| The intended audience depends who's doing it and how: 1) someone like sama, president of YC and successful in his own right, shares his experience and everyone starting up is better off for his advice, including whatever subset end up in YC. This is someone people other than himself would call a "thought leader" and we benefit from their perspective. 2) someone like DigitalOcean, years spent creating a vast archive of content for their customers that is going to lure millions of new people searching google etc to their platform. This is like the longterm, aggregate effect of what YC is doing. 3) established companies trying to reach HN cause tons of developers are here and they're hiring. Best case scenario is they teach us something that touches on our own work. 4) someone who turns to HN and hopes to sell us something or hire us or use us for SEO by way of an unrelated blog post they design for us. There was a recent example - http://blog.desk.pm/viral/ - that turned 50,000 visitors into $1,000. The developer estimates 50,000 ideal customers would generate $25,000 in sales. If you had to pay for HN traffic it would not be viable for most startups. If you rank #1 on Google for "email etiquette" and you're not selling an email app or an etiquette course ... |