Thanks, everybody. It's amazing to me how much appreciation I get sometimes from FunAdvice...of course, only a fraction of our members take the time to say "thanks" but, it's always flattering, never expected and I'm truly grateful, every time.
Of course, my faith in the tech media, such as it is, has completely vanished.
A few highlights, if you're keeping score:
1) We're the 2nd fastest growing social network in the US (comScore)
2) Other than FanPop we're the only ones who are bootstrapped who were in the Reuter's piece...which they clearly overlooked...thus highlighting their skimpy reporting.
3) Other than Deviantart FunAdvice is the *only* social network in the US that's bootstrapped and in the top twenty, per the comScore study that we mentioned on our news page.
I get it, though...given the stats I mentioned, there, why *would* any self respecting techno journalist give us more than the time of day? I've corresponded with Venturebeat, talked to TechCrunch (who only wrote up our bcc'd half ass acquisition offer by myyearbook b/c it was funny as heck), interviewed with Gigaom ~2+ years ago...and yet, the New York Times thought it made sense to include us in a round up of Q&A...where, ReadWriteWeb purposefully left us *off* the list, even after I commented that we should have been included. Last, but not least, the Wall Street Journal even quoted me last year...when a personal intro to Mashable's self styled social media guide didn't even warrant an email in return...WTF?
Nope, it's not about how much tech press we get, or why increasingly, our story seems to be one that most media outlets that I read, regularly would rather bury than highlight...it's about the members. The community. The excitement of seeing how many people we can help, daily.
You've probably noticed...we run a lot less ads (for members) than most sites, and more than 50% of our pageviews, logged in or out, have *zero* ads on them. On the one hand...that's "bad business" right? Sure, from one perspective...but, you didn't go to your favorite social question and answer site to check out how well targeted Google's ads are, now did you? Nope :) We didn't think so.
Over the next month, our goal is to ramp up our engineering efforts and take the product into serious high gear...there have been a *lot* of bumps so far this August but we'll come out of it with a stronger product, more fun and more helpful, to you, than ever.
