When I was just an ignorant kid, I was fond of building stupid little website where I could put adsense ads (they used to approve almost everyone) and have a small pocket-money income. In the best month, I made around $300. I could never figure out how to get traffic and people like Marcus and Amit Agarwal used to be my heroes.
Although, people like us on HN, won't feel excited about making a little websites and earning through Adsense income; a good business / startup seems more worthwhile but sometimes, I do get tempted to enter that territory again seeing people making thousands of dollars a day with just re-hashed content and a little effort but I feel it won't be something to be proud of in the future.
The allure of that seems enticing, but I've found in practice that the effort to income ratio is not what it seems: it takes a lot of effort to even hit that $300/mo mark, and it's not "set it and forget it" - in most cases you have to keep working to keep viewership interested or keep ever changing Seo rankings healthy.
I ll give you one. You can republish email content from the fashion industry and affiliatize every outgoing link via Viglink or Skimlinks. Take your time to select expensive brands, do some basic SEOing, encourage social share, force visitors to give you their email addresss when they get on a deals page before clicking through. Twice a year you will have a brand send you a take down. It will take you some time to get some traffic but you will hit $300 per month eventually.
If you were willing to spend some time in curating the homepage then you could do even better.
I have done this, and honestly I got only two emails from major brands. In fact I got half a dozen emails from smaller brands wanting to be featured on it. I got also a couple of brand monitoring company who would use the product. If you are interested just email me and I will share more information with you.
Edit: When I say I have done this, I mean for two years, almost three. I saw from my Clicky stream the companies that would visit the site, and they included several of the brands whose content I was republishing.
I had, still have, the same moral issue. I want to make money, I want to earn a 'passive' income from websites. I just don't want to do it by being a son-of-a-gun and making content scrapping crud. I saw the evil, in my opinion, and tried to do it 'right' but couldn't get traction.
You don't have to make content scrapping crud to make a buck. The alternative is to take time and build out a focused site with quality content you've come up with. There are tons of one-man-show blogs and sites out there that provide a quality experience and still make money off of ads/offers.
I started my website 8 years ago and made it my full-time job about 3 years ago doing exactly what you've said, though without having any plan of action from the beginning.
I've talked to a lot of bloggers in two specific niches and they almost all say the same thing. They started their site for fun / something to do / be helpful and soon enough started getting traffic and started making money. None have a tech background or anything like they - they just got a Wordpress site and theme and started writing.
I enjoyed building the same websites as a kid. However, gone are the days of easy adsense money and the unregulated acai berry crazed industry of affiliate marketing. Their exists a lot more competition in this space now.
The rules and tools of the game slightly changed but there are still plenty of opportunities up for grab.
http://www.wizzed.com is a website started by a kid (I think he's 16 now). Check out the Alexa and SimilarWeb rankings. I know, vanity metrics, still. Not that far behind ViralNova, that just sold for $100MM.
Now, if you would be proud running this kind of website is another topic.
> Speak for yourself - I run several content sites covering a variety of topics that I enjoy writing about and I love every second of it.
I wasn't pointing at people who put an effort in making original content but there are lots of websites which just build upon memes, gifs, simple tips, and tutorials and do quite well with it.
I agree that there is that 'mesothelioma' part of the web but your commentary sounds like some unfounded elitism. "Simple tips and tutorials" - what exactly is bad about that? If people are visiting the website, reading and receiving value from the content, what's the issue?
Further - what's wrong with gifs and memes? There is a market for it people will go ahead and supply it. It's definitely not easy to do.
> In the best month, I made around $300. I could never figure out how to get traffic
If you never got traffic - why did Google adsense pay you $300 in a month? I get ~600 visits per day and I barely get $0.10/day - usually ~$1 if someone clicks on an ad.
Things have changed. There is a lot more content out there competing for page views. I made $100 a year from adsense from a site with a few programming tutorials on it, although I forget the traffic numbers. It suddenly just dropped to nothing without any change in the number of visitors.
Ad network traffic is really a last resort. In my experience, they tend to focus a lot on remarketing and not enough on testing related products/services. For a lot of sites with lower traffic volumes, you might find better CPM's by hand-picking affiliates. At large volumes, doing ad sales.
10cents per day sounds extraordinarily low for 600 visits per day. But it all depends on content and how rich your traffic is. US Traffic will pay better than developing nation traffic.
