I’ve Written My Last Article for 4GuysFromRolla
Warning! This blog post is long and rife with navel-gazing.
In 1998 I started an ASP resource site, 4GuysFromRolla.com. Toward the tail end of the dotcom boom I sold 4Guys to Internet.com, but continued working as the editor and primary contributor for the site, writing a new article each week. This arrangement continued until just recently. My last article for 4Guys has been written – Use MvcContrib Grid to Display a Grid of Data in ASP.NET MVC.
The Beginnings
My first exposure to web programming came in 1998 working at Empower Trainers and Consultants, a mid-sized consulting and training firm with locations in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Nashville. At the time I was an inexperienced, nervous, 19 year old sophomore at the University of Missouri-Rolla (UMR) who had landed an 8-month internship with Empower at their Kansas City location. My first assignment was to add some new features to the internal timekeeping tool, a custom-build data-driven web application powered by SQL Server and ASP. At the time I had done some rudimentary HTML development, but had zero experience with JavaScript, ASP, and SQL.
Needless to say, I found ASP enthralling. The ability to quickly create an application that could be shared with the world amazed me then as it continues to amaze me to this day. At the time there weren’t many online resources for learning more about ASP. As my internship drew to an end I decided that once I got back to school I would start my own site rich with ASP information.
Upon returning to university I cajoled three good friends into starting a website, 4GuysFromRolla.com. The idea was that the site would boast four sections:
- ASP Information
- Programming Information
- Linux Information
- Humor
If you couldn’t guess, we were four witty computer nerds (with an emphasis on the nerd part).
In September 1998 4GuysFromRolla.com went live. Over time, the other three guys lost interest and moved onto other projects. By the time I graduated in May 2000, 4GuysFromRolla.com was run by one guy from Rolla and focused strictly on ASP.
Sale to Internet.com
The dotcom boom reached its fever pitch in 2000. Companies were paying $5,000 a month for a little 125x125 banner to appear on the 4Guys homepage and $500 for a two sentence text ad to appear in the weekly newsletter, not to mention the thousands of dollars per month companies were dropping to have their animated 468x60 banners in the rotation to appear at the top of each article. The spending frenzy also extended to the acquisitions side, as numerous ASP resource sites were gobbled up by larger players.
In late 2000 I decided to “cash out.” 4Guys was sold to Internet.com.
I wrestled with the decision on whether to sell the site or not for a long time. On one hand, 4Guys was my baby and I had poured uncounted hours into it over the previous three years. Having seen how sites like 15Seconds.com fared after their acquisition, I knew that selling 4Guys would be akin to signing its death warrant. When a larger company buys a smaller site it’s not uncommon for the original founders to exit stage right, either immediately or in the very near term. When that happens, and when the acquirer starts to turn the screws in an attempt to better monetize their purchase, the inevitable happens – the site withers on the vine, traffic languishes, and the death knell is sounded. On the other hand, by late 2000 I think it was pretty apparent to everyone that the dotcom boom was coming to an end.
In the end, I decided to sell. The sales price reflected more than five years of dotcom boom revenue, which I deduced would be more like ten or more years of revenue once the boom ended. At age 22, five to ten years is an unimaginable window of time. I wondered, Would I be interested in writing about ASP ten years hence? Would I even be using ASP or web-based technologies? Since the answers to those questions were “maybe,” I decided to take the bird in the hand over the two in the bush.
Of course, here we are, 11 years later, and I am still actively involved in ASP.NET and the ASP.NET community and, until recently, was still writing for 4Guys. If I had it to do over again (and knowing what I know now), I would not have sold the site. Hindsight is 20/20. But that’s not to say that I regret the decision to sell the site – I don’t. In fact, I still hold that it was the right decision at the time given the unknowns.
The Buying Eyeballs Business Model
The dotcom boom heralded an interesting time in the history of the web. At its peak, billions of dollars were spent buying traffic, or “eyeballs,” as it was commonly referred to back then. In 2000, companies like Internet.com and DevX (among many others) were buying technology resource sites not for their content or talent, but for their existing traffic. This was a workable business model at the time due to the high rates advertisers were paying. Unfortunately, it was not sustainable once the bottom dropped out of advertising.
In 2009, Internet.com and its hundreds of technology-focused websites were sold to QuinStreet for $18 million. I continued working on 4Guys for QuinStreet (until recently). Unfortunately, QuinStreet’s purchase was a continuation of the buying eyeballs business model as evidenced by the lack of investment in the purchased web properties. 4Guys retained its dated look and feel as even more ads were squeezed onto the page.
Sites like 4Guys were sold by Internet.com to QuinStreet for pennies on the dollar. Even at such a steep discount, the question remains: did QuinStreet overpay? Time will tell.
Withering On the Vine
After the sale of 4Guys to Internet.com in 2000 I continued on as the site’s editor and primary contributor, authoring an article each week. Despite my continued work on the site, 4Guys started to lose prevalence in the ASP.NET community. There were many times I talked to a developer at a User Group or at a conference who would say something nice like, “I taught myself classic ASP from your articles on 4GuysFromRolla.com - I used to go there all the time.” The message was always the same – a meaningful compliment that had embedded in it a reflection on the current state of the site - I used to visit 4Guys.
There are probably a lot of different reasons why the importance and relevance of 4GuysFromRolla diminished over the years. Some of the reasons I’ve arrived at include:
- My predominant use of VB code samples (rather than C#). In recent years, I started writing more C#-focused articles, as well as articles with code samples in both VB and C#, but the majority of articles on 4Guys are VB-only. And my switch to a more C#-friendly style came long after C# had become the de facto .NET language.
