About two years ago, I had a chance to ask Eben Upton if there would be a new platform like Arduino and Raspberry PI, what characteristics the new platform should have? And he said:
> There's scope for something very powerful (almost PC-like) in the $70 price range. If I was starting a new venture today, this is where I'd aim.
There is very powerful project like Bunnie Huang's Novena [1], but just the board will cost $550.
Language is still a barrier for developers in China to understand and discuss the technical world, so we developed this application. The daily page view of this website is about 25k, and we add a few features we think important but HN is missing:
- Markdown support, even pictures could be added in comment
- Sub-forums, so one could follow (or ignore) particular topics
- Read comments without living the homepage
- Optimization for mobile device
- Social features, e.g. AT or FOLLOW particular ID
- New submissions will randomly appear in homepage, so we don't need to count on up-votes immediately after submit
In addition to the above mentioned, we developed this application also want to dig much more excellent tech articles, views and open source projects by Chinese developers with community.
In this application, we also use some popular frameworks, such as [Bootstrap](1), [CodeIgniter](2) and so on.
Although, CSDN Geek may have a long way to improve and proceed. Rencently, I have created an [GitHub organization](3) for CSDN Geek. APIs will be open for community in the next step.
This means that the latin character width is roughly half of character height, so "full-width" square CJK ideographs fits exactly as the width of two "half-width" latin characters.
(Wider monospace fonts would typically require extra character spacing between CJK ideographs.)
The only future for journalism might be reader revenue. Without it, everyone in this field were in danger of becoming a public relations or advertising company disguised as journalism.
I'm an editor at Programmer Magazine in China (http://special.csdn.net/programmercovers/), as a coincidence, after 14 years operation, we just release the last print issue last week and withdrawal towards the electronic version only. I think we share the similar experience and feeling about how the tech medias evolved recently.
But media is still a very active field, if you have read the New York Times innovation report that leaked earlier this year, you may get a mixed feeling that with the risks, there are still opportunities to build an independent site with in-depth articles, code, algorithms, and reliable product reviews, which quality media should have.
But unfortunately, most decisions were not made by the ones who love this career, have ability and skill to lead the change, and do not fear to face the risks.
We need more serious competition in the Ad market, someone that interrupts the status quo like Uber did for taxi business [and Google Ads previously did]. Let website owners host the Ads on their web server (no 3rd party scripts; would help also with noscript/adblock).
Today Google Ads and Amazon Referral with the new greatly reduced payments are the new problem. IMO pay per click (PPC) is a big problem (1. click fraud, 2. most people don't click anyway but seeing it still influence by seeing it, 3. adblock/noscript blocks 3rd-party scripts) and it got popular as Google introduced it in AdWords in 2002. Til 2002, cost per thousand impression (CPI) and cost per mille (CPM) where most used. CPI/CPM are the better model for website owners and company that run Ad-campaigns; PPC for Google an other ad networks.
Paywalls are not the answer, the WWW is successful because it is open.
Learn from the history: Microsoft's MSN started as serious competitor to WWW, and it was a fiasco in 1995. (I mean the original The Microsoft Network that came with Win95: http://winsupersite.com/windows-live/msn-inside-story (incl. photos)). Bill Gates even completely rewrote his "The Road Ahead" book half a year later - I have both editions, and almost every page has different wordings (MS Network, Information Highway -> Internet/WWW)
You do realize there is already heavy, impression-based competition going on in the ad market (google "real time bidding", for example)? That is exactly the kind of disruption you are asking for. AdSense is usually only used to fill remnant inventory; any big publisher uses a hybrid of real time bidding, direct sales and ad networks nowadays.
Running your own ad server is a big, big liability. While running a news website is mostly a read-operation, adservers are extremely write-heavy (every adview results in at least 2 write operations). Do that 10 time for every page view, and have 100 pageviews a second during peak times, and you suddenly find yourself becoming and engineering company instead of a publishing company.
Anyway, the scenario you are describing to "disrupt" to ad market is exactly the scenario we had in the 90s. Everyone was using phpAds, which could be embedded directly from within php, and advertisers ran almost exclusively CPM based campaigns. What happened? Publishers found out that their adserver was eating >95% of their server resources because frankly, adserving is HARD, and advertisers found that their ROI was crap because people didnt click ads.
