I'm not sure that nobody has it. It's basically a matter of hacking the system to get cheaper CPM than what you can get with ads. If ads are the market index fund, you are trying to beat it by exploiting some oddity in the system. Once you do so on a large scale, the market adjusts and the oddity either goes away, or becomes useless. But I can think of a few ways to do this:

- Produce awesome content. Remember the Old Spice YouTube channel where they set up and produced videos for a few days in real-time response to people tweeting at them? That got lots of people looking at their product. Sure, it was an expensive stunt, but a stunt that worked. I bet it'd work again and again, as long as it's not done too frequently.

- Send out brand ambassadors into random communities. There are lots of brands present as specific people on places like Reddit, Imgur, etc. They are not customer service, they are not there as the official faces of the brand. They are just there to hang out, shoot the shit, and occasionally give out some free stuff or do something "awesome", "rad", or whatever.

- Provide comprehensive media kits to journalists. The dirty secret is that nowadays people who make money by writing articles need to write lots of them. Do 90% of the work, and they'll jump on the opportunity to customize it a bit, and post it immediately. They get to take a longer lunch break, you get free page views.

- For small or personal projects, go and do the "Show HN" equivalent on various communities. Even if they generally don't allow self-advertising, the rule is usually overlooked if you don't push too hard, and just present it as "I made a thing. Check it out."

- Start a KickStarter campaign for no reason. Ideally, if you can afford to not hinge your business on it, you can just use it as both a pre-order platform, and as an easy way to grab attention of lots of people.

- Sell $1 bills for $0.90. That worked really well for Uber. It can work for you too!

I'll tell you one way a lot of indie fashion brands, mobile apps, and bedroom music producers are doing it right now.

There are people (mostly teenagers/early 20s) who set up catchy Twitter accounts with endless streams of funny photos or videos along various themes. They cross promote and cross retweet these accounts (often retweeting each other's posts for just 5 minutes, then unretweeting again to remove the trace) until they build up over 100K legitimate followers. They then sell "spots" on these accounts to (mostly) people running Shopify fashion stores or mobile app developers ($18 per 100K impressions is a typical rate right now). I've also seen a couple of musicians "come up" through this approach using Soundcloud. (What they do is have fake female accounts repost Vines, tweets, or screenshots of Tumblr raving about thing X, then get those retweeted on "decks" - people then impulse retweet, then they delete the original content to make it all look organic.)

This is the wild west of social right now, it's hard to find info about it, you gotta spend weeks digging around and warming up to the right people, especially since a lot of the trail is destroyed shortly after it's posted.

I'm not going to go into much more detail as I've spent months figuring out this space, but believe me, there are some amazingly savvy 15-25 year olds out there making things on social not look exactly what they seem(!) :)

Do you have any examples of this, or how to get in touch with someone who is doing this?

Thank you. That's fascinating. I'm trying to do this with bots.

> Sell $1 bills for $0.90. That worked really well for Uber. It can work for you too!

Huh? What's the story there?

It's mostly sarcasm, but Uber is one example of several companies whose business model was to disrupt an entrenched industry by providing more value than they were charging for, capture market share, then raise prices. Basically, initially it was cheaper to take an Uber than a Taxi. Currently that's no longer the case.

In the SF Bay Area it's still way cheaper to take Uber than a Taxi.

In many cities it is still cheaper to Uber than Taxi. Personally I know it is cheaper to Uber than taxi in San Francisco, Stockholm, Cluj (Romania), Prague, and Brussels.

In the one urban area that has the worst taxi service in the US, Uber is winning. Great!

I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you claiming that they're losing in every single other market?

At least in Portland, I've never taken a taxi in my life, but have taken probably a dozen Ubers.

>At least in Portland, I've never taken a taxi in my life, but have taken probably a dozen Ubers.

Which is one reason why Uber is winning. You do not even bother to check taxi fares.

I checked Uber rates to get to the airport. Not cheaper than taxi - about the same.

> I checked Uber rates to get to the airport. Not cheaper than taxi - about the same.

Did people stop tipping cabs?

Maybe you meant Ubers were 20% more expensive, or maybe people don't tip cabs anymore, I don't know.

Honestly I'd pay more than cabfare + tips just to have the price be explicit. Tips basically become a tax on nice people. I'd much rather everyone was paying the same price.

I live in Hungary where the taxis are pretty cheap but you have to call them, and there's not guarantee that you'll get someone who can speak English.

