm thrilled for you that you took a risk and it really paid off. Cheers to that! That said, your site has so few images on it of the actual product, that for a price of $30, I feel like you are holding back for a reason. I buy anything and everything, but this doesn't feel right. When someone displays their admittedly very nice logo far more than the product I get a flashing warning sign. My 2 cents. When I can either get a demo or see more of the product I will probably buy. Again, congratulations on your successful launch!

saddington 12y ago
I appreciate that a lot! To answer your question, i had actually was trying to explicitly move people to the app store to "view" the images there... but i could do a better job of providing those screens... thanks for that!

livestyle 12y ago

What's often under appraciated about sponsored content is that it does seem to be catching on as valuable channel to acquire customers not just branding exposure. Here is a case study from Dash as well. https://syndicateads.net/casestudy/dash.pdf https://syndicateads.net/casestudy/dash.pdf (Full disclosure I'm on the team at SyndicateAds)

atYevP 12y ago

Yev with Backblaze here -> I'm a bit late to this party, but I can tell you that advertising with John has worked for Backblaze from a monetary perspective. It's a mutually beneficial sponsorship. John's used us in the past, Marco uses us on occasion, and due to that, the ads are read with a certain knowledge of the product and ring more "true" than a lot of things that I hear on various podcasts and websites. The majority of the ads we've done with John are sponsorships of "The Talk Show", but those have been quite successful.

jtheory 12y ago

This section confused me -- can anyone explain? > I was so unprepared for this deluge that it stunted what was already going to be a banner month as I simply did not have enough review copies and tokens to go around. I ended up having to wait-list over 30 prominent blogs which hurt my momentum severely. He's selling software, right? It sounds here like he hit problems that simply shouldn't exist for a digital product. Is this an AppStore-specific problem? If so, why in the world should it work that way?

saddington 12y ago
I'm given 100 "tokens" or "review copies" to give away for free per every single release via the MAS. Essentially, I ran out and couldn't give free copies for review for big name blogs and news sites and thus lost a lot of opportunities for free press.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  Could you have simply wired them $29 to buy the app? Or would that be seen as dishonest.
  - saddington 12y ago
    it could be interpreted as dishonest in a number of ways... since the blog post and/or review would no longer be an unbiased review... but rather there was now a financial transaction and thus introducing motive for a more positive review. it now is a "sponsored" blog post instead of an impartial review.
    - xuki 12y ago
      Couldn't you just build them a beta build? It seems like a no-brainer.
      - saddington 12y ago
        i suppose, but there would be parts that would probably "break" and thus creating a false or "incomplete" experience. you're right though, there are some other possibilities, i'm sure.

programminggeek 12y ago

I think his model works well for his blog. Not all blogs work well with this model and it doesn't necessarily scale well to a large news org. For what he does and how he does it, this is a cool model for both him, his audience, and apparently the advertisers.

dazne 12y ago
Yes. Couldn't agree more. There're other bloggers in the tech/culture space like Jason Kottke of kottke.org, and Jim Dalrymple of The Loop, who make far less from advertising/sponsorships than Daring Fireball.

saddington 12y ago

I've done a quick RETROSPECTIVE on how this "viral event" impacted sales: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8959967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8959967 :) Thanks everyone! That was fun.