We're also hiring:

Ruby engineers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=312684 Python engineers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=312675

I'd not checked out justin.tv since Justin's 24h lifestreaming event ended, but the other day I was round my brother's house (my brother is a non-techy person) and we were talking about the US Open tennis and where we should go to watch it.

"Oh I know this great site which has all the sports" he says as he loads up Justin.tv.

So basically justin.tv has loads of traffic because it is the hub of illegal sports rebroadcasting.

I think the site is great though, so I hope after all the copyright lawyers break down your doors and you are forced to go back to "legitimate" streams only, that your growth is still strong.

This happened to me too when I discovered a relative watching Major League Soccer and then noticed justin.tv in the address bar.

I asked him what "PSN" (the logo plastered all over the channel) was all about, and when he didn't know I had to conclude that either: 1) it was illegal or 2) PSN was somehow paying ESPN to re-broadcast MLS games.

I guess I was wrong in believing it was #2?

How are you making money? Google ads? Blockbuster movie ads? Are you making money or you only have revenue so far? Do you have any funding besides ycombinator?

We're currently running ads from a couple ad networks, but we're just getting started on monetization projects.

We've raised both angel and VC rounds (google for it if you want the amounts and people)

Hi Justin, could you comment on why you use both Python and Ruby? It seems odd for a small company to use two languages that are very similar.

Python for back-end (see: Twisted) and Ruby for front-end (see: Rails), I imagine.

Exactly. We use languages more for the libraries they offer, than for any other consideration.

We do the exact same thing at RescueTime, FWIW.

Yeah, you have lots of pedophiles on your channels. Curb that shit.

We're working on it, believe me.

Please forgive me for being a bit out of it. But I write this as my ignorance might be helpful insight.

I thought justin.tv was this site that tracked a guy named Justin 24/7. I seemed to recall him having a camera crew with him all the time, and that was the shtick. I had heard about them from the early days of this group, and I think had read about the camera crew and such on some web site.

So when I saw this post, I read through the comments and was confused about the "stop worrying about copyright law" statement.

I decided to check it out.

Now, looking at the front page, it seemed like either I was completely mistaking justin.tv for another web site, or it has changed it's goals, or the 'follow justin around' was a publicity ploy to get attention, and that indeed could be one of the 'channels' I see on the front page ("create your own channel"). (if the latter is actually correct, kudos to a great ploy as the name stood out to me)

Either way, I still didn't really 'get it' from the front page. It looked cool, and I was able to surmise what was going on from all the activity (there was a video of someone playing doom) that it was about video sharing.

I finally found the 'about us' section which turns out to be brief bio's of the founders and key employees. And there was a guy named Justin who looked like he might have been the guy who had the 24 hour camera crew with him. But his Bio didn't refer to this.

So perhaps I was imagining the whole thing. That's cool. I've done it before.

But if not, and the 'follow justin' thing really happened, then at least mention it somewhere so a out of touch lad like me doesn't check himself in somewhere.

But I still don't know what makes justin.tv special. It's description is "Justin.tv is the leader in live video and the place to broadcast and share video online." I thought that's what youtube was.

So it justin.tv the more hip version of youtube? Or, as I think about this more, is it the word LIVE that separates it from youtube? Are all the feeds 'live'? Like in real time? If so, that should get a bit more attention than some text at the bottom of the page.

And so as I review the front page, indeed it looks as though the video on the top could be live.

And the video on the bottom are highlights. Aha. Previous recordings.

Ok. Now I get it. That's pretty cool. How about we rewrite the description to be "Justin.tv streams LIVE video.".

But seriously, it took me a while. Live streams should have an icon in the bottom right that say "LIVE!" that doesn't get into the recording.

The concept of 'time' should be more involved in the navigation + searching. The front page should be like TV guide, and I can click on a row, at the 'current time', and see a live recording of that channel. As it plays the TV guide scrolls to the left slowly to mark the passing of time. The length of a show is depicted with width, and I can click anywhere to see the past. And since it's realtime let me sort the channel rows by poularity, ratings etc.

Sorry to be out of it. I'm a little surprised it took me so long to get the 'live' part.

Youtube doesn't do live video whatsoever. And yes, Justin was the guy with the camera strapped to his head 24/7. If a site doesn't make its history clear, you can usually check out wikipedia.

Congrats guys!

It looks like traffic really started to pick up around March. Did anything drastic happen around then?

I think that's when they stopped worrying about copyright law and letting people re-broadcast telelvision.

Worked for YouTube.

Anything in particular the recent spike in traffic can be attributed to?

alexa being total garbage

Indeed. Our growth doesn't have a big spike at the end, it's just gradually doubling up every month or so.

Any comment on the nature of what looks like a very large recent traffic spike (at least, per Alexa's graph)? What's being watched, who's watching it, any triggering events?

Our traffic is spiky, but not as much as the Alexa graph suggests. In reality our growth is much more steady; every now and then Alexa seems to "catch up". It's weird, and we're not sure what would cause that effect.

How close are Alexa traffic estimates to the actual traffic volumes? I've heard from numerous people that Alexa is almost always wrong and wrong by several orders of magnitude. It could be better for big sites, not sure. Just wondering what you guys see..

Alexa's numbers are crap. Total crap. They only reflect your traffic in the loosest way. There was a period of time where our traffic doubled and the alexa actually declined. It eventually catches up though....think of a random distribution around the true value.

Just so you don't get the idea I'm picking on Alexa, estimating this stuff is hard (or the people doing it are incompetent, but that seems unlikely with so many entrants). Quantcast and Compete.com are even worse, and ComScore is expensive but no better than Alexa.

I've always found quantcast to be much more accurate, although their number for justin.tv looks low: http://www.quantcast.com/justin.tv

what he's implying is that it's (American) football season -- both collegiate and professional -- as well as grand finale of regular season baseball, great football(soccer) league matches, tennis, etc. and any curious passer-by wonders how much of the traffic spikes are due to this subset of viewers

Alexa's totally crazy way of data collection?

Could someone here (who likes it) give a pitch for it?

watch illegal sporting events, tv shows, etc. -- free & live

it's especially helpful if you're a boxing fan like i am ;-)...

I saw a chipin.com widget on there during the last event... to help cover the cost of the broadcast(50$).

Worked out pretty well...

Congrats :) Looks like the competition is pretty much nowhere to be seen.

Since ustream is "quantified" on Quantcast, I know the actual traffic numbers for both sites. And believe me when I say, Compete doesn't even resemble reality.

But alexa does?

It's certainly a lot closer.

Amazing job guys, congrats

awesome! congrats ... was a great place to launch

Great job :-)