Does Sponsoring Daring Fireball Work?

http://blog.desk.pm/df/

by saddington • 11 years ago

256 108 11 years ago

blog.desk.pm

sgustard• 11 years ago

TLDR: "Yes, DaringFireball worked for me."

saddington29• 11 years ago

HAHA. I should add that...

bglazer• 11 years 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.

atourgates2• 11 years 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.

saddington29• 11 years 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.

saddington29• 11 years ago

I did a much bigger FY2014 retrospective today: http://blog.desk.pm/2014-yir/

Hopefully that paints a better picture.

wodenokoto• 11 years 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.

jonstokes2• 11 years 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.

saddington29• 11 years 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.

syllogism• 11 years 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.)

puranjay2• 11 years ago

As a writer, I like the idea of a minimalist writing app. I really do. It feels natural. Just you and a blank screen so you can tap away and kill whatever demons are haunting you.

Except there is a problem: serious writers need more than 'minimalism'.

All the authors and novelists and long-form fiction writers I know have reams upon reams of notes, plot information, and character data cluttering up their MS Word (argh) and Scrivener screens. I even know some to use spreadsheets to keep track of complicated family trees and plots in long fantasy novels.

This is why I use Scrivener. It's bulky and far from minimalist, but it has the tools I need.

Minimalist apps are for people who want to play 'pretend' at writing. Or write a blog post a day and call that 'substantial writing'. But if you really, really need to put together a story, you will need to do your research. And minimalist apps are of no use to you then.

saddington29• 11 years ago

I appreciate that big-time... it's been a great trip and experience. And yes, I want Desk to be a "great" product but it's going to take time for it to really mature in that direction... I've had a great start and I'm glad that software is iterative... always room for improvement.

The community has helped a ton in helping to qualify new features (that make sense) and reward me through my execution.

cmyr3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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/). 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.

saddington29• 11 years 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.

jonas212• 11 years 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.

dilap2• 11 years ago

It's a valid concern, but honestly I think the distorting effects are probably much less than e.g., having to chase clickbait topics for CPM advertising or having Carlos Slim be your largest single investor, etc.

Moto7451• 11 years ago

PBS and NPR have to deal with this issue every year and their solution is pretty simple. They report it as they would want to, mention that X Co sponsored them in the past/present, and don't take their advertising dollars for that piece.

mcphage• 11 years 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)

Generally the companies that advertise on his site are companies that his readers would find useful, but generally aren't the kind of companies that he discusses in his blog posts. Although [I believe] he has had Microsoft and Google products advertise on his site periodically, and his coverage of those companies has still been on his own terms.

jusben13692• 11 years ago

I think you have to ask yourself the fundamental question. How does John make a living? Perhaps he could move to a paid subscription model. That seems fraught with risk but it's true it's a possibility. But even then you pander to your paid audience vs the paid advertiser (if all your paid subscribers are Apple fans and you noticed a 10% subscription cancellation when you belittle the Apple Watch what happens to your behavior?)

The next alternative is he relies on advertising. When there is a conflict of interest in advertising it's mostly around transparency (the site does legitimate and paid product and service reviews side by side and so you don't know what is paid content and what isn't) This approach though seems very transparent. The worse case scenario is a product or service he advertises becomes crappy (based on his backlog he wouldn't need to accept an upfront crappy product) and he doesn't allow them to sponsor again. The biggest crime is he holds off calling out said crappy product because at one time he took money from them. I'm not sure he'd do that and that would only be a real issue if JG was the sole or primary source of reviews for the service vs all the other channels that review products and give you a wide range of opinions to draw on if you need them.

TL;DR: All commercial models involving information sharing are flawed so you have to deal in shades of gray and this seems good to me.

cmyr3• 11 years ago

John has been sponsored by Google(1) and by Microsoft(2) both of which he has written some decidedly negative things about. I think he takes conflict of interest seriously, and has a strong division between his editorial and his advertising content.

1: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/08/10/ios-at-google

2: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/04/20/windows-azure-mo...

simonh• 11 years ago

On the other hand the advertising posts are very clearly indicated to be such, there's no attempt to actualy disguise them as editorial. Furthermore by explicitly posting endorsements with the other content he's drectly putting his own credibility on the line. If the advertised service is sub-par in any way it directly reflects on him.

jcurbo• 11 years ago

Jason Snell wrote an interesting article about his experience with an advertiser and sponsorships. He's running his own blog now (Six Colors) with a similar model to Gruber.

http://sixcolors.com/post/2014/12/no-other-gatekeeper-but-me...

username223• 11 years ago

For better and worse, it's the way things are going in the near future. People like Gruber and Alex Blumberg (Gimlet Media podcasts) have built up credibility, and are open about what is paid versus editorial, so the "native ads" are merely annoying rather than trust-destroying. Unfortunately, lots of people with a few page-views and more greed than sense will also try to get in on the action, and the web will be an even worse place.

collyw2• 11 years ago

Grubers site is basically one big Apple ad from what I have read on it.

saddington29• 11 years ago

Many have continued to try and some have really found it to work. I advertised on a number of other blogs that have the exact same model: http://blog.desk.pm/2014-yir/

I was very happy with those results too!

camillomiller• 11 years ago

John's model is unique, though, not scalable and heavily gruber-dependent. It's something we can analyze as a particular phenomena, not a way to reinterpret advertising on the Web.

saddington29• 11 years ago

I think Gruber is definitely unique and if he "disappeared" it would be hard to replace him.

