
Gigaom Closes Down - petercooper
http://recode.net/2015/03/09/techs-pioneering-tech-blog-gigaom-closes-down/
======
andrewbinstock
This is part of a trend that's just starting.

I was the editor in chief at Dr. Dobb's, which many of you know closed down in
December. As I explained in my farewell editorial [1], our ad sales were
squeezed by a comparatively recent phenomenon in media, which is a very steep
drop in vendors' willingness to buy Web ads--a lifeline for most web sites.

The reason is that vendors have (finally!) discovered that effectively nobody
ever buys anything by clicking on a web ad.

For certain consumer sites, that's a survivable problem. For example,
Budweiser's ads aren't intended to make a sale, but rather to remind people of
the brand. However, for many tech companies (those that aren't tier 1), they
don't have the funds to do brand-oriented ads. Their ads need to result in
clicks and purchases. And that's just not happening on pure websites. (FB and
Twitter are a wholly different category.)

Personally, I expect that more web sites in the tech sector that have depended
in the past on advertising will either fail or drastically cut back on their
offerings.

[1] [http://www.drdobbs.com/240169421](http://www.drdobbs.com/240169421)

~~~
Scoundreller
> which is a very steep drop in vendors' willingness to buy Web ads

Any relative or absolute numbers you'd like to share?

> The reason is that vendors have (finally!) discovered that effectively
> nobody ever buys anything by clicking on a web ad.

My favourite experience with this was when I was selling a computer case and
researched its specs on newegg.com. Then for a while all I saw were retargeted
ads from newegg trying to sell me that case. Nonono, I didn't have one too few
computer cases, I had one too many. I was the complete opposite of their
target audience, heh.

~~~
whoopdedo
You're example is obvious because Newegg can't tell the difference between
market research because you're about to buy versus research because you're
about to sell.

But it's always amused me (in a not very amusing way) that immediately after I
purchase something I'm inundated with advertisements from the same vendor
trying to sell it to me again. Big data is supposed to be about finding
statistical relationships between events, right? In what world would the
probability of someone buying something be highest when they're holding a
brand new one in their hands?

What it really makes me think is the web advertising folks are pulling a con
on their clients. They're not actually doing the critical analysis they
promise but simply sorting by linear distance in n-dimensional space and
hoping no one notices how useless the measurement is.

~~~
Scoundreller
> Newegg can't tell the difference between market research because you're
> about to buy versus research because you're about to sell

I agree. I think it would be very difficult for them to tell the two states
apart, but I found it amusing.

~~~
whoopdedo
Isn't this a market opportunity, though? Make a website that provides product
information for people who want to sell an item. Give tips on how to advertise
and mail the item. Sell packaging supplies. Why isn't Ebay already doing this?

~~~
Scoundreller
Only if newegg had a "Sell One Like This" button, they'd earn a commission,
though cases aren't worth shipping, so it was a local sale anyway.

------
ChuckMcM
This is sad, and not entirely unexpected. Look for a large number of websites
to go under just like Gigaom.

Oddly enough, the reason these folks are failing is that Google's CPC (the
money they get for an advertising "click") has gone down Year over Year for
the last 13 quarters. What that means is that if your web site depended on
advertising from Google (and most do), and your traffic remained constant, you
have seen a 33% drop in gross revenue over that same period. Google doesn't
call out their click fraud numbers, but they do improve their ability to
detect it over time, which means your "quality" click through rate has been
going down as well, for a double whammy. So unless you can improve volume, you
die. In their Q4 report[1] they make this note:

 _Network paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on non-
Google properties participating in our AdSense for Search, AdSense for
Content, and AdMob businesses, decreased approximately 11% over the fourth
quarter of 2013 and decreased approximately 7% over the third quarter of
2014._

A third less advertising revenue on a 11% fewer clicks over all? Serious pain.

As of the fourth quarter, Google also mentions it is paying nearly a billion
dollars a quarter ($968M) to get search traffic. If you're a GigaOm and your
traffic is already generating less revenue and fewer clicks are getting
through, you can't really add insult to injury by paying people to send you
traffic.

[1]
[http://investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q4_google_earnings....](http://investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q4_google_earnings.html)

~~~
brownbat
So here's a pesky theory that pops into my mind every time I hear a story like
this. I really hope everyone will say it's crazy, though, because the
consequences are pretty dire.