- Increased attempts at monetization. More ads, bigger ads, flashier ads, and more annoying ads all made the site more difficult and less enjoyable to use.
- A dated look and feel. If you couldn’t guess, the 4GuysFromRolla.com website hasn’t had a site redesign since 2002. It just looks old and dated. I’d like to think that the quality and quantity of content can make up for such aesthetic issues, but I understand why visitors would find the site appearance off-putting and why that might make them less likely to return, especially if there was similar content to be found elsewhere, which brings me to the next three factors…
- The Google. Google turned the Internet upside down. Prior to Google, when faced with a particular problem people would go to a particular site and start hunting (or searching) for a solution. Once Google made search quick, fast, easy, and accurate – something I think happened in the early 2000s – user behavior shifted radically. Now Google was where people went to find answers to their questions. Just ask Jeff Atwood, who notes that: “Currently, 83% of our total traffic [to Stackoverflow] is from search engines, or rather, one particular search engine.” And that search engine, if you couldn’t guess, is Google.
- A stronger online presence from Microsoft. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Microsoft offered a substandard web presence for their web technologies. There was technical documentation buried somewhere on Microsoft’s website, some articles on their MSDN site here and there, as well as articles from MSDN Magazine that were available online. But everything was scattered and hard to find. Microsoft finally got it right in the mid-2000s when they made MSDN easier and quicker to search and separated out their core technologies into standalone sites – www.asp.net, www.iis.net, etc. This move sucked an appreciable amount of traffic from community-founded sites like 4GuysFromRolla.
- The proliferation of blogs. Blogs are another technology that made resource sites like 4GuysFromRolla.com less relevant. Intelligent developers with something interesting or useful to share didn’t need to get their thoughts published on your site – instead, they could start their own blog. The explosion of blogs outpaced the demand for information, cutting into everyone’s traffic and relevance.
Of all of the reasons listed above only one of them falls on my shoulders, namely my slow move away from VB to C#. But perhaps there are other factors that are my fault that my ego is blinding me from. I do believe that the quality of writing that has appeared on 4Guys has improved over the years. When I read some of the articles I wrote while I was still in school (1998-2000) I cringe. Also, I posit that the articles’ topics are (relatively) timely and of interest to ASP.NET developers. (To be fair, I was a bit late to jQuery and ASP.NET MVC, but once I jumped on that bandwagon I wrote quite a bit on said topics.)
The increased attempts and monetization and dated look and feel falls on Internet.com and QuinStreet’s shoulders. The last three factors were out of everyone’s control and affected all websites, not just those in my little corner of the web. And those macro changes, while perhaps detrimental to the growth of a site like 4Guys, are net gains for the Internet (and humanity) as a whole.
Neither QuinStreet nor Internet.com has ever provided me with traffic numbers so I don’t have any hard data to back up my thoughts on this, but my presumption is that 4Guys is still used by hundreds of thousands of developers around the world each month, but that it’s become less and less relevant as time has gone on. Today, I imagine that most people reach 4Guys from a Google search or from a link posted on an old messageboard or newsgroup thread. Few visit the site to see what new content is available or because a coworker told them that it’s a great website for ASP.NET developers of any stripe.
Yes, there are still many who find a solution to their problem on 4Guys, but few say, “How do I do X? I bet 4Guys has the answer!”
Some Fun Facts
Is it just me, or is this blog post getting a little depressing? How about some fun 4Guys trivia.
For those who have never been to Rolla, it is about an hour and a half west of St. Louis, located square in the middle of nowhere. The university in Rolla focuses on engineering and the sciences and the student body is predominantly male. Many people wonder how I had the time to write nearly 750 articles while a student at UMR. The answer is that I went to school in the middle of nowhere with no girls - free time was not something that was hard to find!
When we started 4Guys, one of the other 4Guys created the site design. It had a black background with gray text and these bubbles that spanned the top and right of each page with links to each of the four sections. Together, we redesigned the site in 1999 to give it a more professional look. It was at this time that 4Guys adopted teal as its primary color. After acquiring the site, Internet.com did a resign in 2002. The redesign made the site a bit more graphics heavy and added some curved doodads here and there. I always found the 4Guys logo that Internet.com’s design team created to be hilarious.
The guy on the left looks depressed and ostracized from the group. The guy on the right wants nothing more than a big group hug. And those two guys in the middle? They look like a couple of real a-holes. Too cocky and arrogant to console their melancholy friend on the left, and too cool for school to hug the guy on the right. Jerks.
So Farewell…
My time with 4Guys has now come to an end. It was a fun and unforgettable run. I fondly remember huddled around a computer monitor with the other three guys from Rolla as we tried to decide on a domain name. I remember the excitement of landing my first advertiser and of depositing that first check. And I won’t forget the many emails from fellow developers who wrote in to thank me for an article that helped them solve a vexing problem. But most of all, my memories will center around writing the 4Guys article each week – drumming up a topic, banging out some code, and then putting that code into prose.
Having written a 4Guys article each of the preceding 650 or so weeks, it will be odd not to do so this week. Or next week. Or ever again.
Farewell, old girl, it was a good run.
Just to be clear, I am not retiring! I am a writer, that’s what I do. You’ll continue to see articles from me on this blog and on sites like DotNetSlackers.com and ASPAlliance.com. And I am always looking for additional engagements – if you have a need for a technical writer or prolific ASP.NET author, please don’t hesitate to check out my resume and drop me a line.