The real disruption is already happening, in the background, far away from where the public looks -- real time bidding has completely disrupted the adserving market in the last two years, and more and more ad networks find themselves becoming irrelevant.
Disclaimer: i was co-founder and cto of an adserving platform.
RTB may be an answer, I am not sure it is the answer. It introduces some latency to the visitors, is very data heavy process and is realistically more a supplement than a disruption. (some fellows are a bit skeptical: http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/rtb-overhyped-technolog... )
If it's a race to the bottom like Uber than that's not good for website owners. And RTB automates just one side, the buyer side could/should be automated too.
All hassles aside, the best advertisement method for visitors and website owners would still be the old fashioned way of hosting the ads on the webserver itself and doing CPI/CPM (best as in not sitting in a glass house, and no need for Adblock/Noscript as last resort). Google used MySQL for Google Ads until ~2012, it should be fast enough for 95% of the websites. RTM is write heavy, old style CPM isn't by today's hardware standards.
The disruption could be to get more ad-buyers on this bandwagon (again). Only the website owner (theoretically) and (as good example) Amazon.com can provide good matching advertisement. I have yet to come across a Google Ad or one of the other ads that displays content that interests me at all.
> best advertisement method for visitors and website owners
The problem is, they are not the customer -- the advertiser is the customer. The measurability of internet advertising is also its fallacy: while in traditional media outlets, advertisers just keep buying and buying "because our managers will fire us if we do not get the advertising slots before black friday", on the internet, advertisers discover that their ROI of black friday ads is very low and adjust their willingness to pay premium prices for them accordingly.
You forget the constraints that advertisers have been putting onto CPM based campaigns also: for example, frequency capping is a common targeting mechanism since the 90s: only show my ad 3 times to the same visitor within a 30 minute timespan. It involves a lot of cookie processing, session logging (think about race conditions when multiple ads are requested in the same pageviews, etc).
If you have 20 campaigns running with a decent frequency cap, you can get a LOT higher average CPM than otherwise (because advertisers get a certain guarantee of the amount of exposures / visitor).
Anyway, I'm all for disruption, and I've been the technical lead of an adserving platform for almost 10 years -- and I'm glad I had an exit and can leave the market behind me. It's complex, margins are extremely low, and you are only able to disrupt if you cater to the advertisers, not to the publishers/visitors. The things that are currently disrupting the market are only in the best interest of the advertiser, because hey, that's where the money is coming from. One of the more scary startups I encountered in the last months I was active was a startup that linked location data to visitor cookies -- buying "bogus" facebook ads to link a cooke to a location, and using that information as feedback for offline advertising (for example, how many people are able to see our billboard daily? how many people were in the football stadium when we ran our ads?). All kinds of red flags privacy-wise, but that's where the market is moving. Google is moving towards abusing their cookie (they have one big "super"-cookie both for advertising and gmail and search -- you cannot opt out of targeted advertising without opting out of gmail) and linking mobile location data with the cookie on your desktop.
Disruption on the publisher/visitor side is nice in theory, but I am very afraid it does not work in practice.
The biggest problem might be compatibility, old computers (common in China) only contain fonts that have low quality Roman parts like SimSun (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E6%98%93%E5%AE%8B%E4%...) but this font is default Chinese typeface in Windows.
The newly designed fonts in recent years for Chinese have much better Roman parts which are already distributed by operating system or could obtained for free:
Many Chinese websites have already using one of them as their default font. There are also a dozen of commercial Chinese fonts which contain higher quality Roman typeface (although could not catch up most classic ones).
And for professionals (like book publishers or designers) in China, they often combine one Chinese font and one Roman font in their product for better result. (e.g. FZNew ShuSong + Sabon for Serif).
> There's scope for something very powerful (almost PC-like) in the $70 price range. If I was starting a new venture today, this is where I'd aim.
There is very powerful project like Bunnie Huang's Novena [1], but just the board will cost $550.
[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena