I think JetBrains is doing it quite well. They have different subscriptions, but also an affordable All-Products-Pack. And they have discounts for individual developers over companies.
A d they are giving away licences in meetups, conferences, discounts on podcasts. They offer licences for opensource, for academics... If I didn't have free access as an academic I probably would not be using it with a license today.
Jetbrains succeeds because of their products, not their advertising. Mostly, I suppose. It was the mayan end of the world sale in 2012 that lowered the price point enough for me to make my first purchase from them.
They're probably the only tool that I pay money for, and I'm generally happy to do so, because I get a ton of value from it.
My only complaint is in a polyglot environment it can be painful to have multiple jetbrains ides running in the same project root.
A number of years ago they shipped all of the different products as plugins to intellij. unfortunately at some point that stopped. I wish they resolve it, because it's slowly driving me to vscode.
This is same for me. It was great value in 2012 and product was good enough to keep using. I subscribed to Resharper before that but now use the other products like datalink. The fact that a personal license can be used at work also helped my adoption of the tools.
> The fact that a personal license can be used at work also helped my adoption of the tools.
Same here, and because of that I sub to the All Products bundle, while if I had to convince my employer it would be for PyCharm only. The Personal All Products license is $50 more per year than a Corporate Single Language license.
Gaining a perpetual license after 1 year of subscription also makes the subscription an easier pill for me to swallow.
> A number of years ago they shipped all of the different products as plugins to intellij. unfortunately at some point that stopped. I wish they resolve it, because it's slowly driving me to vscode.
Did they stop? I still use IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate for most languages (Go, Java, Rust, JavaScript/TypeScript). I had to use Rider for C#, AppCode for Swift, and CLion for C/C++, but those are the only special cases afaik, or are those languages the ones you use & have problems with?
The plugin updates are sometimes a bit behind the dedicated IDEs in terms of feature releases which is annoying but I think you can often download an EAP build to get around that.
I've been under the impression that there are significant capability differences between any of the plugins and the corresponding product
I mainly use goland & clion, and clion definitely doens't have an equivalent plugin. It's been a long time since I've tried to use intellij though, so perhaps my impressions are antiquated.
This is, I think, most appealing. I do need to know a product exists but the most important thing is when I land on the product page am I going to find a free product that turns into a $10k/yr product? Is there going to be a price range that’s suitable for my use case? Having a good range of offerings and skus makes a huge difference on whether I actually pull the trigger or not.
For me the winner with Jetbrains is that I can see clear prices, the product is defined and I can cancel easily.
With other enterprise products it takes forever to get pricing, scope of what you buy and how to cancel.
A while ago we had to price Windows for 5000 custom devices and it was infuriating to go through a convoluted process with lots of different people, meetings and whatever.
I once tried to buy 2 Windows embedded licenses for a prototype. All the official resellers in my country couldn’t even connect me with a person who could give me a quote, without first getting a certification, finishing courses, signing contracts, etc.
We rewrote our application on Linux then, it was much easier than dealing with MS licensing BS.
I'm always amazed when I see the various embedded contexts I find windows out in the wild. Usually when they are glitching out and displaying a start menu or something.
I guess they are operating at a scale where the licensing hell isn't a major roadblock? I don't get it.
Is it an embedded version though? If you see the start menu, probably not. Because you can easily disable it on windows embedded. And configure a lot of other things, that prevent it from glitching out.
Regarding the intro of the article: I agree, it's important not to heed any advice that tells you that you just can't advertise or market to any particular demographic.
Advertising and marketing are essentially universal truths. If you are having trouble reaching someone, it most definitely isn't because "ads just won't work on them."
Also many websites the product is not showing what it does on the front page. Many times they extol how amazing the product is. Best thing ever, customer abc built more whatamdongles with it, etc, etc. But what does your product actually do?! How would I use it? When buying a tool I am many times not buying fashion. I am buying a tool that does something. Be upfront what your tool is. If you are 1 of 5 competitors explain what your tool does that the others dont. Dont make me dig around on your site to find it or sign up for something just to look at your docs. It shows me you are not serious about helping me, other than helping money out of my wallet, and trying to setup a time to talk and waste my time.
> Pushy pop-ups, "do it now", flashy colors, and all that stuff.
Things that work like a charm in e-commerce or fashion will most likely not work on devs.
Not just 'not work', but 'actively repel'. A popup chat bot or a survey form request (during or after using a website or software product) or anything not germane to the task that has a shadow or notification highlight has slowly but surely become a form of wart that elicits a deep, instinctual disgust from me. I'd even say an unhealthy and unreasonable level of disgust.
It's enough to get me to instantly despise a product almost nomatter how well it does its original job.
But 100 folks who actually click ads or interact with these distraction baubles (mistakenly or otherwise) are worth thousands of people like me, so I understand why it won't ever change for the better out of a company's own volition.
---
When it comes to advertising, say, developer tooling, I think a large part of the problem is that there's just not going to be a lot of relevant tools out there, for my job or hobbies, that I either don't already know about (and aren't using because I have already evaluated its prospects) or... I am already using it. Conversely, seeing ads for something I am already using has potential for negative effects (see above). Tasteful advertising is thus useful for the rare case of something I don't know about, but I don't think it's worth it when 999/1000 of these ads are detrimental and irrelevant.
> Not just 'not work', but 'actively repel'. A popup chat bot or a survey form request (during or after using a website or software product) or anything not germane to the task that has a shadow or notification highlight has slowly but surely become a form of wart that elicits a deep, instinctual disgust from me. I'd even say an unhealthy and unreasonable level of disgust.
Same here. I've even setup a bunch of Firefox extensions just to keep the annoying ad-like stuff away from me.
Sometimes, when I open up a browser on a computer I don't own, I get surprised by how filled internet is with annoyances. It feels like I've put on the glasses from They Live and can suddenly see all the bullsh-t.
There's no form of marketing that I "like" or actively reward, at most there's marketing that I fell for.