So make something small and simple, but original, and market it a bit. I have a few small tools that get a few thousand visitors a month, which brings in enough revenue to buy me a few dinners.
I think the startup crowd tries to make every weekend project into something big. But it doesn't have to be - small, but original work, when targeted to niche audiences, is easy to monetize ethically by giving very targeted ads in which they have a legitimate interest.
I won't get rich with my work of this nature - but my tools pay for their own infrastructure, with small/tiny (3 digit!) profits, so they are in the black. It is more than many startups can claim.
My friend does this with a shitty viral type site. He does well and works a load of hours. You would think it is just reposting crap, but it is 99% putting out fires.
Unfortunately gone are the days when you could slap some ads on a blog and make a couple hundred bucks. I recall Stackoverflow mentioning they dropped Adsense because the revenues are small, lot of online magazine type of websites are going out of business because ad revenue has shrunk. By large, a big market correction in this landscape.
This man is my hero. When I become a millionaire I want to be just like him. Spent a weekend hacking together a mediocre site that grosses millions a month. Working 15 minutes a day. Yeah, brilliant.
I've worked with Markus, it would be very disingenuous to think he works 15 minutes a day. He really loves running the site.
It's just that the feels like work part of his job only lasts 15 minutes, signing cheques, etc. He just doesn't do the "I work 8 hours 5 days a week thing", if the site is fucked up he is there til it's fixed. If everything is on track, he might be there an hour or two.
I've been meaning to put a blog post together for a Show HN advocating for buying lottery tickets and working a sane 35-40 hour week job versus slaving away at a startup for 80-100 hours a week with even worse odds of becoming wealthy.
I'd love to see this post as I'm securely in the "lottery is a tax on the desperate" camp.
I'd love a reason to stop disparaging my father's mega-millions dreams and the dozens of people that frequent my local 7-11 for countless scratch-offs everyday.
I have a gut feeling that a study of the odds/payout ratio of being apart of any given startup acquisition is better than what you'd get from any given lottery/scratch off... though I'm not taking into account the associated costs. How many tickets/scratch-offs is an 80 hour week for a full stack engineer worth?
> I have a gut feeling that a study of the odds/payout ratio of being apart of any given startup acquisition is better than what you'd get from any given lottery/scratch off... though I'm not taking into account the associated costs. How many tickets/scratch-offs is an 80 hour week for a full stack engineer worth?
This is the study I'm interested in performing.
> So, here's me hoping you weren't being facetious.
Not at all! I'd rather buy X lottery tickets on the most advantageous schedule, enjoy working 32-35 hours a week, and spend the rest of my time with family, on hobbies, or traveling.
I'm not going to fault someone for working 80-100 hours a week if that's what they enjoy doing, but if they're doing it to get rich, let's see if the data supports those odds.
This is a really interesting comparison. I've done the startup thing (unsuccessfully) and know a fair number of other people who have as well (including one who came within one business decision of being a millionaire but who couldn't convince his partners to accept the buyout offer they were being given.)
When you consider reward/(risk*effort) rather than just risk/reward it wouldn't surprise me if lotteries came out on top.
But... the thing you don't get from a lottery is a statement like this: my life-partner and I met through PoF almost ten years ago, and I will be forever grateful to Marcus for building the site that made that possible.
We had both been on other sites previously, and we had actually seen each other's profiles on other sites in the year or two before we met while we were both in a post-divorce dating phase, but PoF had the right mix of features that it happened to be where we actually connected with each other.
As I recall, I saved her profile for later consideration at one point, and the site (unbeknownst to me) notified users when that happened, so she looked at my profile and contacted me with something along the lines of, "Don't hesitate, I won't be here long!" I didn't, and she wasn't.
Now, I agree that accolades from strangers doesn't necessarily balance off time not spent with your family, but it is another factor in the overall equation, knowing you've made the world a better place for a lot of people.
I'd love to see this study but I'm not sure it's possible, especially because of the fact that most startup failures still lead to great success later in life because of, not in spite of, the work done building the startup (whether or not that's fair? well, that's a different question).
For every startup failure that has granted someone the skills to succeed later in life, there's someone who has had their entire life torn apart putting their all into a startup, whether that be founder or an early employee.
We really need to drop the facade that working a startup will always be beneficial to you, or lead you to wealth and/or success. Sometimes, its going to tear your soul from you and you may not come back from it for a long time.