In other words, what makes DF "work" is Gruber... and if he wasn't there... it wouldn't really work. It makes you wonder about the sustainability of "people-centric" companies.

I have thought often about this in terms of my own projects... how many of them would be sustainable without my very explicit presence?

arrrg• 11 years ago

Look at podcasts. They are nearly all, in essence, using exactly Gruber’s model. It seems to me as though there is practically nothing else there …

(I’m not sure exactly where this podcast model is coming from. I think I first heard it – in an incarnation that is nearly totally similar to what DF does – on Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network. That genesis would even sort of make sense, as Dan Benjamin are friends and used to be long-time co-hosts of a podcast. I obviously can’t recall exact dates, so I’m not even sure who came first there, actually. Now other podcasts and podcast networks are doing it, too.)

What that means is this: The actual hosts of the podcast read the ad in their voice, though they still say that it’s an ad read (that’s analogous to putting the ad directly on the website in the website layout together with the other content and in the RSS feed, though still marking it as sponsored content). Nearly all will also add in little personal touches. Those can be widely diverse, from a simple, slightly personalised thank you (as Gruber writes), to stories about how the hosts use the product or why they like it, all the way to specially produced editorial content for the sponsor (as Startup and Reply All from Gimlet Media are doing by, for example, interviewing their sponsors and talking to them about their business).

That’s practically identical to what Gruber does, just in another medium (and maybe the podcasts were even first and Gruber just cribbed from them and adopted it to his medium).

I honestly think this is at least somewhat workable on a wider scale. Not a billion dollar scale, sure, but a small operation making a small profit with a couple well paid staff? Sure, that’s very imaginable and partly already sort of happening.

vondur• 11 years 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?

saddington29• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Azure Mobile has been a sponsor. I guess at that point it becomes difficult to even extrapolate the impact of the sponsorship...

petercooper• 11 years 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• 11 years 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...

[2] http://daringfireball.net/misc/2014/10/not-intrusive-at-all....

hullo• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

How you dragged "bloatware loaded Windows installs" into this I don't understand.

code_duck• 11 years 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.

bkmartin• 11 years ago

I try to boycott as many sites that use Taboola as possible... this can leave very few sites left to visit without hating myself... Them and Outbrain have to be the absolute worst that I see on "reputable" sites. You begin to truly understand a site's revenue integrity when you see these in their "Sponsored Content" sections.

po• 11 years ago

This is why I personally don't like using an ad-blocker.

If I have ads blocked, then I'm blind to the problems that the average internet user faces. I end up viewing, reading, tweeting, talking about sites that are flat out reader-abusive in their advertising. As a web developer, my sense of the state of the internet is warped.

With ads turned on, I end up avoiding those sites and seeking quieter places. I have a better understanding of what normal people see.

pnathan• 11 years ago

Ah, I'd been noticing more and more Taboola ads on my mobile phone, but I hadn't chased down the source. I suppose I should find some ad-blocks for the phone.

ChuckMcM2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

ChuckMcM2• 11 years 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. :-)

saddington29• 11 years 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.

jusben13692• 11 years 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)

saddington29• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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!

saddington29• 11 years 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• 11 years 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

(Full disclosure I'm on the team at SyndicateAds)

atYevP2• 11 years 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.

jtheory2• 11 years 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?

saddington29• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Could you have simply wired them $29 to buy the app? Or would that be seen as dishonest.

jtheory2• 11 years ago

Congratulations, first -- that's a good thing to run out of!

But it's a bit infuriating that the problem seems to be completely fake; that is, of course Apple has no limitations to how many review copies and/or tokens they can generate; they could trivially give you a button to request more.

In cases like yours, that would have been the more profitable choice for them... but they're operating at immense scale, which generally means removing choice as much as possible -- and there must be some loophole they're closing (though I admit I don't see it yet). They can't pay someone to check every possibly dodgy request for more copies/tokens, and so they can't check any.

/rant -- this is certainly a tangent to the article! I just found it startling. I've sold my own software and online subscriptions for more than a decade (though nothing ever likely to become big) and naturally if I feel like giving away copies, they're mine to give.

programminggeek• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

saddington29• 11 years ago

I've done a quick RETROSPECTIVE on how this "viral event" impacted sales: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8959967

Thanks everyone! That was fun.

Does Sponsoring Daring Fireball Work?

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