Anything that comes from the primary source is an automatic nope, I'll only take positive accounts from third-party sources. Unfortunately, not even that is enough, so I've become wary of HN comments praising any particular product.
What's even more unfortunate is that you have to apply the same skepticism to open source "products" these days as it has become common even for open source projects to exaggerate the project's capabilities and be dishonest about its limitations.
I used to be a bar manager 16 years ago and would often see the Anheuser-Busch marketing rep for our region out and about, and she would never fail to use her corporate credit card to buy me some free drinks. I liked that form of marketing.
>There's no form of marketing that I "like" or actively reward, at most there's marketing that I fell for.
For very high value software licensing agreements there's huge financial rewards for performing the marketing dance with the vendor. Paying list for enterprise software doesn't happen. Customers who even know what Oracle RAS is , or SQL SERVER Parallel, are numbered in the hundreds. The expenditure on manpower to design and commission a new major database installation is two to three orders of magnitude greater than the license costs. That's per database not enterprise wide. You embark upon a courtship from the outset.
This isn't what the article nor what most everyone's discussing, but I thought it worthwhile to offer a real illustration of a very viable means of sales and marketing that can be made to work if you have a high value application or service and can identify a small finite number of customers.
Edit: I probably should have said the number of customers who know what they're doing with the most sophisticated databases is very likely in the hundreds. Arguably the market is rather larger but if the behaviour F500 generally is any indication, there's a lot of nameplate and marquee buying driven by C suite egos. If you're selling a unique and expensive application this is where your margins are. And where tales of sales excess and bad reputation / hubris attaching to your product originate.
When I was younger, I sold turquoise jewelry at the Grand Canyon and I feel about the same towards sales and marketing, I mean they are the same with different levels of scale. I found an exception though, the way we sold in the shop I worked at would only teach people interesting things if they showed interest, explain the history, the nuances, give some background on the artist who made it, things like that. Even if there wasn't a sale the ones who took the time to listen still learned something interesting, and those who did buy now had something cool to tell to people who would ask them about it later.
So I guess I'm saying that tutorial style marketing is ok, but that's such a small amount of what passes for marketing nowadays, and marketing tends to always take anything and everything too far to the point of ruining it and whatever platform supports it.
I would personally say that while marketing elements exist within the essays, they are more like an attempt to influence the industry he operates in (tech focused venture capital) to as much an extent as he is capable with words alone.
His essays strike me as appeals promoting a certain manner of thinking that he wishes to impart, while also naturally acting as marketing simply due to his own default mode of thought being deeply entrenched in entrepreneurship.
It'd be very interesting to see the results of some A/B tests where they looked at the effectiveness of a marketing funnel with some of these distracting features on and off.
I mean, I think we all know what the results would be, but I think that a lot of bean-counter types will only listen to beans counted...
> Some devs would be surprised because this stuff is effective at getting a larger N - total sales funnel volume, not efficiency, is most of their goal.
This is a short-term/long-term tradeoff. If you have the choice between:
- N people into the funnel, 10% decide to join, the rest go away without a negative opinion, some of them even with a "not right now but maybe later" opinion
- 10*N people into the funnel, 2% decide to join, the rest go away with varying degrees of negative opinion
Short-term, the second choice will give you 2x the users joining. Long-term, the second choice will give your company a bad reputation.
A/B testing creative is pretty typical. I'm certain "flashy" ads that get your attention perform better. Of course, they change the style of your page, and if you don't like they way they make your site look, don't use them.
For something I am already using and actively repel (because I have to use it but hate it) I do the following: I click on every ad I can find, because they advertise a lot, to make them pay 1.30 usd per click for nothing. I'm only seeing this ad now, everywhere.
Anything connected to ads or marketing triggers a visceral response of disgust in me.
Not just towards products or companies that try to show me an ad, but for the advertising/marketing industry itself, the very concept of ads, and all the professions staffed with people who make it their life's work to promulgate it all. It reeks to me of hot air and lies.
Any I don't trust any company (looking at you, Google and Facebook) whose revenue comes primarily from ads - such income poisons everything it touches.
> CircleCi is (or was) remarketing withyoutube pre-roll video ads to people who with case study testimonials to users who visited the page but haven’t signed up
Is this the nitpick thread? Here’s mine: there’s a horizontal overflow on iOS, so it’s difficult to scroll vertically down the y-axis of the page without accidentally scrolling on the x-axis too. This is a pet peeve of mine and so many websites (my own included at times) do this.
But thanks for sharing your site and this analysis. It’s easy to trust your authority on the matter in the title of this post, considering its current ranking on the front page of HN!
Will you post a follow-up with numbers analyzing today’s success of marketing to developers who market to developers? :)
The Framework laptop team is doing developer advertising very well IMHO.
I see their ads on multiple sites, and the ads are direct, clear, and advice-oriented i.e. the Framework ad explains a capability and why it's relevant and a differentiator.
Most of the listed ad networks are blocked by uBlock Origin. SponsorBlock is crowdsourced YouTube ad flagging. It is not surprising that those paid channels would not be effective for firms not willing to commit the $$
SponsorBlock is unfortunate, as sponsorships are the “good” form of advertising. No invasive tracking or targeting, contextual targeting only, and generally vetted by content creators (as least far better than ads sold on exchanges).
"Fundamentalist" is a fair description; I do feel quite strongly about this.
The function of advertising is to intrude on your awareness, stealing attention from whatever it is you actually care about, in order to create a desire for something you were previously content without, in hopes of enriching the advertiser at your expense. Ads are a tax on your attention which hope to to take a toll on your pocketbook; they benefit advertisers by making everyone else's lives just a little bit worse.
In Seattle, billboards are forbidden (with a few grandfathered-in exceptions), but stores are still permitted to post signs. This seems like a reasonable compromise; labeling the contents of the building provides useful information, which seems beneficial enough to outweigh the advertising function of the sign.
I suppose brochures are fine if you go in and get one because you are curious; but someone walking down the street bothering people by handing them out at random would be an asshole.