The major difference between your odds of success when playing the lottery and your odds of success when working at a startup is that you can affect your odds of success by your actions when working on a startup.
A successful startup is not an accident, and a failed startup is not just a lack of luck. Make good business choices, product choices, and infrastructure choices and you can make the startup a success. On the other hand make poor product choices, and poor business choices and your startup will fail.
On the other hand there is very little strategy or way to improve your odds of success when gambling.
For me, it's nice to think of the "what if..." as I will generally only buy a single ticket per drawing over 100 million. I've never gone out and bought multiples of tickets. It's mainly to keep the dream/fantasy. I only even check my tickets a few times a year.
Scratch-offs are for suckers IMO. On pure EV alone, once you hit the 200M range the lottery makes sense to play. It doesn't mean you'll win but buying a ticket for $2 pays a little better than even if I remember the odds correctly.
Think of it as a really large poker game where you didn't have to put any money in the pot and can play a random hand for $2 and win the entire pot. Personally, once it's in the 100M+ range I'll grab a ticket while getting gas.
9 out of 10 startups fail. Those that don't, don't necessarily have prosperous exits. Unless you're a VC or accelerator (which is essentially a fund buying educated "lottery tickets"), the odds are not in your favor.
I'm not saying that startups are that likely to make you rich; what I'm saying is that even in the case that they're an even worse bet than the lottery (and I agree that it is likely), that doesn't mean that playing the lottery is smart; it just means both things are ill advised.
I'd really love to see the numbers on failed startups, though I suspect that they don't exist (since a fair chunk of startups don't even get as far as incorporating)
Kazemi is more of an programmer-artist or -comedian, but he releases dozens of side projects a year, all relatively low effort. He uses himself as a test case and also examines KickStarters and how unpredictable their success is.
It all depends on the work you do. If you're coding, the knowledge you gain during the experience is valuable too. If you're in sales and marketing, the networks you build are valuable too.
I found it pretty funny that he said Match is "dying" in that article:
When he does engage in conversation, Frind can be disarmingly frank, delivering vitriolic quips with a self-assured cheerfulness that feels almost mean. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), he says, is "a complete joke," Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is "a cult," and Match is "dying." ...
Using a “compiled” language like C# probably didn't hurt, but Markus Frind is also wicked smart. Some of his work was cited in a published number theory textbook.
It's a combination of Moore's law and churn, since the site is reasonably effective it generates huge churn.
Since RAM follows Moore's law you could always keep the users in RAM if you wrote effective queries because user growth didn't outpace Moore's law. All you had to do was build a server big enough.
C# definitely helped vs ruby, the real kicker was stored procs, everything was a highly tuned stored proc. The huge insights I got was latency, by keeping everything close together you could run some really abysmal synchronous code with out cratering everything.
Also, he really cared about the ant hill more than the ants. He would do horrible things to the ants that would encourage them to build a bigger ant hill. (Ants are users, employees were treated very well)
As a fictional example, lets say the site was skewing too heavily male by 20%, just add a line in the stored proc that gave a male user a 20% chance of their registration not being written to disk. Voila, site has the proper mix, onto the next problem. He was the most brutally effective person I've ever worked with.
The memory vs users idea is briliant. I would love to have observed him although working under someone like that sounds like it requires a great amount of patience.
The architecture post on high scalability is truly inspirational.
So IAC now owns Match.com, Tinder, OKCupid, and PlentyofFish. Are there any competition concerns there? I only looked briefly, but couldn't see any market share figures.
eHarmony and Zoosk are the only two majors left standing independently.
It wouldn't surprise me if IAC has over 50% of the US dating market at this point.
There's a blatant competition issue there, but the online dating market isn't likely to attract much anti-trust scrutiny at this point, for at least three reasons: there needs to be some evidence of consumer harm (I'm not aware of much in that regard); competitors would have to be getting Washington's attention; the dating market isn't considered to be very attention worthy, minus something egregious going on.
http://www.jessmeetken.com/ is based on introductions from women to other women, which eliminated the problem that women's inboxes are filled with lots of low-quality (and occasionally vulgar) messages.
The problem with that is that if I knew a girl I wouldn't need online dating.
He is right that there need to be some kind of filtering though - the problem is that the men women want to date are also the girls most likely to put up with the filters.
