I've been using Dashblock in a production environment and it's super easy to create and use the APIs on sites. We'd previously written our own scripts to do this at scale, but it was difficult to keep them all up to date. You're right that fixing a single page's dom changes is trivial, but it's a real pain to scale that. Regarding the ML aspect, I've tested changing the dom for a page in Dashblock and it seems to work... it didn't break the scraping I had set up. The price might not make sense for everybody, but for me it's definitely worth it.
Great point about the value of the social validation from high-profile media coverage! That's usually more important than the minimal traffic it drives.
This was definitely our biggest surprise: we expected an early spike and quick tapering, just like we were accustomed to from web traffic.
It's hard for us to know how much residual traffic we still get from Better Homes & Gardens, since there's no referrer to track people coming from magazines.
We're actually working on an export feature now. We keep full resolution copies of all photos because so many people want to use Moment Garden to backup their baby photos.
This was the reason I co-founded Moment Garden http://momentgarden.com, to help parents securely save the memories of their child.
I know it's a leap to trust a small startup with such important data, but with stories of Google arbitrarily shutting down accounts, it helps make our case.
Sure, we've had some growing pains, but when a parent emails us with problems, they get in touch with a founder who will make the situation right. Good luck getting that with Google.
This seems so obvious in hindsight. Despite "The Social Network"-generated interest, startups are simply too boring to make for great ratings without some manufactured drama.
I feel for those who applied to TechStars NY, not knowing about the circus they were getting into. Startups are hard enough without additional, external distractions.
I saw Gmail being used in this manner quite a bit among our friends with new kids (or expecting kids). I was concerned about the long term security of the memories they shared this way, which ended up being the reason I co-founded my startup, Moment Garden http://momentgarden.com .
There are surprisingly few good, secure ways to save and share memories of your kids. Particularly if you don't trust Mark Zuckerberg with your child's private data.
You'd be surprised at how much innovation is in the industry, particularly with respect to social media. I know: my company provides web based software to funeral homes and mortuaries. We let them design headstones online. We even put QR codes on the headstones to make it easy to find the deceased individual's online obituary within the cemetery.
You must examine a patent based on the specific claims, not the title. Many people make this mistake and assume the patent is much broader than it actually is.
With a product, you design the solution based on your vision and find customers who match that vision. With web design work, you are essentially taking direct orders and requirements from the client.
Yep, that's essentially the moral of the post. While cheap clicks do exist, and you can find them, you need to ask yourself whether it's really worth it for your business.
Definitely that's the reason the ads are cheaper in less developed and less wealthy countries. It's simple supply & demand: obviously there are more people targeting ads towards users in the U.S. and other wealthy countries.
We touched on a lot of this in the article, and in fact the title clause "(and why you might not want to)" was referring specifically to that point!
That being said, there is a tremendous amount of useful techniques you can learn from this approach, and you can choose apply those towards whatever demographics you are marketing to.
It's up to each person to decide the specific goals of their ad campaigns, but I'm hoping this article outlines some techniques that will help you achieve those goals.