Advertising is good at selling some products, but advertisers are spectacular
at selling advertising. So we've had almost a century-long bubble in bullshit.

The best way you outsell other advertisers, masters of bullshit themselves,
all spinning how effective their ad is, is by selling metrics alongside your
advertising. Metrics are the anti-bullshit. Well, almost...

You want something that looks like "actual sales caused." You want to tell a
guy, "pay me $10 per ad, and I will generate 10 sales, each giving you $2
profit you wouldn't have otherwise made. We'll split the winnings."

You want to claim metrics for sales caused, but you don't really want those
exact numbers, you kind of want something that looks hard that you can spin.
Something loosely correlated with "actual sales caused" where your art of
bullshitting can get slightly better returns than the exact numbers would get.
Play to your strengths, right?

So magazines come along with subscription numbers, and that's great sauce.
Then television comes along with the Nielsen family and, ok, actually Nielsen
starts way back with radio in the 1920s, but same idea. Radio/television
advertising reaches the most people and every company starts to pay a premium.

Advertisers have the whole industry sliced, diced, catalogued and formulated.
Superbowl is the premium end, free weeklies are the bottom of the barrel.
Everybody has a place, but everyone's using the same game to guess at
eyeballs, to guess at actual sales caused.

Suddenly, though, there's this new game on the internet. Not a lot of eyeballs
at first, so it starts in free weekly category. Suddenly though, Google (and
maybe some other companies) can tell you how many ads are actually getting
action rather than just eyeballs.

It's a metric like we've never seen before, it's the killer metric. Sure, you
could get this from surveys, or test markets, but this is like measuring
everyone who sees the ad. It's pretty cool.

But remember, metrics this accurate are dangerous, it shows when advertising
doesn't work too.

And a lot of advertising is spin, a lot of it isn't all that great, because
advertisers are better at selling ads than they are at selling your product.

I hope someone tells me this is all nonsense, though, because if it's true,
then Internet advertising is both absorbing the advertising industry then
destroying it.

That'd be sad. I mean, sure, it's showing us which of our emperors are already
naked. But it might mean the constant death of random content sites like this.

~~~
anigbrowl
_Advertising is good at selling some products, but advertisers are spectacular
at selling advertising. So we 've had almost a century-long bubble in
bullshit._

This should be inscribed in 50-foot tall letters of fire hanging in the air
above Silicon Valley.

~~~
Scoundreller
I agree. I think the demise of newspapers is largely from those buying
advertising finally having hard and credible evidence that they were
overpaying for a few centuries.

Advertising wasn't (and isn't) valueless, but the benefits were overextolled.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> I agree. I think the demise of newspapers is largely from those buying
> advertising finally having hard and credible evidence that they were
> overpaying for a few centuries.

There is something else at work here though. It could be that people were
overpaying for advertising, but it doesn't cost a lot more for a print ad than
it would cost to have the ad printed and mailed to the same number of people
who subscribe to the newspaper. The newspaper makes money because they put
your ad in the newspaper they were already going to print and deliver and then
they get to stick your ad money in their pocket. It's a nice deal for them.

But the internet equivalent of direct mail is spam. Or mailing lists to be
more charitable. In ether case there is no printing and delivery cost. And the
advertiser will now also have their own website which anyone can go to and
view their products at trivial expense to the advertiser.

So sellers of advertising are no longer providing printing and delivery
services or access to finite broadcast airtime. The equivalents of those
things are no longer scarce or expensive.

The only thing they're selling is the ability to put your ad in front of
customers who otherwise might not see it. Which might still be valuable if
they had some kind of exclusivity in providing that, but they don't. Eyeballs
aren't scarce either. Everybody visits many websites every day. The advertiser
can get their ad in front of the customer by putting it on any subset of those
websites, which then have to compete with each other for the advertiser's
money.

So the price of advertising goes down. Somewhat fortunately for the likes of
Google, then the Jevons paradox kicks in and people realize that if
advertising becomes cheaper then it's profitable to buy more of it. So
companies aren't spending less money on advertising.

But there are still many times more people selling it. And if companies spend
twice as much on advertising but there are twenty times as many websites
offering ad space, at the end of the day they each end up with ~10% of what
they used to.

------
gkoberger
GigaOM (or, Gigaom, given the rebranding following Om's departure) was my
first internship in SF. I always really respected Om. While often to the
detriment of Gigaom's bottom line and readership numbers, Om was adamant about
avoiding controversy and clickbait. I was always proud to say I worked at
Gigaom.

Really sad to see it go.

------
treelovinhippie
After receiving $8m in funding 12 months ago:
[https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-
grown-u...](https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-up-its-
time-for-the-next-chapter/)

~~~
djloche
They tried to pivot, raised a bunch of money, hired 70+ people, and likely
burned through it all.

~~~
chx
Any source on the 70+ people?

~~~
jeromegv
Here it is: [https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-
grown-u...](https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-up-its-
time-for-the-next-chapter/)

------
hackuser
There are so many tech publications, and I never knew why I should read Gigaom
instead of others. Perhaps that's one reason they didn't attract enough
revenue. Can anyone answer that question?

Even better: Can anyone advise what publications they would read if they were
interested in innovations in technologies and in their applications, rather
than in products? That is, I'm interested in innovations or developments like
IoT or blockchain or HTTP/2, and innovative ways to utilize them. Generally
I'm not interested in something like the latest MacBook Air; it's significant
in the marketplace, but for my purposes it only marginally improves and
repackages existing tech.

~~~
softdev12
I read a bunch of different tech sites, but it my opinion, the most relevant
stuff is on HN. It basically aggregates all the best stuff from all the tech
publications anyway, so you are probably just as well off in the end. Of
course, if you want to read more academic articles per se, stick to the big
science publications like Nature, etc.

Here's a list in no particular order:

1) recode

2) pando daily

3) techcrunch

4) techmeme (another good aggregator)

5) Mit tech review

6) New York Times Bits

7) WSJ D

8) CNET

9) Mashable

~~~
ForHackernews
Ars Technica?

~~~
wtallis
Ars Technica is basically an aggregator that dumbs things down almost to
Associated Press level. Ars will give you a clue about what's newsworthy, but
if you want technical details you have to track down their sources (which were
probably on HN and Reddit the previous week).

~~~
nitrogen
[http://arstechnica.com/science](http://arstechnica.com/science) is a little
bit better than the rest of the site, but its median article quality is also
going downhill.

~~~
feybay
Yep, I saw a sharp decline in quality and increase in clickbait right around
when GamerGate picked up steam. Maybe it was happening before but it's very
noticeable now. Too bad.

------
mintplant
Om Malik just published "A Statement about Gigaom" to his personal blog.

[http://om.co/2015/03/09/a-statement-about-
gigaom/](http://om.co/2015/03/09/a-statement-about-gigaom/)

------
shortformblog
I'm pretty surprised by this, particularly in part because their events
business seemed robust. My company sent me to an event of theirs in NYC two
years ago, and it had a very high caliber of presenters/panelists (David Karp,
Andrew Sullivan, Tim Ferriss, a few others). The tickets also weren't cheap.

Sure, the company didn't go down the clickbait road, but it also had come up
with revenue models that made up for that. Beyond events, they also had a
research group—something that, to a degree, arguably made their real
competition Gartner and Forrester.

I wonder what role Om stepping away from the day-to-day played in this. What
he said a year ago makes this turn of events seem shocking:
[https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-
grown-u...](https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-up-its-
time-for-the-next-chapter/)

~~~
frabcus
I went to, probably the same, (big data) Gigaom event.

I really enjoyed it - good people and talks.

There weren't, however, many customers there. It was all other people selling
stuff. So I didn't go again.

The recent wave of data related businesses are now generally at the phase
where they need to meet potential customers from corporates at events.

Not sure how/if this affects business model though! The profitability of
events is opaque to me.

------
petercooper
My personal take is that Gigaom will be sorely missed. They've had some top
notch writers and they've put out a lot of great stuff lately. But.. they've
also had several funding rounds over the past 8 years and when you take $20m+
over 8 years and you can't hit a crazy level of growth, the VC grim reaper
rears its ugly head.

------
jallmann
Damn. I read Gigaom regularly, really appreciated the straight up news. It
will be missed.

Gigaom had an excellent writing staff, hope they get back on their feet
quickly so we can keep reading their pieces.

------
petercooper
[https://gigaom.com/2015/03/09/about-
gigaom/](https://gigaom.com/2015/03/09/about-gigaom/)

~~~
austenallred
> Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time. As
> a result, the company is working with its creditors that have rights to all
> of the company’s assets as their collateral.

Sounds like a fairly hostile takeover that no one was expecting. I wouldn't be
surprised to see something very similar be spun out of it, perhaps not bearing
the name of the departed founder.

~~~
iand
More likely the company had debts it couldn't service

~~~
teej
I think the phrasing "in full" is important here. It implies that a debt was
"called in" and thus something more political is at play. I don't think this
means they couldn't pay their bills. I wonder if venture debt is involved.

------
walterbell
Thanks to Mathew Ingram for his valiant articles and twitter commentary on
journalism ethics. Maybe he will consider following the Ben Thompson /
stratechery business model.

~~~
Scoundreller
The Globe and Mail could use his abilities again too, I'm sure.

------
sremani
I time to time read gigaom, the articles were mostly somber devoid of
sensationalism, I will sorely miss gigaom.

------
ilamont
I thought they were on much more solid footing, considering the funding last
year and the very strong talent in their ranks. For instance, Laura Hazard
Owen is one of the best reporters covering the ebook industry.

This could be a sign of things to come for other online pubs once the funding
runs out. Too much competition, too little in the way of sustainable revenue
sources, and not enough AOL acquisition cash to go around.

------
duck
[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/10/tech-site-gigaom-
is...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/10/tech-site-gigaom-is-shutting-
down/)

------
crystaln
Could this be a canary for the end of this investment cycle?

------
ilamont
From the GigaOm media kit (1)

 _Display advertising:_

Charging $35-$45 CPMs, depending on the channel. Rates dependent on campaign
duration, budget and targeting. 300x250, 300x600 and 970x250 ad units
available.

Flipboard campaign: $55 CPM, over 1.5 million readers/month

"1-week channel takeover" \- Gigaom homepage channel (1M+ impressions per
week) $22K per week - includes two sponsored posts.

Mobile channel $15k, cloud $8k.

 _Sponsored posts:_

$3,000 250-word sponsored post $5,000 800-word sponsored post

 _Event sponsorships:_

$5K–$85K

 _Research:_

Annual cost appears to be $10k

1\. [https://gigaomabout2.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/gigaom-
medi...](https://gigaomabout2.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/gigaom-media-
kit-v3.pdf)

------
buyx
With "dead tree" publications dying, and online ad supported publishing not
being lucrative, how will the demand for content be satisfied?

Here in South Africa, our newspapers and magazines are in steep decline (but
still profitable), and it seems everyone under 35 gets their news from ad-
supported websites that are probably losing money.

Perhaps Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos were ahead of the curve. People may yet
turn back to more traditional news sources, even if they are delivered via
more modern mediums, such as tablets, if web advertising supported sites die.

------
juanmnl
First guess, they didn't take the native advertising wave, losing thousands
per article to _cough cough_ Techcrunch-likes _cough cough_

------
shubhamjain
> Every founder starts on a path — hopeful and optimistic, full of desire to
> build something that helps change the world for the better, reshape an
> industry and hopefully become independent, both metaphorically and
> financially. Business, much like life, is not a movie and not everyone gets
> to have a story book ending.

Quite daunting. Everyone hears the success stories and dreams of doing the
same, or maybe even better but most fail. The reason I believe people push
themselves to entrepreneurship is they ask themselves - "Why can't we? We are
as smart as them and we have all the knowledge before us". Failure sucks and
not everyone is capable of handling it in a positive way - "So what, I'll do
better next time. I won't quit.". Perhaps, what scares me the most from my own
'business adventure'.

------
el_duderino
I'm not too surprised. I feel as if they've fallen off the radar in the past
couple of years.

