There is much discussion of the way that the goals of advertising and privacy are at odds. But advertising is not the only casualty when browser makers clamp down their privacy settings. Another big category that this will affect is 3rd party analytics tools. Google Analytics (GA), for example, is an extremely powerful (and free) way for [...]

Yesterday Readability announced that they were shutting down their experiment to take payments on behalf of authors and then distribute them (minus a 30% cut) to those authors. The announcement talks about learning from the experiment, the main learning being that while readers seemed to like the model, it was impossible to get enough publishers [...]

Nick Bilton recently wrote about stratospheric valuations for companies that don’t generate any revenue and there has been much debate on whether or not this represents a bubble. The more interesting thing from my point of view is how the incentives of venture capital encourage consumer-oriented startups to adopt an ad-based1 business model and simultaneously [...]

For the last couple of years I have been an active user of Instapaper, Marco Arment’s excellent service for saving online articles for later reading. According to his press kit the service has more than 1 million signed up users and is profitable. Instapaper is successful for good reason — it offers a lot of [...]

When I wrote about recurring payment solutions in March I called Saasy “without doubt the simplest recurring billing payments solution the world has ever seen.” I thought it was expensive though, and it doesn’t have data portability. You can’t move your customers’ credit card data to another provider. You are locked in. Braintree was my [...]

I’ve spent some time investigating billing solutions for a premium subscription feature we are considering for YLF. This area is a minefield. Until recently, it has been a lot of work to get an online business set up with recurring billing. Over the last year or so several startups identified this pain and set out [...]

Google’s announcement about Chrome dropping H.264 support for the HTML5 video element caused an explosion on the Web. I must admit that I initially fell in line with the “See! Google is Evil” narrative. Many parts of the announcement just didn’t seem to make sense. Google was dropping H.264 in the name of openness, but was [...]

There has been a lot of recent talk about Google’s search results becoming more polluted with spam over time. Matthew Ingram’s article on GigaOm did a decent job summarizing it all. Also worth reading (and not linked directly in Matthew’s post) is Jeff Attwood’s post on the way this impacts StackOverflow, a popular programming Q&A site. Most [...]

Everyone knows about hyperlinks – the highlighted text and images that we can click on to take us from one page to the next on the web. In the case of a text link, there is a simple piece of HTML code behind the link. For example, consider this link to Angie’s site. If you [...]