My 2c about ad blockers

Yaron GalaiLeave a comment

I’m always surprised when smart people, especially those working in ad supported industries, advocate the use of ad blockers. When new folks join the Outbrain team, I ask them during their on-boarding how many of them use ad blockers. About 50% of people say they do, and are quite casual about it.

Then I ask them how many of them steal books at Barnes & Noble, and the response is usually a bunch of horrified faces at the mere suggestion. I’m not sure why. Both are very similar forms of stealing content without paying the content owner.

The idea that ad blockers are OK to use because ads are annoying or interruptive, is absolutely ridiculous. The ads aren’t some optional thing you choose to turn on or off – the ads are how you pay for the content you consume and enjoy.

The ads might be annoying, but so is the cashier at your bookstore. But you probably never told yourself: “I want these books and magazines, but that payment part is really annoying… It’s an interruption in my day to stand in line and take out my credit card. And the paying piece – that is really annoying! So I’ll just take all the books I wanted and walk out the store without the annoying part!”.

The form of payment for the content is determined by the seller, not the consumer. Barnes & Noble might set the price in dollars. A publisher might set the price in the form of advertising. If you don’t like the form of payment, or the price, the only recourse is to not consume that content.

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Company integrity – having a Single Story

Yaron Galai5 Comments

One of the paramount aspects for us at Outbrain, since the day we started, is maintaining the company’s integrity. There are many different ways we make integrity the core of our company DNA,  but having a “single story” is probably one of the most important ones.

The ‘single story’ principle means that there’s not the slightest difference between the spirit of what is said or expected from our team internally, to what is said to our investors, to what is said to our partners and clients or publicly to the press. If we say we stick to a certain principle, there’s no winking, or lip service, to *any* of our constituencies. For example, when we say that publishers are our true partners, there’s no backroom dealings of any kind that would undermine that in any way. When we announce publicly that we don’t accept any misleading advertisers, it’s my expectation from my team that we strive to comply with that as strictly as we can, even if it costs us dearly in lost revenue. And its the same single story that my investors (existing AND potential) would hear. It’s that same single story I wouldn’t mind having printed on the front page of the NYT’s, because I’d be proud standing behind it with all the constituents that are part of Outbrain.

So many companies in our space seem to put a facade of similar integrity, yet at the same time maintain multiple different stories – one for the market, a very different one for employees, and a very different one for investors. In the short run these facades can probably work. But I suspect that in the long run it’s impossible to hold onto different stories for different constituencies. Integrity in that sense is a lot like a pregnancy – you can’t be half-pregnant, and you can’t run a company with integrity on some fronts but not others. It’s either a principle you stick to, and then *always* do, with all constituencies. Or it’s not.

In short: Business needs can be turned on or off for integrity; but integrity can never be turned on or off in the face of business needs.

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Google Wave – a few lessons for entrepreneurs

Yaron Galai12 Comments

Wave_logo Google killed Wave yesterday, and I think there are a few lessons we entrepreneurs can take away from it:

  1. Focus on doing one thing great (MVP) – Wave was a classic engineering-driven product, full of features and things it can do. One of the most dangerous, silent killers of many startups is developing product features just because you can, or just because it’s easy for the engineers (“lets do it – it will only take 1 day to develop”). Each specific feature seems benign on its own, but when cobbled together, cancer starts to spread in a few forms:
    • The product becomes less “crisp” – the biggest challenge you’re going to have as an entrepreneur is in selling a crisp product story to a very clear buyer. By layering more ‘just-because-we-can’ features onto your product, you are going to lose the crispiness of what’s that single thing that your product does better than anyone else in the world.
    • Maintenance becomes a nightmare – those little harmless features you add might cost very little now, but are going to cost you dearly in the future as you scale. They cost is customer support, in code complexity, in multiplying future QA efforts, etc, etc.So my tip would be to think about “just-because-we-can” features as if they were a cancer you should avoid developing at any cost. And if you slipped and developed one – don’t hesitate to kill it and reduce your feature set. Google Wave tried to do too many things, and lost its product crsipyness in the process.
  2. Don’t think of your product as an X-killer – When Wave was launched it was hyped to death as the email-killer. The Googlers who developed Wave kept saying how outdated email was, and how it was not designed for the current world we live in and how Wave would replace all that. Wave didn’t stand a chance as an email-killer. But I think it could have been a great team collaboration tool within companies. Problem is – that probably didn’t seem like an exciting, big enough goal to take on and so it was positioned as an email-killer.
    Focusing on being the killer of something is almost surely going to distract you and take down the wrong product roadmap. All the “Google killer” search engines, or “Facebook killer” social networks, are much more likely to be killed themselves than even scratch those they’re after.
  3. Avoid big bang, hyped launches – I might be wrong on this – just my personal 2c… please take with a grain of salt. I’m allergic to hyped up product launches – I think they are extremely dangerous for startups. A hyped launch usually has minimal long-term value — it’s like a Digg storm hitting your site and leaving immediately — yet it sets unrealistic expectations for users, employees and investors alike. A hyped launch is almost guaranteed to follow with a big disappointing drop to a more realistic attention level, which can be devastating for a startup. My personal 2c:
    • If you can void hype – avoid it like the plague. Just focus on, and celebrate, smaller wins – WoW or MoM growth on your core important metrics. It’s a longer road, but a much healthier and more sustainable one.
    • If hype hit you – get in the bunker and IGNORE it. Tell everyone involved in the company – employees, investors, etc – to enjoy the day of hype for 2 minutes, and then get back to work and ignore it. Ignore it in the reports. Ignore it in any way you can. If you start believing the hype – you are likely on route to being doomed.
  4. Lastly, and very importantly – You can beat Google at your game! -Google does a lot of things right but they’re not beyond competition or failure. As a startup it may seem like they have all the advantages over you – money, lots of smart engineers, brand, etc, etc. But believe me – if you apply some ‘Moneyball thinking‘ (highly recommend every entrepreneur read this book) – you’ll realize that as a startup you have so much unfair advantage against the BigCo’s of the world that it’s not even funny. Namely – you can afford to start working on much smaller, crisper bites which are too small for a BigCo to be interested in, but be the best at them in the world.

I wrote a while back about the disease of Featuritis. I’m afraid this was the #1 thing that plagued Google Wave from the start.

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