What is Hacker News's business model?

My humble perspective, HN serves several purposes:

1) Top of the funnel lead gen for emerging companies (for YC to invest in).

2) Persistent advertising for the YC brand. You can’t use HN without associating it with Y Combinator and by being useful it brings in millions of views to the brand at relatively little cost

3) A proprietary way to learn more about the founders they invest in. I’ve read a users HN profile (what they like dislike, quality of comments) is an important source of unadulterated intel.

As for value, I wouldn’t know how to calculate it but given the size of their “classes” and speed of rise, it clearly serves as a very effective in bound funnel for investing in quality startups. Definitely in the millions, not sure if billions unless it directly contributed to their biggest and best investments.

EDIT: I’ve left out other ancillary benefits like a distribution platform for YC companies looking to hire and such.

Lastly, value is relative. The value of HN to YC (or to perhaps other VCs) is larger than the value to say me who couldn’t make as much use of the benefits enumerated above. There are a lot of intangibles here.

My two cents: HN creates and maintains the impression of YCombinator being a cutting edge nexus for hacker and startup culture, the virtual water cooler you want to be seen next to saying something clever when important people walk by. It also provides advertising for YC startups via related threads and the who's hiring pages.

HN’s business model is to put the YC brand in front of a technical, entrepreneurial, audience.

It may not be consciously built towards this purpose, but HN serves primarily to spread the silicon valley, get-rich quick, startup business, and entrepreneur culture among software engineers and other technology experts.

YC and other VCs can't continue to exist if people don't continue to believe in the mythology of silicon valley. Who the hell will work ridiculous hours and gamble with their livelihood to make some worthless app? All in exchange for equity worth less than lottery tickets.

I've written about this a few times. If you read these answers and still have a question that remains unaddressed, I'd love to know what it is. (My plan is eventually to compile all these repeated answers to HN questions into some kind of super-FAQ and then retire from comment writing and just link to it, forever into a bright future.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285793

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Y-Combinator maintains this platform ( in my own opinion ) for two reasons

1) it's a neat place for likeminded people to share and discuss interesting topics

2) this is a byproduct of 1. by gaining popularity from 1. they gain more exposure to a lot of smart people, which turns out great when they post job ads, or new companies reveals, as well as a lot of people apply to y-combinator, which in turn means they get to be very picky in who they invest.

But HN doesn't have a business model per se. same with Reddit communities.

For some reason this post reminded me of a new rule by by Bill Maher:

Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, Bill, the profit motive is what sustains capitalism." Yes, and our sex drive is what sustains the human species, but we don't try to fuck everything.

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If it’s anything it’s content marketing for YC. I suspect it’s origin is that it was just something pg wanted.

I'm not sure there is a business model or a quantitative framework for measuring its value. I imagine it's just a cool thing they built and put it out there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not mentioned yet, but occasionally you'll see a job posting (no more than one or two) on the front page. They blend in well; it could be possible to miss them now and again.

I don't think this was how it got started but you can think of HN as content marketing / recruiting channels for YC.

Interestingly no one suggested YC could actively contacts inventors which just share their work/research with the world and suggest mentoring or drive toward business. It could be seen as a super early lead generator. How common/possible in this scenario?

Mostly to inflate the startup echo chamber so that y combinator can cherry pick companies to invest into, I guess.