When I first got here, I used Uber all the time, but the government passed some anti-über laws and Uber withdrew from the market. Now I just use the public transport, which is pretty good, but less convenient than Uber. I felt bad for all the drivers that lost their jobs.

Cheaper in Seattle too.

They are still losing billions a year.

It's cheaper everywhere in the US

While the lower price was nice, one of the biggest selling points for Uber with me was convenience and a guaranteed minimum level of quality. While Uber is as cheap and convenient as ever for me (in and around DC), the quality has seriously suffered. I've been in some pretty beat Uber cars, and one time the driver got out to pee behind the car.

Predatory Pricing. Something Uber did, which is illegal, but they will likely never get fined for it.

A taxi driver has to rent a medallion and a car (because they can't just use the one they already own) and needs to charge extra for trips across city limits (because they're barred from picking up anyone in another city). It's not predatory pricing when your lower prices are due to lower costs.

A taxi driver in my state has to rent nothing, has to only get insurance and a drivers license allowing them to transport people (which is basically 50$), and there’s two dozen competing services.

Don’t assume your local shitty laws are an issue everywhere.

Likewise, don't assume your local good laws aren't shitty everywhere else.

Predatory pricing is only illegal if you are a monopoly, or part of a price-fixing cartel. Simply selling something for less than cost is 100% legal, although as a business strategy it requires deep pockets, and if or when you raise prices you risk alienating your customers...

Clarification, having checked after being down-voted. It is also illegal if the below-cost pricing strategy can be shown to have been implemented with the express purpose of driving competitors out of business. This intent is the important thing, it would be fine to sell below cost to gain customers for a new market, or to encourage network effects, and if that had the unintended side effect of causing a competing company to fail this is fine.

My understanding is that these cases are usually very hard to prove, unless you have 'smoking gun' evidence of some kind.

I remember this at the time -- Tew invested the initial earnings he made (<£2,000 IIRC) from selling ad space to friends and family into buying media coverage, which kickstarted the whole thing.

So whilst he was lucky, he did kind of make his own luck by putting the money into it -- he could have just taken that money and sat on it.

I seem to recall reading that Tew spent up to 20% of his targeted million dollars on PR[1]. Which would suggest that he had a very good understanding of page views being the important ingredient, a good story for traditional media being important (more so at the time) to get there, and more faith in what he was doing than anyone else that had the idea of creating a pure web page billboard.

[1]IIRC it was discussed in Paul Carr's Bringing Nothing to the Party, which isn't exactly complimentary about Tew

From an article in 2006:

"His friends and family paid the first $1,000 dollars, which he spent on a press release. That small publicity gave his site more traffic, which in turn persuaded more advertisers to have faith."

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4585026.stm

I remember from the TV news coverage he talked about how he'd sent that press release out to hundreds of news outlets. So I feel he (in part at least) made his own luck on this one.

Thousands of people send their press releases out every day, and most of them are never seen again. I stand by my assertion that it was largely a matter of luck, and while Tew no doubt knew he needed publicity, he had no reliably repeatable way of getting it. He was very fortunate with a dumb idea that fit someone's need for a good story at the time. There are thousands, maybe millions, of other dumb ideas that would make equally good stories but are not picked up. Statistically, it would indeed have been a better move for Tew to take the money and sit on it, just as it is a better move for a lottery player to save their $2. But it's certainly a lot more fun to gamble it. And unlike a lottery winner, in business if you win with a dumb idea, you not only profit, you look like some kind of savant.

Funny story about that.

I worked on an internship back in 2004, and one morning my manager walked in and asked a coworker and me something like, "Do you think people would buy pixels on a website?" We asked what he meant, and he explained this exact idea.

Of course we told him it was dumb and nobody would buy pixels and it would be pointless, and how would anybody find it, etc., and he decided not to do anything with it.

Then, about a year later, this site came around, made the news, and sold out in no time.

Like you said, there's a lot more to it then just putting the site online, but I've always felt a little bad for dismissing it so quickly.

  Lots of people thought of it, but discounted it because it was a dumb idea

An idea that costs almost nothing to do with almost nothing to lose.

Almost being the operative word here. Compared to the eventual payoff, yes, almost nothing. But I'll bet Tew actually spent quite a bit of time working on the idea, time he might've spent on something else with much better prospects for success. He's a classic case of survivor's bias: we only know about him because he was successful. We don't know about the thousands of others that pursued similarly dumb ideas (maybe even the same one) and failed.

Agreed, kind of like gambling.