jimbobob

Learn Python the Hard Way and Automate the Boring Stuff with Python were both very helpful for me to get started.

She's not even trying to hide her selfishness. What a lack of empathy.

This is an interesting approach in the short term and could help bootstrap Starsky's business before the conversion to fully autonomous driving.

I still think driving a truck as a profession will be a thing of the past within 20 years or so. There's just too much money riding on this problem, and logistics companies are fairly ruthless about efficiency.

How much traffic do you drive per month? There are exchanges / SSPs that would do an integration with you but that is going to require scale.

Pretty much any SSP is going to ask you for a minimum of pageurl or app-level data in order to prevent fraud on their end.

I'm sure you already know, but you are going to take a big hit on eCPMs as a lot of advertiser money is connected to behavioral segments (and thus cookie / device id data).

Is your site general focused or do you have a specific niche? Some specific niches (eg targeting programmers) will be able to pull in significantly more through direct sponsorships and/or ad networks specializing in your vertical.

I think you are looking at the arithmetic average, which isn't very useful for the following reason:

Year 1: 100% gain Year 2: 50% loss

The arithmetic average here is 50%, which the geometric average is 0%. The CAGR listed is going the correct metric to use but that is not 9% after inflation using the date range you provided. I get 7.42% for 1/1/95 - 12/31/14 after inflation and dividends are factored in. Not bad by any stretch of the imagination, though!

Spotify uses Chromium Embedded Framework to serve a lot of UI elements via HTML/CSS/JavaScript[0]. Anecdotally, there seem to be a number of desktop apps moving in this direction.

[0] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-technology-behind-the-Spoti...

This seems like a smart way to go. You could start by looking for business development people at these publishers on LinkedIn.

Responded to your email. Hopefully you find that helpful.

Best of luck getting started!

Hi foxpc- that is a hard question to answer without knowing more specifics. Here are some of the questions that I can use to point you in the right direction.

- What kind of site(s) do you have traffic for?

- Are they in a specific niche, or is the traffic more general?

- Which ad units do you support?

- What is your estimated volume (impressions/month)?

- What is your geo breakdown?

Feel free to reach out to me directly if you don't want to share this info publicly. I would love to help!

https://www.earthclassmail.com looks like it is still alive, no?

It depends on the size of your audience. Typically if an audience is very niche (eg user demographics are similar), then selling ads to direct advertisers is more of a possibility.

What do your DAU/MAU numbers look like? How much engagement is there with your app, and how much time do users spend per session?

Feel free to reach out to me if you need more specific advice.

I just updated my profile. Feel free to reach out!

Your post would have fit me pretty closely ~ 7 years ago. Personally, I got into tech by getting exposure to online advertising with a side project. This led to an internship and then a full-time job in advertising operations.

My advice: apply for entry-level roles in tech companies on a business/operations focused team. Hustle and learn something new every day. For me, that has meant launching side projects, learning Python, advanced Excel skills, reporting automation (VBA and Python), becoming an expert at the industry-standard ad servers, and learning how all the pieces of the online advertising ecosystem fit together.

Depending on your interests and current skillset, you may want to adjust your own path accordingly.

Feel free to reach out to me directly as I would love to help.

I started FitSpot (https://Fitspot.io) and released this week. Our first feature allows personal trainers to create a web presence easily and for free. We have some big ideas for the future but wanted to start small and build from there.

The site is built using Django and Angular.

The 2% compounds over time. There is a far greater opportunity cost to losing 2% of earnings in year 1, as that amount reinvested at 7% over a 20 or 30-year period is quite significant.

Where are you located?

Your background sounds very similar to mine and I now work in Advertising Operations, which was a job I did not know existed when I was in school. Working in Marketing or Data Science in a startup might also be an option for you. Have you looked into those fields?

Feel free to email me if you would like to discuss further. eric (dot) rygh (at) gmail.

M = 1000. MM = 1,000,000.

It could be due to the Hulu videos loading in your Facebook News feed. This seems likely as the Hulu videos are interspersed with Facebook page loads.

I recently went on a backpacking trip with the thought of working from the beach in Thailand in mind. I spent a couple months there, both in the South near Krabi and later in the North (Chiang Mai, Pai).

The good: You can live a pretty good life for quite cheaply. Depending on where you are, I found the Internet connections to be decent, the food to be tasty and the people kind. If you stay there long-term it is important to pick up some of the language as it will bring you closer to the locals. You may also find that you are able to get better prices as a result.

You can do border runs quite easily (Cambodia, Myanmar, or Malaysia). There is an entire industry that has developed around this purpose. When I was there, the visa terms were different depending on if you flew into the country or if you went over a land crossing. I would check out the latest situation on WikiTravel or the Lonely Planet forums.

I personally met another American who over-stayed his visa by over a month. Believe me, you do NOT want to be that guy. He had a horror story about the situation, and ended up having to pay a hefty fine.

Feel free to reach out to me if you want more details.

Hulu pulls in $30 - $40 CPMs. That is comparable with TV, no?

Just curious... where are you getting the $9B number from?

Hulu does target users already based on a lot of demographic information they have. This can be based on info found in your user profile (gender, age, zip code, etc). Additionally Hulu builds profiles based on past viewing history and is able to fit a viewer to a demographic with remarkable accuracy.

Ads on Hulu are and have been more effective for advertisers than its television counterpart (http://socialtimes.com/hulu-ads-are-twice-as-effective-as-te...). The issue for Hulu is that because there are less of them in every stream there is less to go around. This especially bothers the content providers.

This is great. Just registered and the process took about 15 minutes.

Just curious... what do you see as the use cases for this service?

Not to rain on your parade, but 550 users on a game site is still quite small. I'm far more familiar with sites in the USA but I assume the general rules will apply. With sites I am familiar with, Google Adwords is usually used until reaching 100,000 users or so. If a site caters to a niche audience then it may be possible to find advertisers/ a sponsorship with far fewer users. Gaming attracts a general audience, however, so I think you would need to grow your user base before reaching out for sponsors.

Feel free to reach out to me with any specific questions.

How long do you plan on being in the Bay Area for? If it is a short time period maybe your time would be better spent meeting directly with business-oriented folks.

Thanks for posting this... I just joined. It will be good to get some local hackers together that also happen to love the outdoors!

I like this idea. People probably have never heard of the artists on your site, but I'm sure there is some incredible talent there already. If you could create a service for listeners, I think you could attract a lot of music fans. And hipsters.

People expect to hear ads in radio streams, as they have been conditioned by Pandora, Spotify, etc.

I would be interested to see what makes the Asian airlines different... it seems as though flight attendants there are usually younger and quite attractive.

I think they do recognize it by this point. I think the pullback of Starz! was a key sign of this... the content providers were not comfortable handing Netflix so much power.

You bring up a good point about Netflix/Hulu going direct to buy their content. I think we are seeing early signs of this, but it has been taking time to gain traction. Some of the early Hulu exclusives such as "If I Can Dream" were epic failures. But there have been successes as well, such as "The LXD".