[dgreensp]

Thank you for saying it better than I could have.

Alarm bells should go off when someone with a million users is talking about spending money to get more and not about converting existing users into customers. Free users are not customers. Strategies for spending money to acquire customers make sense because you end up making more than you spend.

[niggler]

"Free users are not customers."

Free users are the product. The point is to develop the product until you can sell it.

EDIT: to clarify, "converting existing users into customers" suggests that the parent assumes the users are the customers. In an advertising driven business, the users are the product (time spent by people on the app) and the customers are advertisers wishing to advertise to the users. Think about google: gmail is free, but its revenues come from advertising and not from the users directly.

[dgreensp]

Ha. I'm not sure I get the metaphor, unless you are talking about trying to get acquired based on your user graph, or applying "greater fool" theory.

[lsc]

the idea is that your 'users' are the product you are selling to advertised.

[dchuk]

Isn't DDG inherently fucked here though because of their whole privacy deal? The massive advantage the Internet creates is extremely targeted tracking and advertising methods, which DDG is explicitly against.

It's like they're against the most proven business model for search engines yet expect to survive somehow.

[niggler]

DDG does show ads: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9r0hxyxew3aiddr/Screen%20Shot%2020...

They are trying to build an advertising model that doesn't track or store your searches (just show ads based on the search at hand), which is actually plausible

[lsc]

gah. The idea is that your users are the product you are selling to advertisers, who are your real customer.