Hi everyone; longtime HN user here. My co-founder and I launched Payload three years ago. It's now the leading B2B media company covering the space industry.
This week we launched Ignition, a media company covering the business and policy of nuclear energy. We are starting with a twice-weekly free newsletter that takes less than 5 minutes to read.
The first edition goes out on February 22nd.
Me + my cofounder started Payload last year to cover the space industry, from seed round to SPAC and beyond. Our first (and primary) product is a daily newsletter covering the business and policy of space. It's free and it takes ~5min to read.
I don't understand this POV at all. Advertising provides a fair playing field for up-and-coming businesses. If startups could not advertise, how would people find out about it? If I want to start an eCommerce brand, people won't suddenly show up on my website. If I open a new club in a city, people don't just suddenly show up.
Without advertising, the world would be filled with large companies with no incentive to innovate because it would be impossible to discover their competitors.
"Without advertising, the world would be filled with large companies with no incentive to innovate because it would be impossible to discover their competitors."
There is nothing in that sentence that makes sense historically, and certainly doesn't now. Larger firms can leverage advertising usually better than small players just on budget terms, so it isn't just advertising itself, but how its deployed.
Adtech favors larger players that are platforms (e.g. Doubleclick) and just scrapes marketing dollars from everyone it can, and then benefits the platform itself if its product family has competing products (Google, Amazon, etc)
Advertising doesn't provide any fairness in a playing field. It's simply a parallel arena of competition with a more opaque set of operating rules.
Today's advertising industry systematically violates everyone's privacy with no practical opt-out, and hand the information to oppressive regimes.
Also, the middlemen extract tons of cash from the auction process, diverting it away from sites that people actually want to use, and spending it to cement in their mostly-hated monopolies.
The problem is that what we call advertising isn't what advertising actually is.
Advertising in the 21st century is about spying on people, whether or not they want it whether or not they will ever be your customer, and selling that information to other people if it's beneficial to your business.
Advertising is as near to lying as the advertisers can get. Also, advertisers end up corrupting ad-supported media: look at all the "payola" scandals in radio. Newspapers famously didn't run stories that upset major advertisers. Google has gone from being nearly miraculous to just serving ads, not to mention what SEO (which is nothing but optimizing advertising) has done to it.
I bet those innovators could come up with a solution that doesn’t involve eyesores placed on every surface imaginable, if traditional advertising were banned.
>Without advertising, the world would be filled with large companies with no incentive to innovate because it would be impossible to discover their competitors.
I do think the world would be better if most forms of advertising were strictly limited or banned, but advertisement absolutely doesn't require what is being called "advertisers" in this context.
I run a B2B media company. There are tons of success in B2B media:
- Aging Media (sold yesterday to PE)
- Morning Brew (sold for $75M)
- Blockworks bootstrapped and just raised first round at $135M valuation with $25M revenue
- Skift is a profitable media venture
- Industry Dive (sold for $530M)
- Politico (sold for $1B)
he's at least very communicative and pedagogical, and has a refreshing view of EO. reading him, Aravind, and Payload (thanks for it) is a good way to set you up on what's going on in the space-based EO industry.
Adelstein is one of the best poker cash players in the world. He has a sterling reputation in the community and to my knowledge has never made an accusation like that before.
If you play poker, that call was either the greatest hero call of all or extremely suspect.
There is absolutely no reason to call in that spot considering the fact that many bluffs could be ahead of her hand such as AcXc for a flush draw.
Furthermore, she was backed in that game meaning that she doesn’t have the money to play in it. Who is backing you if you are calling over $100K pots with Jack high.
Marketing works plain and simple. The people who think they aren't affected by marketing are the very people it works on. Nobody wants to admit that marketing affects them which makes product development so difficult.
I run a media company. We are very transparent about our KPIs with employees. We only share things that have materialized. For example, we don't want to mislead about something that might happen especially in an early stage company where it's hard to estimate the accuracy of something happening.
I would never want to work at a company that is secretive about everything and thus we chose to be transparent.
This week we launched Ignition, a media company covering the business and policy of nuclear energy. We are starting with a twice-weekly free newsletter that takes less than 5 minutes to read.
The first edition goes out on February 22nd.
Me + my cofounder started Payload last year to cover the space industry, from seed round to SPAC and beyond. Our first (and primary) product is a daily newsletter covering the business and policy of space. It's free and it takes ~5min to read.