~~~
ausjke
Same here, I used to read it but not much so in the last couple of years,
probably ever since I started to read on HN.

------
stephenc_c_
Further confirmation: [http://recode.net/2015/03/09/techs-pioneering-tech-
blog-giga...](http://recode.net/2015/03/09/techs-pioneering-tech-blog-gigaom-
closes-down/)

~~~
dang
Thanks. Since that has more information, we changed the url to it from
[https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/575090046572736512](https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/575090046572736512).
If someone suggests a better url we can change it again.

------
damonpace
You can build a lean website on CPC advertising...but it's hard to build a
real business based on that. Advertising should be viewed as supplemental
revenue, rather than the main business model. I assume that's why GigaOm began
to shift over to the subscription model.

It could also be one of the reasons Google just came out with the
"Contributors" beta last week. They may have realized the CPC ad model does
not pay enough and content creators need better business models to make it
worth their time.

------
manigandham
I've worked in the adtech industry for years and now run a new company focused
on content/native ads.

Online advertising is a vast and complicated ecosystem with hundreds of
companies and lots of politics but all this is to say that sites like Gigaom
failing are almost never just down to simple factors as "ads pay less". Some
points on online advertising itself though, in random order:

\- Overall pageviews online are up, a lot. More people are online now and with
more devices (desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, even tvs).

\- Ad blockers (depending on the site) can be anywhere from 10-50% of users.

\- Desktop is now the minority, usually about 35% of traffic.

\- Ad blockers are mostly on desktop, so while they are making an impact, it's
somewhat minimized by the shift to mobile.

\- Ad blockers are also mostly run by corporations that make money and most
allow companies to buy exceptions (Google does this, along with all those
recommended links guys like Outbrain, Taboola and dozens of others. To be
perfectly honest, we're trying to get on this list as well.)

\- There's a difference between branding/awareness campaigns (like for GE) vs
performance campaigns (like for Newegg). Awareness is about getting you to
recognize, remember, engage with and otherwise think about the brand.
Especially important for B2B/enterprise and other companies that don't have
things for consumers to buy, or even cheap enough for mainstream. Performance
is all about getting a click, or these days even a signup, purchase or some
other "action".

\- The ability of digital advertising to track things to such a granular level
has made everything more efficient, driving down prices to a few cents per
click in some cases. The ads you see on a webpage have gone through an entire
auction process with dozens of bidders in about 100 milliseconds before you
ever see anything.

\- Fraud is a huge issue along with viewability (whether an ad actually shows
up inside the browser window vs. never being scrolled into view, inactive tab,
etc). Early studies have pegged fraud/viewability problems at almost 50%
although this is rapidly going down with new companies and standards. Nobody
wants fraud and it's a constant arms race.

\- There are lots of ad types, everything from display (banners) to rich media
(interstitials, popups, expanding/moving/interactive stuff), to native ads, to
video, to email, and more. They all work on different parts of the "sales
funnel" and there are different strategies in place. One of the biggest is
called retargeting. It's when you visit a site then see ads for that same
company across the web, even days or weeks later. It's all about making you
remember and come back to learn more, buy something, etc. And it works really
well.

\- Display ads do work. While everyone seems to think that _they_ won't ever
click on a banner, Google sees hundreds of millions of clicks a day. Those
recommended widgets get tens of millions of clicks a day. Ads work, whether
you want to believe it or not, otherwise this industry wouldn't exist. Those
billboards on the side of a freeway are far more expensive than small
campaigns online but they're still bought because you can measure the effect
before and after and see a measurable increase in whatever you're interested
in.

\- People complain that they get crappy ads, unfortunately they also complain
about being tracked. Trust me, ad networks want to get you the best ads as
possible. Showing you what you're interested helps everyone. But we can't know
who you are, what you've seen or anything else if we can't track you in some
way. And for those who are worried about privacy, for all the legit ad
platforms, you're nothing more than a randomized id number. Not personal
information. If you're worried about that, then stay off Facebook where most
people willingly give all their info.

\- Most advertising is being shifted to be bought on audiences rather than
sites. Native ads are shifting this back somewhat but most modern platforms
work by selling audience segments primarily, so as an advertiser you would run
a campaign targeting 18-25 males interested in sports for example. Doesn't
matter what site, as long as the audience matches and this is facilitated by
the efficiency of running the aforementioned auctions (called RTB for Real-
Time Bidding).

\- While privacy is important, there's an arms race with tracking because
advertisers want this audience access. The recent issue with cookies has only
made tech companies even better at tracking and there are entire sub-
industries dedicated to tracking people across all of their devices. We can do
this today. And it will only get better. Again the intentions are to get you
better ads but if you're worried about privacy, just be aware that it's not
that easy to "hide".

\---

If you've read this far, I hope that helped give some insight into online ads.
I'm sorry I can't give exact sources as this is data that comes our ad network
and it's not published anywhere, but we do have global coverage and this is
very accurate in the US/European region. Disclaimer again: I run
[https://instinctive.io](https://instinctive.io) but feel free to
email/message if you want more info.

~~~
frik
> People complain that they get crappy ads, unfortunately they also complain
> about being tracked.

Is it so hard to understand? Give us ads related to the website content and
pay CPM instead CPC to the website owner. On IT sites it would be helpful to
see some ads about hardware devices and books, on digital news papers show us
cars, holiday destinations, etc.

Instead we are followed by ads of products that we just bought like a plague.
With personalized ads, you just make it worse, as more visitor get annoyed and
root their mobile device to install adblock.

~~~
icebraining
Agreed. I searched for a pair of boots (for research - I buy those offline,
since I like to try them), and since I happened to click on an Amazon link,
I'm now getting inundated with ads for boots, most of which don't even ship to
me!

Meanwhile, Hack-a-day is the only site I remember buying something through
their ads, since they actually show relevant stuff. It's not an amazing
discovery that I'd be more interested in buying a Raspberry Pi after seeing an
article about someone using it in an interesting way, than a pair of boots!

~~~
manigandham
Yes, this is called retargeting. By clicking on that link, you've expressed
interest (however slight) in boots. Amazon is pretty big and they work with
all the major retargeting networks so now you've been instantly put into
several "segments" denoting this interest along with attempted lookups on
every network for your user profile (including social networks, major
exchanges, some large site/publisher networks, etc).

Now eventually those retargeting segments will expire (usually somewhere
between 10-30 days) but for the vast majority of people, the constant reminder
of boots will actually lead to a sale. Remember we wouldn't do it if it didn't
actually work.

There is an issue if you do buy something as ecommerce data is valuable and
under strict privacy controls so we don't always get to know you already
bought something. And it's much harder if you walk into a store and buy it
offline. Add in all the other privacy complaints and its like trying to do the
impossible, users expect us to know exactly what they're interested in and
what they've bought but don't want us to track anything... We're trying but
it's not magic, something in that equation has to change. Either better/more
accurate ads or more privacy. It's up to the users to choose.

~~~
icebraining
How can users choose? I don't remember being given the choice.

As a user, what I know is that not only am I being tracked, but the result is
fucking boots everywhere. Frankly, I see absolutely no gain from my
perspective from the whole thing.

~~~
manigandham
Adblock/proxies/private browsing are one way (not recommended really) to
choose. Another is to opt out of major networks, just search for "ad network
opt out". Here's a starting point:
[http://www.aboutads.info/choices/](http://www.aboutads.info/choices/)

Btw, we track that you've opted-out using the same methods we track everything
else. So if you try to get around with adblock, etc then we don't know you've
opted-out and we don't know your history either so we show you even
worse/generic ads. It's a catch 22 but that's reality.

You've expressed interest in boots, now you'll keep seeing ads for boots until
you either buy boots (and that purchase data somehow finds it way back to the
retargeting networks) or until the history segment expires. That's what
advertising is for. Do you complain about billboards for movies you've already
seen? At least online we can be a little bit more dynamic about it. But again,
it's very tough with users complaining about privacy and the dozens of
companies that data has to go through. You want us to know whether we can ship
to you, but we dont have your address. We dont know who you are, where you
live, or any of that. There are ways to try and figure this out, but it's
usually not worth the cost and again there are privacy issues. Do you want us
to know your address? If no, then how do you suggest we solve this?

It's not perfect, there's a massive amount of technology involved but it's
still a challenge to tie everything together so I hope you understand that
this isnt something we take lightly but its unfortunately the best we can do
right now.

Now if you're saying you've never been impacted by ads online, that's pretty
much scientifically wrong. Even the smallest impression does add up and
eventually influence something down the line. Nobody wants to admit it, and
you might not even notice, but I promise it's working.

~~~
frik
> then we don't know you've opted-out and we don't know your history either so
> we show you even worse/generic ads

But that's what people want - generic ads. Instead of spying on user the ad
networks should spy on content (crawl the web pages were the ad is on).

It's very easy, the first time an ad is served from a specific page it's new
for your network and you show a generic ad related to the topic of the
website. Then you crawl the new page. For every new visit of that page you now
have some information and can show a related ad to that page!

Hint: That's how Google Ads work. There is no need to spy on visitors.

~~~
manigandham
Actually they don't. People want ads for what they're interested in. Time and
again, that's been the number 1 complaint, that they see ads that aren't fit
for them.

Contextual relevancy is hard (and what you talked about isn't scalable) but
that's not the only issue. A mainstream news site can get a massive amount of
people of all kinds, an ad about cars to one might be irrelevant to another.
It's just not that simple to show "generic" ads, especially when advertisers
increasingly want better and more accurate targeting.

It's better for both sides to have this tracking, companies get better
performance and users see what they're actually interested in. Again the
legitimate companies don't know anything personal about you... at most we know
what you've seen, what you've clicked and can guesstimate that maybe you like
a certain thing or another. And 15-30 days later we delete the profile because
it's old. Not exactly a giant NSA database of your life here.

------
mercurial
One idea for a business would be being a subscription service. Partner with
some big names, which already offer/consider offering subscriptions. Users
select a monthly payment, and tick boxes for the websites they want to
support. Much less hassle than subscribing to each and every website which
wants/needs your money. Maybe with an RSS feed aggregating content from your
selection.

------
gitdude
The long-term solution is to form a consortium of online media and charge a
monthly subscription fee of $9.99/month or so. (Tech media comes together:
techcrunch, venturebeat, recode, etc.) Having individual paywalls will not
incentivize readers to pay an annual subscription fee. And then the revenue
can be split between various media outlets.

------
cookrn
I think one of Om's earliest blogs (may have even been an acquisition) was
about being a digital nomad. I was just getting in to tech/startup news at the
time and for whatever reason, that one stuck out to me. (Can anyone find a
link?) I've always enjoyed reading their content over the years and will be
sad to see them go.

------
gesman
I had pretty good click-to-buy success but only at a narrow subject, dedicate
vertical sites. In other words selling backup software to the readers of data
backup tech site.

GigaOM is a wide subject site and only brand awareness ads would make sense.
For click-my-ad-to-buy-my-stuff hopeful advertiser - it's a waste of money.

------
muyuu
70 people full time? that sounds like an awful lot. If these are SanFran
salaries then their running costs are already immense without even considering
other running costs.