> The problem with that is that if I knew a girl I wouldn't need online dating.
You don't know any women?
I think that this differs from your scenario in that Jess is vouching for a guy for basically anyone, vs. Ken asking all of his female friends if they know anyone they'd be a good match with.
How so? I don't have any female friends (I don't have any male ones either). If I started looking for a girlfriend (which I currently don't), I would indeed be looking solely for a romantic relationship, so I don't see how having female friends would be a prerequisite.
That said, I don't think that matters for the site in question. I'm just not a part of their target audience. Doesn't mean their idea doesn't work for other people.
If you really love women, you'll love being friends with women just as much as you love being in romantic relationships with women. If you don't really love women, I'd likely suggest that you just don't date - loneliness or social proof of your value are shitty reasons to get into a relationship.
A factor in any antitrust analysis is barriers to entry for new competition. In this case, those barriers are extremely low. How much effort does it take to whip up a dating site/app? Not very much. So even if IAC were to own nearly all existing dating sites (and thus in theory charging monopoly prices for date finding), 5 other people could start up competitors to undercut them on price in the next month without much trouble.
It is quite difficult—just not necessarily in terms of code. What makes it really hard is the chicken-egg problem that people won't come to it until there are people on it to browse, and there aren't people on it to browse if nobody signs up.
OKCupid's clever bypass for this was to get people hooked answering all those little questions. Heck I knew early adopters that signed up just to answer those questions, not necessarily for dating, and then fell into using it.
Tinder's was the swipe right/left that has now become a term used outside of the app in other parts of life.
Doesn't matter. No matter what your churn is, if you currently have a thousand times more members then your competitors it will be drastically easier to attract new members. In other words, your competitors have a much higher customer acquisition cost. It's still a big barrier.
The churn is so high on dating sites that everybody is constantly re-acquiring customers. One test for anti-trust is also how they think the market would respond to a price increase.
Yes, you need a critical mass of people, but what this means can be very different for different people. Some dating sites have a warm body approach where you probably need lots of people because the set of matches is terrible.
However if you had a dating site for swedish people living in miami who only wanted to date swedish people even having 40 people on there might be plenty.
The website built on spam to extract money out of desperate guys? (I could write a blog post on this - Badoo is legitimately deception across the board).
From what I understand, dating sites typically experience a valuation headwind since the purpose of the site is a high userbase turnover (i.e. match making). Is there any reason to think that controlling market share can somehow offset this effect? (other than the standard price-setting power of monopolies)
I think that that in addition to the price-setting / risk-spreading nature of the "monopoly," they're also trying to control new "experiences" as it relates to dating. OKCupid / Match offer a fundamentally different experience to Tinder or HowAboutWe.
IAC seems to be making a macro-bet: we don't know what online dating will look like in 5-10 years, but we want to control it.
Interestingly, they "incubated" Tinder via Hatch Labs (where I was an employee). Pretty impressive control of that vertical.
Some people put down Marcus as just the lucky guy and POF as an ugly undeserving website. The reality is that running even a semi-successful dating website for 12 years straight is a huge huge achievement. Dating websites have almost 30% customer churn each year which means you constantly have to figure out how to get new customers. This problem becomes much harder because entry in the market is easy enough that any one can one-up you anytime. There is not much stickyness or virality like FB. All these makes dating business very difficult to run successfully with large margins.
The thing is that Marcus has conveniently downplayed the required effort in playing this game. He has projected image that he just worked few hours a week to check servers and then going back to other things in his life. I would bet reality wasn't exactly like that. To ensure new customer acquisition, you must make sure your website constantly pops up high on Google for most popular dating queries. This means lot of SEO+marketing work. My guess is that Marcus purposely made his story very attractive for newspapers to report without paying for any PR which gave him links and boosted his ranking. His competitors are known to spend massive fortune and efforts on marketing just to stay relevant.
Now that deal is done, it would be good time for Marcus to actually disclose the true story :).
> Dating websites have almost 30% customer churn each year which means you constantly have to figure out how to get new customers.
I think that was a part of the business model. A good chunk of the ads were for for-pay dating sites. At $30/month, which is effectively $30/month marginal revenue (since most costs are fixed), the for-pay sites will pay a fortune per customer acquisition.