I don't spend a lot of time on Youtube, and rarely have the patience to watch the sort of videos people make in hopes of earning money, so I don't have much of an opinion there. I did install SponsorBlock recently, just in case.
They're really not vetted by the creators, usually.
Edit: I mean the products aren't usually vetted, they just make an ad saying how great it is, all the while most likely not having even tried it. How many YouTubers do you think actually played Raid Shadow Legends or used NordVPN?
Problem is a) it is the same stuff that is being sold all across youtube, b) aside from maybe audible none of that is a good offer, c) the claimed benefits are non-existent or bullshit (see all VPN ads) and finally d) the problem is not advertising, it is terrible products. Good products should not need creators to sponsor them, they should get creators so excited they can't stop talking about it.
A) Youtube is a big site. It's more likely that you're seeing the same ads on the channels that you watch. It's very unlikely to be the same set that I see.
b) Apart from the products you like, none of it is a good offer?
c) Are you sure this is true for all sponsors?
d) Is advertising ever justified in your mind?
Overall, I think you just don't like ads, so have decided to arrive at that conclusion. Your arguments don't seem to hold water.
I am talking about ads in sponsored segments. The inventory of youtube ads is much bigger, but I blocked them a long time ago (too annoying).
As for the sponsor ads it is always things like hello fresh, vpn ads, ads for free to pay games, etc. You can argue that hello fresh could be a good deal for a very small selection of people[0], and VPNs might be fine if people didn't lie about what they can do but in general it is shit or actively harmful.
Think of it this way: if you are making the best make up brush, do you want to pay for a sponsorship or just send a few samples to channels that are likely to feature it? On the other hand if what you make is so-so you have to pay to be featured.
It wasn't because ridgewallet was so good everybody was showing it, it was because they were paid for it - and even if you want a wallet like that, you are the one who pays for all the marketing.
So to sum up: most products are not revolutionary, the few that are gets their own mention because they are revolutionary and so what is left over is either too expensive or not good enough.
[0]: disposable money and enough time to cook, but not too much time and/or not enough skills to make a dish from scratch.
> I am talking about ads in sponsored segments. The inventory of youtube ads is much bigger, but I blocked them a long time ago (too annoying).
I'm also talking about sponsorships, not Youtube ads (preroll, display, interstitial, etc). However, I don't watch the same channels you do, so I don't see the same sponsorships.
I have seen a Hello Fresh sponsorship, but never Ridgewallet or Raid Shadow Legends that someone else mentioned. I have seen sponsorships from electronics components companies, airlines, medical supplies companies, body armour, agricultural equipment, solar panel installers, a local newspaper, a local dairy, etc.
Edit: Funnily enough, I just heard my first sponsorship for a prescription hair loss medication - ads for prescription medications are illegal here (Ireland) so definitely a bad ad.
Unless you happen to be an Irish search-and-rescue medic who lives part-time on a farm (or have the same interests), you aren't going to see the same sponsorships. Your bubble may contain VPN and F2P games, but mine doesn't. Hence, making generalisations based on your own experience is not helpful.
In the end, I don't think there's anything wrong with using SponsorBlock, but I don't believe that you have an ethical motivation for using it. If so, the best course of action would be to simply avoid the channels/podcasts peddling the products you don't like. You use it for convenience, plain and simple.
Sponsorships encourage deception (tricking the user into not skipping) and building up parasocial relationships with the audience to abuse their trust, the worst of the influencer world
I made SponsorBlock, and over the years working on it, I have been able to see how horrible some of the techniques people use are
Do you believe that sponsorships are worse that targeted digital advertising?
Do you believe there are any Youtubers who have acted ethically in accepting sponsorships?
> I made SponsorBlock, and over the years working on it, I have been able to see how horrible some of the techniques people use are
It seems somewhat hypocritical to pretend that SponsorBlock is an ethical reaction to bad sponsorships when the clear ethical response would be to simply not watch the content. To be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with SponsorBlock, but let's be honest. It's purpose is convenience, not any higher moral objective.
> Do you believe that sponsorships are worse that targeted digital advertising?
With podcasts, it seems people are now trying to get the worst of both worlds, with dynamic advertisements from a pool based on who you are + the ads are read out by the podcast creator. I can't say that either case is worse than the other, but they are bad for different reasons.
> Do you believe there are any Youtubers who have acted ethically in accepting sponsorships?
There exist some that have clear transitions, declare in the first sentence that it is a sponsor, repeat at the end that it is a sponsor, and say explicitly in the ad-read that it is not their opinion but a script. That is certainly less deceptive. But unfortunately, this is not usually consistent. Some of their videos will do it well, and some do it poorly.
> It's purpose is convenience, not any higher moral objective
With "full video" labels (https://blog.ajay.app/full-video-sponsorblock), I've started to delve into the fixing bad declarations world. Full videos don't skip anything, but just inform the viewer what to watch out for. I want to make a wiki-like system for organising more precise biases in the future as well, and allow people to know which where each opinion in a video comes from.
Another fact I'll point out is that we sometimes get complaints that certain sponsor sections are incorrect, even though they totally are correct due to them not knowing it is paid promotion. An example is dbrand, which pays many top tech people to randomly mention their name in reviews, usually without much disclosure.
I don't think you're being honest in your motivations here. SponsorBlock is a convenience tool to avoid having to watch/listen to ads. It's your stated aim on your website:
> SponsorBlock is an open-source crowdsourced browser extension and open API for skipping sponsor segments in YouTube videos.
Again, I don't think there's anything morally wrong with using SponsorBlock, but I think it's absurd to claim it's a morally positive tool.
The thing that sparked the idea was a badly disclosed sponsorship. The saving time bits are great, and that's why there's more features now than just ads, you can skip intros too. However, I did start this explicitly due to being frustrated with the state of deception in the sponsorship world, and that remains my main motivation.
That may have been the initial motivation, but SponsorBlock isn't a tool to reveal hidden product placement or sponsorships. It's not described that way on your site or the add-on pages, used that way, or - if we're honest - popular for that reason.
In the end, the motivation is not the tool as implemented.
There is no money you can pay to get the same experience as SponsorBlock. Some channels are offering "sponsor-free" content on exclusive sites such as Nebula, CorridorDigital.com and Floatplane, but I've checked all of these out and they don't cut as smoothly as us, and often leave parts of sponsorships in if they find it humourous. Some of the sponsor cuts on Nebula are done so lazily...
If Nebula existed when I created SponsorBlock, would I have created it? Maybe not, but I think the existence of the tool should prove that people want to avoid this stuff, and more creators should take note and provide ways to at least pay to avoid it.
And, if your ads are still deceptive, allowing a privileged few to pay to avoid them doesn't solve that issue
You didn't answer the question. If the creators are deceptive, isn't the ethical course of action to stop consuming their content.
After all, SponsorBlock doesn't address the deception or the parasocial nature you complained about elsewhere. It just hides the ads that the creators inserted.
Given that SponsorBlock also allows users to skip the segments where users are offered ways to pay (like Patreon), it also seems especially hypocritical to suggest that.
Again, I don't think there's anything morally wrong with using SponsorBlock, but I think you're fooling yourself if you think it serves some public good. It just removes the only privacy-preserving form of advertising available to creators and let's people consume their work without the inconvenience of watching the ads that pay for it.
> isn't the ethical course of action to stop consuming their content.
No, I don't believe so, abd that's the fundamental disagreement
https://giveup.ajay.app/ here's some fun satire of taking that opinion to the extreme. How dare you steal from advertiser by not following through and buying their product :)
That link doesn't address the opinion at all, because you claimed that SponsorBlock is not designed to simply block sponsorship ads. You began our conversation with:
> Sponsorships encourage deception (tricking the user into not skipping) and building up parasocial relationships with the audience to abuse their trust, the worst of the influencer world
SponsorBlock doesn't address either of these points.
If the creator is truly deceiving the user to try to get them to watch an ad or building a parasocial relationship in order to increase the chances of conversion (which is your claim), then I don't see how continuing to watch their content minus the ads is any better for the user. Of course, that doesn't really matter because SponsorBlock has a different true purpose, to remove the inconvenience of watching ads.
Once again, I don't have a problem with SponsorBlock or using SponsorBlock to avoid ads. I think you're trying to rationalise your decision to build SponsorBlock by trying to claim it serves some moral good or higher purpose. Whether that's conscious hypocrisy or internalised self-deception is another matter.
To be honest, only parasocial dynamic I see here, is his argumentation.
But yeah, some people just think they deserve to have content served for free for them...
I was simply saying that sponsorships incentivize those bad behaviors
Labeling something on a timeline, or skipping it, does prevent someone from deceptively convincing you to follow through with the action they want. If you have an idea on how to fix people's attachments to parasocial relationships, I'd love to hear it, as I think it's important as well. SponsorBlock does not, and cannot, solve every problem I have with the world.
Thank you for making it. I don't really care much about deceptive advertising, but I love the peace of mind it gives me, because I can dwell into a topic without getting distracted by irrelevant stuff.
I did the Hacktoberfest one for years getting a T-shirt every time. I liked the T-shirt and might have done it anyway, as I sometimes continued contributing for a while after the event.
After a while the sense I got from Hactoberfest changed. Both from the projects and the promoters in ways that disagreed with the way I think about opensource and contributing to it. So I haven't participated since.
Exactly. I'd love to hear about folks' most beloved swag and sticker acquisitions! This is where people's affinity and affiliation is shown.
In my own career, I remember my first IBM "THINK" button back in the 1980s, as well as my first six-colored "Apple" stickers. Showed them off with pride.
I saw the story above about the "200 OK" t-shirt. I still wear t-shirts for an industry I haven't worked for in over two decades.
This is where brands aren't fighting for your attention. You're happy to champion them. Because you are sold on their tech, and you consider yourself part of their tribe. Or it just has some sort of totally obscure geeky formula or tech reference that only you and others in the tribe will get the in-joke.
I jumped through a lot of hoops to earn a free t-shirt that says "Everything will be 200 OK". I had to sign up for a couple cloud services and set up some kind of automation, essentially demo-ing the product to myself to get the shirt. It was smart on their part.
My company sponsored a coding livestream recently that featured a dev integrating with our product and I was astonished at how excited folks were to have a chance to win a t-shirt.
Haha, hopefully there are other good parts too! But I confess, I'm wearing a "Enjoy Code" t-shirt (like "Enjoy Coke") I picked up at a conference right now.
And, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out anyone who wants a free FusionAuth t-shirt can go to https://fusionauth.io/download , install it, and share a screenshot and we'll ship you one. Further instructions there.
Unfortunately we can only ship to the USA and Canada for this offer.
People get unreasonably excited about swag. I try not to take T-shirts any longer unless there's something unique about them. If it's just some random company's name I'll pass. I've given away huge trash bags of lightly worn or unworn T-shirts and I still have massive piles of them.
As the purveyor of this shirt, it warms my heart to read this comment. We pretty much copied New Relic's model for this, and it worked really well. For awhile it felt like we were more a t-shirt company than a software company.
As far as expanding customer use I think having really good and actually helpful docs are critical. The services that I use that have great docs get used a lot more and integrate with apps much deeper than services with okay or shitty docs that feel half assed.
Docs are critical! This article focuses on awareness, but if you create awareness but developers see out of date, missing or incorrect docs, they'll bounce.
That said, it's a struggle. Sure, there are some pieces of doc you can generate (API docs, for sure) but others are more conversational and can get out of date.
I work on EthicalAds, one of the ad networks mentioned in the post. We focus on targeting relevant developer-focused ads to content rather than to individuals.
The post is great. My only nitpick is that the author mentions that they think retargeting will go away. The scope of retargeting might be reduced especially as third-party cookies stop working but I don't think retargeting will completely go away. Big ad companies with whom visitors have a direct relationship with (Google, FB) will always be able to do it. They know the pages on their sites and those linked from their site that visitors visit and they will use it to target ads. They don't need third-party cookies since they have first-party cookies.
Networks that just do ads and don't have relationships with visitors except for advertising will find it harder and harder. At EthicalAds, we don't do retargeting at all because of our privacy focus, but many ad networks will find retargeting more challenging (less precise, they can always fingerprint users) to do. Doing away with it is a good thing from a privacy perspective but it probably will further entrench the big players.
I don't know if it's a danger or just the illusion of one, but one of the things that targeted ads supposedly avoid is that of influence. In theory if the floor wax I'm advertising in my hypothetical home improvement content decides that they have a personal issue with some of the ethics I have espoused, then there is pressure for me to change or lose the endorsement.
This could be either direction as well. We could disagree on anything from me showcasing work by a feminist or LGBTQ+ carpenter, to me making a statement about fair trade goods and one of their suppliers is in a country known for rampant human rights violations.
The problem I think is that life is full of compromises, and I don't know that the bargain we've made and are now experiencing the consequences of is a particularly good one.
1. Go to your local Hackerspace (or makerspace). If you don't have a Hackerspace in your city - create one.
2. Sit there with your target audience. Don't be pushy.
3. Solve their problem with your solution, in real-time.
Also, you should spend like half of my time on Meetup.com and try to attend all possible dev-oriented events where you could pitch my product. Time consuming, but rewarding. Worked with https://aidlab.com/developer
Create a maker space in an increasing all remote working environment as a marketing tool? Slow, expensive, small user base….maybe if you convert a ton but that $$$ might be better used doing the digital ocean strategy mentioned above (ie be useful)
One problem the advertising industry fails to understand is that an advertising agency, or whatever source the ads originate from, is a socioppath.
Developers are logical and practical thinkers and despise sociopathic behavior.
Developers have a very strong resistance to this sort of manipulation.
Advertisers are unable to cope with this reality or understand their true nature in our economy, so they continue to do more "research" on how to engage developers, who in turn, learn how to better detect and evade sociopaths
Im also very surprised that in 2022, there are developers that see ads at all, outside of glancing at some non technical person's youtube tab.There are browsers now that are completely ad free, even without add-ons or extensions. Ads are horribly toxic in nature and an offense to the human psyche and to any person's dignity.
I wasn't aware the digital camera wars had ended -- somebody better tell Canon -- but "advertising to developers" sure sounds like what Blackmagic does:
Congrats on landing on the HN front page! Good stuff, although a table of contents could make navigation easier for readers.
EDIT: I originally read your article on mobile but viewing on a desktop, I see a ToC on the left-hand side of the page. So, scratch my earlier remark about a ToC.
I’m working on something similar, but from a different angle: marketing to developers organically. Hoping to have it published soon.
I do B2B advertising for a living, and that includes a lot to developers. Fun article!
Facebook is going to work better than twitter for direct response just be sheer volume, even though developers are less likely to use FB than the average person.
Generally to target working developers you want to let them know your free trial exists so they can poke around in it. To market to the bosses you use gated content.
Certainly could play a role. Another benefit is they have a long tail effect, where people who listen to it a year from the original air date will hear it.
I listened to a podcast the other day on Spotify on my phone. Last time I did podcasts was maybe 10 years ago. I was properly confused when an ad block appeared. I had forgotten what ads even were like, and there was no skip button! (For example, for YouTube there’s Sponsorblock)
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadThey're probably the only tool that I pay money for, and I'm generally happy to do so, because I get a ton of value from it.
My only complaint is in a polyglot environment it can be painful to have multiple jetbrains ides running in the same project root.
A number of years ago they shipped all of the different products as plugins to intellij. unfortunately at some point that stopped. I wish they resolve it, because it's slowly driving me to vscode.
It would really be lovely if the Jetbrains all-in license gave you each product as its own standalone and as an IntelliJ plug-in.
Same here, and because of that I sub to the All Products bundle, while if I had to convince my employer it would be for PyCharm only. The Personal All Products license is $50 more per year than a Corporate Single Language license.
Gaining a perpetual license after 1 year of subscription also makes the subscription an easier pill for me to swallow.
Did they stop? I still use IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate for most languages (Go, Java, Rust, JavaScript/TypeScript). I had to use Rider for C#, AppCode for Swift, and CLion for C/C++, but those are the only special cases afaik, or are those languages the ones you use & have problems with?
The plugin updates are sometimes a bit behind the dedicated IDEs in terms of feature releases which is annoying but I think you can often download an EAP build to get around that.
I mainly use goland & clion, and clion definitely doens't have an equivalent plugin. It's been a long time since I've tried to use intellij though, so perhaps my impressions are antiquated.
As far as Go, I've had a great experience with the Go plugin for IntelliJ. You do need the ultimate license for that though, iirc.
My issue is the things they just don't do, Jupyter Notebooks, more than anything else.
The good news is that their new Fleet product has it all in one again.
The bad news is that it’s not anywhere near production ready (not at a point where it can compete with any of their othet products anyway).
With other enterprise products it takes forever to get pricing, scope of what you buy and how to cancel.
A while ago we had to price Windows for 5000 custom devices and it was infuriating to go through a convoluted process with lots of different people, meetings and whatever.
We rewrote our application on Linux then, it was much easier than dealing with MS licensing BS.
I guess they are operating at a scale where the licensing hell isn't a major roadblock? I don't get it.
Advertising and marketing are essentially universal truths. If you are having trouble reaching someone, it most definitely isn't because "ads just won't work on them."
Not just 'not work', but 'actively repel'. A popup chat bot or a survey form request (during or after using a website or software product) or anything not germane to the task that has a shadow or notification highlight has slowly but surely become a form of wart that elicits a deep, instinctual disgust from me. I'd even say an unhealthy and unreasonable level of disgust.
It's enough to get me to instantly despise a product almost nomatter how well it does its original job.
But 100 folks who actually click ads or interact with these distraction baubles (mistakenly or otherwise) are worth thousands of people like me, so I understand why it won't ever change for the better out of a company's own volition.
---
When it comes to advertising, say, developer tooling, I think a large part of the problem is that there's just not going to be a lot of relevant tools out there, for my job or hobbies, that I either don't already know about (and aren't using because I have already evaluated its prospects) or... I am already using it. Conversely, seeing ads for something I am already using has potential for negative effects (see above). Tasteful advertising is thus useful for the rare case of something I don't know about, but I don't think it's worth it when 999/1000 of these ads are detrimental and irrelevant.
Same here. I've even setup a bunch of Firefox extensions just to keep the annoying ad-like stuff away from me.
Sometimes, when I open up a browser on a computer I don't own, I get surprised by how filled internet is with annoyances. It feels like I've put on the glasses from They Live and can suddenly see all the bullsh-t.
Anything that comes from the primary source is an automatic nope, I'll only take positive accounts from third-party sources. Unfortunately, not even that is enough, so I've become wary of HN comments praising any particular product.
What's even more unfortunate is that you have to apply the same skepticism to open source "products" these days as it has become common even for open source projects to exaggerate the project's capabilities and be dishonest about its limitations.
I could have flown myself to Nashville every weekend. But they made me feel special with a plane ticket and a few bar bills.
I guess it's the difference between 'marketing' and 'sales'.
For very high value software licensing agreements there's huge financial rewards for performing the marketing dance with the vendor. Paying list for enterprise software doesn't happen. Customers who even know what Oracle RAS is , or SQL SERVER Parallel, are numbered in the hundreds. The expenditure on manpower to design and commission a new major database installation is two to three orders of magnitude greater than the license costs. That's per database not enterprise wide. You embark upon a courtship from the outset.
This isn't what the article nor what most everyone's discussing, but I thought it worthwhile to offer a real illustration of a very viable means of sales and marketing that can be made to work if you have a high value application or service and can identify a small finite number of customers.
Edit: I probably should have said the number of customers who know what they're doing with the most sophisticated databases is very likely in the hundreds. Arguably the market is rather larger but if the behaviour F500 generally is any indication, there's a lot of nameplate and marquee buying driven by C suite egos. If you're selling a unique and expensive application this is where your margins are. And where tales of sales excess and bad reputation / hubris attaching to your product originate.
So I guess I'm saying that tutorial style marketing is ok, but that's such a small amount of what passes for marketing nowadays, and marketing tends to always take anything and everything too far to the point of ruining it and whatever platform supports it.
You don't like Paul Graham's essays? Because they are marketing. One of the best I've ever seen I may add.
His essays strike me as appeals promoting a certain manner of thinking that he wishes to impart, while also naturally acting as marketing simply due to his own default mode of thought being deeply entrenched in entrepreneurship.
Exactly. If I see something like that I'll often add a custom ad-block rule so it never shows again.
I mean, I think we all know what the results would be, but I think that a lot of bean-counter types will only listen to beans counted...
The marketers would be surprised because they believe people need the shit they advertise.
Some devs would be surprised because this stuff is effective at getting a larger N - total sales funnel volume, not efficiency, is most of their goal.
Most devs would be surprised that it’s even something people talk about.
And the regular citizen like my mom would be surprised that such a thing even exists.
This is a short-term/long-term tradeoff. If you have the choice between:
- N people into the funnel, 10% decide to join, the rest go away without a negative opinion, some of them even with a "not right now but maybe later" opinion
- 10*N people into the funnel, 2% decide to join, the rest go away with varying degrees of negative opinion
Short-term, the second choice will give you 2x the users joining. Long-term, the second choice will give your company a bad reputation.
For something I am already using and actively repel (because I have to use it but hate it) I do the following: I click on every ad I can find, because they advertise a lot, to make them pay 1.30 usd per click for nothing. I'm only seeing this ad now, everywhere.
Anything connected to ads or marketing triggers a visceral response of disgust in me.
Not just towards products or companies that try to show me an ad, but for the advertising/marketing industry itself, the very concept of ads, and all the professions staffed with people who make it their life's work to promulgate it all. It reeks to me of hot air and lies.
Any I don't trust any company (looking at you, Google and Facebook) whose revenue comes primarily from ads - such income poisons everything it touches.
> Advertising to developers with feels like asking for trouble.
~with~. "Advertising to developers feels like asking for trouble."
Looking forward to reading the rest of this :)
> CircleCi is (or was) remarketing withyoutube pre-roll video ads to people who with case study testimonials to users who visited the page but haven’t signed up
Not sure how I fk it up when updating/editing.
But I did...
But thanks for sharing your site and this analysis. It’s easy to trust your authority on the matter in the title of this post, considering its current ranking on the front page of HN!
Will you post a follow-up with numbers analyzing today’s success of marketing to developers who market to developers? :)
I see their ads on multiple sites, and the ads are direct, clear, and advice-oriented i.e. the Framework ad explains a capability and why it's relevant and a differentiator.
Most of the listed ad networks are blocked by uBlock Origin. SponsorBlock is crowdsourced YouTube ad flagging. It is not surprising that those paid channels would not be effective for firms not willing to commit the $$
The function of advertising is to intrude on your awareness, stealing attention from whatever it is you actually care about, in order to create a desire for something you were previously content without, in hopes of enriching the advertiser at your expense. Ads are a tax on your attention which hope to to take a toll on your pocketbook; they benefit advertisers by making everyone else's lives just a little bit worse.
In Seattle, billboards are forbidden (with a few grandfathered-in exceptions), but stores are still permitted to post signs. This seems like a reasonable compromise; labeling the contents of the building provides useful information, which seems beneficial enough to outweigh the advertising function of the sign.
I suppose brochures are fine if you go in and get one because you are curious; but someone walking down the street bothering people by handing them out at random would be an asshole.
Where do you feel the line is online, specifically in Youtube videos/podcasts, where SponsorBlock is effective?
Edit: I mean the products aren't usually vetted, they just make an ad saying how great it is, all the while most likely not having even tried it. How many YouTubers do you think actually played Raid Shadow Legends or used NordVPN?
b) Apart from the products you like, none of it is a good offer?
c) Are you sure this is true for all sponsors?
d) Is advertising ever justified in your mind?
Overall, I think you just don't like ads, so have decided to arrive at that conclusion. Your arguments don't seem to hold water.
As for the sponsor ads it is always things like hello fresh, vpn ads, ads for free to pay games, etc. You can argue that hello fresh could be a good deal for a very small selection of people[0], and VPNs might be fine if people didn't lie about what they can do but in general it is shit or actively harmful.
Think of it this way: if you are making the best make up brush, do you want to pay for a sponsorship or just send a few samples to channels that are likely to feature it? On the other hand if what you make is so-so you have to pay to be featured.
It wasn't because ridgewallet was so good everybody was showing it, it was because they were paid for it - and even if you want a wallet like that, you are the one who pays for all the marketing.
So to sum up: most products are not revolutionary, the few that are gets their own mention because they are revolutionary and so what is left over is either too expensive or not good enough.
[0]: disposable money and enough time to cook, but not too much time and/or not enough skills to make a dish from scratch.
I'm also talking about sponsorships, not Youtube ads (preroll, display, interstitial, etc). However, I don't watch the same channels you do, so I don't see the same sponsorships.
I have seen a Hello Fresh sponsorship, but never Ridgewallet or Raid Shadow Legends that someone else mentioned. I have seen sponsorships from electronics components companies, airlines, medical supplies companies, body armour, agricultural equipment, solar panel installers, a local newspaper, a local dairy, etc.
Edit: Funnily enough, I just heard my first sponsorship for a prescription hair loss medication - ads for prescription medications are illegal here (Ireland) so definitely a bad ad.
Unless you happen to be an Irish search-and-rescue medic who lives part-time on a farm (or have the same interests), you aren't going to see the same sponsorships. Your bubble may contain VPN and F2P games, but mine doesn't. Hence, making generalisations based on your own experience is not helpful.
In the end, I don't think there's anything wrong with using SponsorBlock, but I don't believe that you have an ethical motivation for using it. If so, the best course of action would be to simply avoid the channels/podcasts peddling the products you don't like. You use it for convenience, plain and simple.
I made SponsorBlock, and over the years working on it, I have been able to see how horrible some of the techniques people use are
Do you believe that sponsorships are worse that targeted digital advertising?
Do you believe there are any Youtubers who have acted ethically in accepting sponsorships?
> I made SponsorBlock, and over the years working on it, I have been able to see how horrible some of the techniques people use are
It seems somewhat hypocritical to pretend that SponsorBlock is an ethical reaction to bad sponsorships when the clear ethical response would be to simply not watch the content. To be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with SponsorBlock, but let's be honest. It's purpose is convenience, not any higher moral objective.
With podcasts, it seems people are now trying to get the worst of both worlds, with dynamic advertisements from a pool based on who you are + the ads are read out by the podcast creator. I can't say that either case is worse than the other, but they are bad for different reasons.
> Do you believe there are any Youtubers who have acted ethically in accepting sponsorships?
There exist some that have clear transitions, declare in the first sentence that it is a sponsor, repeat at the end that it is a sponsor, and say explicitly in the ad-read that it is not their opinion but a script. That is certainly less deceptive. But unfortunately, this is not usually consistent. Some of their videos will do it well, and some do it poorly.
> It's purpose is convenience, not any higher moral objective
With "full video" labels (https://blog.ajay.app/full-video-sponsorblock), I've started to delve into the fixing bad declarations world. Full videos don't skip anything, but just inform the viewer what to watch out for. I want to make a wiki-like system for organising more precise biases in the future as well, and allow people to know which where each opinion in a video comes from.
Another fact I'll point out is that we sometimes get complaints that certain sponsor sections are incorrect, even though they totally are correct due to them not knowing it is paid promotion. An example is dbrand, which pays many top tech people to randomly mention their name in reviews, usually without much disclosure.
> SponsorBlock is an open-source crowdsourced browser extension and open API for skipping sponsor segments in YouTube videos.
Again, I don't think there's anything morally wrong with using SponsorBlock, but I think it's absurd to claim it's a morally positive tool.
The thing that sparked the idea was a badly disclosed sponsorship. The saving time bits are great, and that's why there's more features now than just ads, you can skip intros too. However, I did start this explicitly due to being frustrated with the state of deception in the sponsorship world, and that remains my main motivation.
In the end, the motivation is not the tool as implemented.
(I assume from your message tone that you are not a fan of paying for the content, either)
If Nebula existed when I created SponsorBlock, would I have created it? Maybe not, but I think the existence of the tool should prove that people want to avoid this stuff, and more creators should take note and provide ways to at least pay to avoid it.
And, if your ads are still deceptive, allowing a privileged few to pay to avoid them doesn't solve that issue
After all, SponsorBlock doesn't address the deception or the parasocial nature you complained about elsewhere. It just hides the ads that the creators inserted.
Given that SponsorBlock also allows users to skip the segments where users are offered ways to pay (like Patreon), it also seems especially hypocritical to suggest that.
Again, I don't think there's anything morally wrong with using SponsorBlock, but I think you're fooling yourself if you think it serves some public good. It just removes the only privacy-preserving form of advertising available to creators and let's people consume their work without the inconvenience of watching the ads that pay for it.
No, I don't believe so, abd that's the fundamental disagreement
https://giveup.ajay.app/ here's some fun satire of taking that opinion to the extreme. How dare you steal from advertiser by not following through and buying their product :)
> Sponsorships encourage deception (tricking the user into not skipping) and building up parasocial relationships with the audience to abuse their trust, the worst of the influencer world
SponsorBlock doesn't address either of these points.
If the creator is truly deceiving the user to try to get them to watch an ad or building a parasocial relationship in order to increase the chances of conversion (which is your claim), then I don't see how continuing to watch their content minus the ads is any better for the user. Of course, that doesn't really matter because SponsorBlock has a different true purpose, to remove the inconvenience of watching ads.
Once again, I don't have a problem with SponsorBlock or using SponsorBlock to avoid ads. I think you're trying to rationalise your decision to build SponsorBlock by trying to claim it serves some moral good or higher purpose. Whether that's conscious hypocrisy or internalised self-deception is another matter.
Labeling something on a timeline, or skipping it, does prevent someone from deceptively convincing you to follow through with the action they want. If you have an idea on how to fix people's attachments to parasocial relationships, I'd love to hear it, as I think it's important as well. SponsorBlock does not, and cannot, solve every problem I have with the world.
People that managed to reach me did so by either:
- helping me solving one problem
- creating something that looked really cool and fun
At my last place they found most effective to sponsor a couple of popular podcasts - they were paying $15 to 20K per month.
- (1) For example, YC startup had API integration contest with a real battle axe as the prize:
https://www.wufoo.com/blog/win-a-real-battle-axe-in-the-wufo...
- (2) Then there’s the free developer swag promotions:
https://iq.opengenus.org/ways-to-earn-free-cool-developer-sw...
After a while the sense I got from Hactoberfest changed. Both from the projects and the promoters in ways that disagreed with the way I think about opensource and contributing to it. So I haven't participated since.
In my own career, I remember my first IBM "THINK" button back in the 1980s, as well as my first six-colored "Apple" stickers. Showed them off with pride.
I saw the story above about the "200 OK" t-shirt. I still wear t-shirts for an industry I haven't worked for in over two decades.
This is where brands aren't fighting for your attention. You're happy to champion them. Because you are sold on their tech, and you consider yourself part of their tribe. Or it just has some sort of totally obscure geeky formula or tech reference that only you and others in the tribe will get the in-joke.
And, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out anyone who wants a free FusionAuth t-shirt can go to https://fusionauth.io/download , install it, and share a screenshot and we'll ship you one. Further instructions there.
Unfortunately we can only ship to the USA and Canada for this offer.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=cYsVvV1aVss&t=1000
Takes all kinds.
I wouldn’t want the swag if I were not going to use it, so best to give high quality stuff.
As far as expanding customer use I think having really good and actually helpful docs are critical. The services that I use that have great docs get used a lot more and integrate with apps much deeper than services with okay or shitty docs that feel half assed.
I ran a twitter poll on whether devs would prefer missing or out of date docs; was interesting to see the results (N was small though): https://twitter.com/mooreds/status/1517508537945001984
That said, it's a struggle. Sure, there are some pieces of doc you can generate (API docs, for sure) but others are more conversational and can get out of date.
I hate advertising. I especially hate stealth ads that are written to resemble a legitimate article, blog post, etc.
Don't insult what little intelligence I possess.
> devs want the ad to be relevant
I have never, ever seen a relevant ad. Not once in almost fifty years on this godforsaken planet.
The post is great. My only nitpick is that the author mentions that they think retargeting will go away. The scope of retargeting might be reduced especially as third-party cookies stop working but I don't think retargeting will completely go away. Big ad companies with whom visitors have a direct relationship with (Google, FB) will always be able to do it. They know the pages on their sites and those linked from their site that visitors visit and they will use it to target ads. They don't need third-party cookies since they have first-party cookies.
Networks that just do ads and don't have relationships with visitors except for advertising will find it harder and harder. At EthicalAds, we don't do retargeting at all because of our privacy focus, but many ad networks will find retargeting more challenging (less precise, they can always fingerprint users) to do. Doing away with it is a good thing from a privacy perspective but it probably will further entrench the big players.
This could be either direction as well. We could disagree on anything from me showcasing work by a feminist or LGBTQ+ carpenter, to me making a statement about fair trade goods and one of their suppliers is in a country known for rampant human rights violations.
The problem I think is that life is full of compromises, and I don't know that the bargain we've made and are now experiencing the consequences of is a particularly good one.
1. Go to your local Hackerspace (or makerspace). If you don't have a Hackerspace in your city - create one.
2. Sit there with your target audience. Don't be pushy.
3. Solve their problem with your solution, in real-time.
Also, you should spend like half of my time on Meetup.com and try to attend all possible dev-oriented events where you could pitch my product. Time consuming, but rewarding. Worked with https://aidlab.com/developer
Developers are logical and practical thinkers and despise sociopathic behavior.
Developers have a very strong resistance to this sort of manipulation.
Advertisers are unable to cope with this reality or understand their true nature in our economy, so they continue to do more "research" on how to engage developers, who in turn, learn how to better detect and evade sociopaths
Im also very surprised that in 2022, there are developers that see ads at all, outside of glancing at some non technical person's youtube tab.There are browsers now that are completely ad free, even without add-ons or extensions. Ads are horribly toxic in nature and an offense to the human psyche and to any person's dignity.
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/developer/
https://www.arri.com/news-en/2022-oscar-winners-rely-on-arri...
Thanks for all the comments. Learning so much.
EDIT: I originally read your article on mobile but viewing on a desktop, I see a ToC on the left-hand side of the page. So, scratch my earlier remark about a ToC.
I’m working on something similar, but from a different angle: marketing to developers organically. Hoping to have it published soon.
Let me know when you have it -> always interested to learn more about devmar
Facebook is going to work better than twitter for direct response just be sheer volume, even though developers are less likely to use FB than the average person.
Generally to target working developers you want to let them know your free trial exists so they can poke around in it. To market to the bosses you use gated content.
I’ve tried a lot of things, but for my money, podcast sponsorships have worked the best and it’s not even really close.
I listened to a podcast the other day on Spotify on my phone. Last time I did podcasts was maybe 10 years ago. I was properly confused when an ad block appeared. I had forgotten what ads even were like, and there was no skip button! (For example, for YouTube there’s Sponsorblock)