Big Fat Quiz Of The Year’s David Mitchell described 2017 as “personally adequate, internationally disastrous.” It’s an apt summation of a year in which I enjoyed personal successes and amazing experiences, set against a backdrop of global chaos and calamity.
Thoughts
State of the Labs
SingularLabs has been struggling lately. Other projects and commitments have consumed most of my productive time over the last two years, and SingularLabs has languished as a result. In June we had our lowest ever monthly traffic at 68,000 pageviews. To put that in perspective, in June of 2014 we did 68,000 pageviews in the month’s first three days.
Hello again.
When I shut this blog down in 2015, there weren’t many people still reading. A few years prior there were tens of thousands of people reading each month; but gradually I ran out of things to say and they lost interest.
Display advertising is no longer a valid monetization strategy
Producing great content and putting a few AdSense units into the sidebar was once a decent monetization strategy. Up until very recently, one could make a pretty decent amount of money with display advertising.
Talkspace; A Startup Fighting Mental Illness
It’s common for startups to claim their idea will make the world a better place, but very few live up to the mantra. Founders seem so enamored by messaging apps, mobile games and social networks; that ideas capable of positively impacting people’s lives are often ignored.
“Internet Fame”
John Saddington; one of my favorite bloggers and creators-of-cool-shit, earlier wrote a fantastic piece on the topic of internet fame titled I Got Boring. While it would be egregious of me to compare my brief moments of popularity with Saddington’s long list of accomplishments, many of his observations resonated strongly with me.