Monitors performance using task manager. When spikes show up he investigates. Problems were usually blocking in the database. It's always database issues. Rarely any problems in .net. Because POF doesn't use the .net library it's relatively easy to track down performance problems. When you are using many layers of frameworks finding out where problems are hiding is frustrating and hard.
Makes me blush a bit that we have 1000 - 1100 customer websites (which don't get many hits) spread across 6 CloudLinux servers and the performance is terrible... (not that I have anything to do with those servers!)
It's a great reminder that the silicon valley echo chamber only reflects the views of silicon valley. If you want to do great work and be respected for your peers it's a great place, but never confuse the quest for prestige with the quest for financial gain.
I'm not sure if I'm on track, but I think Match.com's acquisitions are of the kind I'm a little sad to see, "competitor squash" kind. A lot of acquisitions are cool. EG, Google bought youtube and they run it well. You might not agree with everything, but it's hard to say youtube suffered. Google just wanted to get into video and youtube knew how to do it right.
BWhen FB buy instagram or match.com buy everyone, it feels like an unfair avenue of competition. I'm not sure if "fair" or "competition" are the right words, but hopefully my point gets across.
Part of the issue is (ironically) well illustrated by OKcupid's blog post.^ In it, they basically said that paid dating sites work worse, because they are paid. It's a fun pick-a-fight blog, so read it if you're interested. Implied (IMO) is that a massive dating site can be run with much lower revenue and be better for users. Doesn't matter if they were right.
OKcupid had a working unique, effective model and their product was different. Then Tinder do it a totally different way and we have more diversity. The difference are cultural, not just a different feature-set. I think that's awesome. But, one business model generates way more money. The others are profitable too and can actually do their job perfectly well (OKcupid anyway) with less revenue. There's no inherent reason not to continue existing and letting a thousand (or like six) flower bloom.
The problem is that removing company A as a threat is worth more (in dollars) to company B than company A costs. So company B buys OKcupid, Tinder, POF and anything else. The wheels of the market are removing choice.
OKcupid still exists. It's fine, but it's doesn't have the same cultural uniqueness. They removed that blog post, for example.
For the record, no one ever asked we take down that post. We did it just to be polite.
By contrast, when we sold TheSpark.com to iTurf.com in 2000, we spent several man-months of company time making the parody AyeTurf.com, which pissed a lot of people off.
I don't think there's anything terrible about taking down the post to be polite.
I also don't think that OKCupid (or match.com) are to blame. I'm just kind of musing about this sort of tiny-giant paradox generally. The internet lets people make great things on small budgets, which means big thing can exist with small business models. Magnitude of revenue does not necessarily equal magnitude of impact, but if the first is a lot smaller then the second, they're a target for these neutralising acquisitions.
Well this is awful... Their monetisation of OK Cupid killed the sites functionality. You literally have to pay to see 'more attractive matches', and search ranking is based on payment as well. What was once a place where the alternative / arts crowd could meet like minded folks is now awash with spam, poorly filled out profiles and other guff that makes it effectively useless for meeting a potential partner.
Companies valued purely based on revenue streams alone will typically sell for 2x to 5x their yearly revenue.
This is a big part of why it's SMART for most consumer startups to avoid earning revenue at all. Doing so will often cap their potential exit price, in practice.
Still, this at least was at the higher end, for purely revenue-based valuations.
How many SV VCs would have turned him down because his team and his pitch deck weren't cool enough, and they "weren't looking for investments in that sector"?
I'd love to see more examples of successful bootstrapped and/or lifestyle businesses, but - unlike PoF - most of them they don't get the same PR as the mainstream startups, which makes them harder to find/follow.
For someone like Facebook or Google that does not matter. It doesn't look like he shopped it to enough buyers. Or perhaps this was a quick and easy deal, he would have to wait on others. Also perhaps he was afraid of losing to mobile.
Shopping the site around to get more than $500 million is just ego boosting at that point. That's more than enough money to do whatever you want for the rest of your life.
POF's founder story is fascinating and jealousy making. It was just right time, right place, right product. He had $10MM in the bank before he realized he needed help and hired his first employee..
Interesting to see how he kept things lean and has gone against the entire 'companies need a co-founder to succeed' stigma by single-handedly growing a multimillion dollar venture. He recruited the first three employees in 2008.
I remember when he was mentioning how his relatively new site was pulling in a million a month in adsense and no-one believed him (many, many years ago).
Match, Tinder, OKCupid, HowAboutWe, now PlentyOfFish. I'm curious if there are other mainstream dating apps out there? There are apps like Grindr for the LGBTQ community; JDate for the Jewish community. But what others are there for the larger populations? eHarmony, though I've always been under the belief that religion was a key component of that site.
I find it interesting to see that Match now really owns the space and that TechCrunch is suggesting that the purchase was for "a fresh pool of digitally active singles" vs. technology (OKCupid) or a different experience all together (Tinder).
I've never heard of plentyoffish users in USA, nor bumped into advertising except PR on web-biz sites. I have heard of users of Match, Yahoo, JDate, and seen advertising for eHarmony.
Is this a case where someone launched a product that conquered the non-USA users that USA companies ignore?
I've read somewhere that it's very hard to sell VCs on dating websites, but with OKC and PoF both now being owned by big companies, is this space opening back up for someone without the stink of big corporate?
It's a joke about how reddit is supposedly full of unpopular people, but strangely enough, the joke has now become about how HN is full of people who can't recognize a joke.
Online dating is elance of romance. It's a race to the bottom.
"Myspace, Match, eHarmony, CL… they all suck for the elegantly simple reason that online there are too many indiscriminate horny men and too few cute girls. The dynamics are totally in the woman’s favor, ridiculously so in that it encourages massive self-assessment inflation that will carry over into real life social interactions, guaranteeing disappointment."
To me, that article feels incredibly negative, sexist, and rooted on a men-women dynamic that assumes women are things to be conquered.
Then again, I don't know what I was expecting from a website that gives "Alpha assessments" regarding "women you are attempting to bed" and whose top post is "How to get a girl to send nudes of herself".
It's not just you that feels that way. That article is just a torrent of misogynist screed.
For example: "It’s no surprise that the virtual world warehouses sexual rejects who couldn’t cut it in public where their ugliness means they’re not even in the running. BBWs, BBBWs, BBBBBBBBBBBBWs… you’ll find them all online, beached like a herd of walrus." Or later, "Fatties – The internet is great for banging fatties."
Misogyny and a belief that women are favored aren't incompatible. If anything, they're compatible beliefs.
Antisemitism, for instance, doesn't often hold that Jews are worthless, poor, and incompetent. It tends to hold that Jews are rich and powerful and can do whatever they want thanks to their worldwide conspiracy. The antisemite usually thinks that the world disproportionately favors Jews.
> How is dating websites being lopsided in favor of women misogyny?
I did not claim that.
> The systemic use of the blanket term of misogyny in these cases seems more like misandry, to be fair.
Why?
> Why not stay on the point?
What is the point? I thought you were implying that the author believing that women were favored by dating websites was a counter to the claim that the site was a torrent of misogynistic screed. If so, I refuted that. If not, you were unclear, but if you wish to be clear about your point, I am happy to stay on it.
> You can't control of tone of Heartiste. He has the right to express his opinions, don't you think?
Absolutely, and I have the right to express opinions about his expression of his opinions. Free speech is truly a wonderful thing!
Well yes. Heartiste is a pick-up artist. He's basically built a blog (and possibly a career) around dating advice that's negative, sexist, and treats women as things to be conquered. When you read articles from PUAs like that one, it's worth bearing in mind that they're basically trying to sell you their own even scummier alternative to online dating.
I do find them a bit toxic because of the negativity. It's a phase many guys go through when they break the social conditioning of the feminine imperative.
Rollo Tomassi is far more gentle, for those who haven't heard of him (www.therationalmale.com)
I think it's also a place where men can boost their self esteem. I think it's the antithesis of seduction. It's just way too efficient and not serendipitous enough. Sure, you can say swiping on someone allows you to interact with way more people than you could ever interact with in person. The thing that's lost is that random look in the middle of the street, coffee shop, or party where you exchange glances with a stranger and wonder for a second if the attraction is mutual. Then you put yourself out there without knowing what the response would be because you don't know if the person is looking for a tryst or romance. On tinder, you can assume they're already open to at least some flirting. If not, no big deal -- you never even looked the person in the eyes.
Although, people like us on HN, won't feel excited about making a little websites and earning through Adsense income; a good business / startup seems more worthwhile but sometimes, I do get tempted to enter that territory again seeing people making thousands of dollars a day with just re-hashed content and a little effort but I feel it won't be something to be proud of in the future.