
The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition From Startups - thinxer
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-copycats-how-facebook-squashes-competition-from-startups-1502293444
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pelario
Same article (without paywall) was submitted and discussed two days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14970877](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14970877)

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dave_sullivan
In case anyone from WSJ or other paywalled content producers reads this: I
notice myself sharing far less when I hit a paywall even if I used one of my
"free credits" because hitting a paywall is shitty to the people clicking the
shared link. If it's important information, I will actually find a different
source and share that.

So you shouldn't worry about lost subscription revenue, you should worry about
lost relevancy. Lost relevancy will result in your CPMs on ads being a
Mashable rate, not a WSJ rate.

Publishers that do this will literally nickel and dime themselves out of
relevancy. But whatever, I don't read WSJ or the economist anymore because
paywalls and they're not the only (or even best) analysis online. Sad to see
the mighty fall though.

Same deal with "We noticed you running Adblock :-(..." Most tech savvy people
have Adblock. Many of them have many more followers who _do not_ have Adblock,
and those people get their links from social streams. So again, you're not
turning away adblockers, you're turning away their friends and leaving the
public consciousness.

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RivieraKid
Monitoring and copying potential threats at early stage is an obvious and
effective strategy. This is the unpleasant thing about many startups,
technology is a commodity, the big players can simply copy it (or buy it if
they think it's cheaper).

Honestly, I think it's unfair. You can put effort into making an amazing
though-out product with a lot of novel ideas behind it, but the big players
can simply copy you and use their monopoly power (network effects, integration
into existing product, marketing) to make a superior product.

The problem is that companies like Facebook or Google are monopolies which use
their monopoly profits to further expand their imperiums. In a competitive
market, profit margins around 30 % would be impossible, because a competitors
would push the prices close to 0 % margin (btw, the "real" profit margin is
much more than 30 %, because these companies put lot of resources into
research, buying overpriced startups, and in general are not very efficient
with money). This just sucks in my opinion...

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readhn
"Mr. Zuckerberg is sensitive to anything that might disrupt Facebook, even the
teeniest startup, say current and former executives and employees. "

that says it all. Facebook is vulnerable and has a limited life span. The idea
is out of the bag. It has a high chance of going away just like myspace and
others before. Z. knows it and it seems will protect it at any cost.

When you suppress competition instead of reinventing yourself and
retaining/attracting users that way - you are basically done.

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jondubois
>> When you suppress competition instead of reinventing yourself and
retaining/attracting users that way - you are basically done.

Tell that to Oracle.

If a company can get its hooks into something, I think they can keep it going
for a very long time.

Also, ever since Microsoft achieved dominance over the PC market, they've been
coasting along nicely - Leveraging their legacy (Windows server -> Azure, also
many patents) - MS never had to compete on the same level as all the others
who had to start from scratch... Some old leaves of their business peel off
and new ones grow in their place.

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type-2
read here if paywalled [http://archive.is/LUAA8](http://archive.is/LUAA8)

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mrlatinos
Paywall

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juststeve
surprisingly, i also got the paywall

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beaconstudios
can't read it due to the paywall.