Cannot a site like this be ran by 10-15 people? Maybe I'm missing where the
labour is going.

~~~
mkr-hn
They probably needed a few people for events.

------
bonn1
With 'more than 6.5 million monthly' they should do between 50K - 200K/m
depending on the bizdev and sales skills.

50K is not enough to keep operations running, 100K would work with editors
from low-wage countries.

But still a bit odd that they ran out of money.

------
andrewchoi
While some of the podcasts seemed to be a bit fluffy, I always appreciated the
Structure Show as a survey of where infrastructure software was. Any
suggestions of similarly aimed content to subscribe to?

------
damm
Unfortunately their paid-wall model of content really didn't work. When Gigom
went into the multi-site model the fragmentation (and the quality) went down
hill

They tried to resurrect it but the damage was done

------
kevinastone
“How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

― Ernest Hemingway

------
antr
Any insight why? I'm guessing ad revenue is down, not enough traffic, etc. But
more light on why Gigaom shutting down would be of value.

~~~
petercooper
I have no inside knowledge (other than being in publishing generally) but
they're in a hot space with relatively good advertising opportunities right
now, they also run events which should, in theory, be quite profitable.

My totally unfounded theory/opinion is they were overfunded and the investors
wanted to get out after not seeing the growth levels they wanted (which in
publishing is not a big surprise, you almost never see SaaS or consumer app
levels of growth there).

------
pknerd
Many people discussed that it happened due to Adblocker. If that's true then
how sites like Mashable and Techcrunch still surviving?

~~~
strictnein
Mashable isn't a tech site any more, really, so their target market doesn't
use Adblock as much. It's a bad HuffPo / BuzzFeed clone. Started when they
took funding two years ago and has gone way downhill ever since.

------
feybay
I wasn't a heavy reader of the site, but it always struck me as very fact-
oriented and professional. That's too bad to hear.

------
Angostura
Another triumph for Adblock

~~~
dredmorbius
Adblock is merely a symptom of a larger problem. Advertising itself is hostile
to quality content and good practices.

------
ulfw
Another one bites the dust. Pity.

------
halayli
maybe it's time for paid subscription model?

~~~
dredmorbius
I'm leaning to something closer to a patron / member model, though with most
content generally available.

We're seeing a reprise of earlier forms of media. Truth is: there _is_ a
social (and business) need for quality and reasonably unbiased information.
There's also value to those who want to control such a feed (the dark side of
media). Advertising has sustained the concept in some form or another for
several hundred years, with a few big shake-ups. But there've also be (and
continue to be) highly ideological organizations (see Fox News / NewsCorp /
WSJ, well know, but also _The Economist_ , and on the left, papers such as
_The Guardian_ , _Mother Jones_ , or _The Christian Science Monitor_ ).

The problem, in an online era, of subscriptions only is that it closes your
distribution down _too_ much. Providing early access might be a way around
that, though information tends to get out very, very quickly. Of numerous bad
options, it strikes me as one of the less-bad (see LWN.net which uses it).

Another is partnering with someone who has a clear interest in your
demographic -- DICE buying Slashdot, for example, though that doesn't seem to
be going all too well from either a content or business stand point so far as
I can tell. Hacker News follows the same model, more successfully (on both
grounds) via Ycombinator.

Advertising, though, seems to me a dead end. And it's going to be all kinds of
hurt for the current iteration of Silicon Valley if it plays out as I suspect
it will.

------
ripb
Is it just me or does there seem to be significantly more of a recode.net
presence on HN at the moment?

I hadn't heard of the site until recently and now I've seen a few fairly low-
brow articles from it on the front page here in the last 24 hours.

~~~
dang
I looked at the data and am pretty sure it's just random fluctuation.

If there's a higher-brow article on this story we'll happily change the url.

------
pc2g4d
Really??

------
kra34
How does a tech company run out of money? Isn't this where some VC steps in
with a billion dollar valuation for the series G round?

~~~
pkaye
I don't think they are a tech company.

------
pjbrunet
That's one problem naming a business after a person. Still the domain is worth
something. No sense "parking" a domain like that.

