Wow, pretty big sale! Big congrats to Chris.<p>Interestingly, DigitalOcean has a knack for acquiring these technical dev sites, in 2019 it acquired Scotch.io[0] which was one of the better <i>technical</i> web development sites out there.<p>Fun fact about Scotch, the founder (Chris Sev[1]) sold the site to DO, joined their team, and later managed to broker a deal to 301 redirect a lot of the pages to his new project Better.dev[2].<p>Absolute genius.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/scotch-io-is-joining-digitalocean" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/scotch-io-is-joining-digit...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://twitter.com/chris__sev" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/chris__sev</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.better.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://www.better.dev/</a>
This is part of a broader trend. Last year, Balaji Srinivasan tweeted about the idea of SaaS companies buying media companies – <a href="https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1374363031417753609" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1374363031417753609</a> – and as an observer/operator in this space, I've heard about a lot of conversations going on behind the scenes with larger companies expressing an interest in smaller media companies (including my own - I value autonomy too much but for the right multiple.. :-D).<p>Consider Hubspot buying The Hustle, Robinhood buying MarketSnacks, Stripe's various acquisitions (like IndieHackers), Insight Partners bought The New Stack.. and this is all happening in the developer space too. Subscription based companies with high cashflow but high customer acquisition costs will continue to buy attention-based companies with relatively low acquisition costs because, frankly, the owners of the latter are generally quite happy with "modest" (<$40m, say) exits that the former can easily cover.
Hope they keep the site as it is, css-tricks.com has been consistently one of the best, if not the best CSS site around, to the point that I search there for a particular topic before going to general purpose search engines, and you'll frequently find Chris' original articles copypasta'd by "content marketers" anyway. I guess the big time push for CSS3 with ever-changing responsive requirements and new UI idioms of the 2000's and 2010's is behind us, as witnessed by css-tricks's forum with contributions from other world-class experts having closed down last year or so. Could be worse than DO for sure.
Whether it be setting up a LAMP stack on a server, securing nginx with Lets Encrypt, deploying a python ML model as a web service, you name it, DigitalOcean's tutorials just work. Thanks Digital Ocean!<p>PS: I love the Idea of calling a single server a "Droplet" in the "Digital Ocean". Nice one DO.
For your start up, a good blog could be a serious lead vehicle.<p>To generate a ton of traffic or be worth something, I find you need to balance three things (personal opinion):<p>- Normal longer Blog type articles / announcements<p>- Quick blog / library / resource / how-tos<p>- Engagement / community<p>Each are unique for everyone.<p>For example, Cloudflare I would argue leans heavy to the longer blog rolls and is a lead gen for enterprise reads, investors, and also new hire folks.<p>For SEO though, Digital Ocean cares more about the library of resources style (I would wager). It’s why they are buying CSS-Tricks to get all that “smooth scroll css” traffic. This is very much a traffic is traffic mentality to boost their own blog traffic metrics. There are probably other factors here like community / clout. Why build all this when you can just buy it?<p>Then finally the last one is engagement. This is what converts and is having an active community. This is why influencers can make serious buck. This is the hardest to build and I would argue the most important. A “real following”.<p>Would love to hear your thoughts on this too and how you use your blog for your start up or business.
It's already been mentioned in a few comments, but I imagine a big part of this purchase was influenced by the SEO power of the domain. CSS-Trick is a crazy powerful domain [1]<p>Google loves old domains with authority, and still, to this day, it's a lot easier to rank a site built on an aged/expired domain than it is on a fresh domain.<p>Buying powerful domains on auction sites has shot through the roof in the last couple of years. Here's a couple of example on Godaddy (Godaddy auctions tend to have the most powerful domains SEO-wise)
<a href="https://www.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/gutenberg-net-414405463" rel="nofollow">https://www.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/gutenberg-net-414405...</a>
<a href="https://uk.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/freewebtemplates-com-414369081" rel="nofollow">https://uk.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/freewebtemplates-com-...</a><p>I imagine they will eventually 301 the domain to the main DigitalOcean domain.<p>[1] - <a href="https://imgur.com/a/8XHWry9" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/8XHWry9</a>
I’ll be the first to say: congrats to Chris! Just an excellent guy - and he’s been contributing so much good writing to the web development community for so long, he deserves a pay day.
This is one of the few instances where I can say I trust the acquiring company. I've been a fan of DigitalOcean since I started using them. They haven't given me a reason to dislike them. And like the post says, they do write some handy tutorials. One that's helped me a few times is how to spin up a quick FTP server on Debian, because for some reason I can never configure it right.<p>Congrats to the original owner on getting acquired, and by a company that will most likely do well with it.
Good for CSS-Tricks team but
Why does DigitalOcean need it in the first place?<p>Is it some kind of purchase of real estate for future permanent advertisement of DO?
I've been using the CSS-Tricks site since 2008. It's one of the best sites on internet and has great community of developers. Congrats to Chris Coyier and the team!
Why does DigitalOcean want to build their selection of content out? It's kind of weird. They don't need to become some big dev article repository/media engine. Other than to consistently push devs consuming the content towards their services (good as they may be). Happy for Chris and the team to get something (substantial?) back for their efforts and maybe free up their time, but having these openweb resources just be sucked up constantly by 'media conglomerate' strategies isn't the best feeling vs independent/somewhat isolated resources.
Does seem a bit of a strange fit for DigitalOcean. That said, they seem like a solid company and they really do have some really good tutorials/knowledgebase.<p>Sounds like a good time to sell it off though and hope they have the same success with future projects.
I (and I'm sure many others here) owe my career to Chris. HTML never "clicked" for me, until I watched one of his screencasts breaking down a design and building a page from scratch. The rest is history.
CSS Tricks played a critical part in teaching me about web designs. It was a paradise for an introvert like me to hangout at, and also learn new skills.<p>Congratulations, Chris!
This reminds me of a little known fact that Digital Ocean almost had their own UI kit, I posted a question on HN 5 years ago asking if anyone had used it. It was called Buoy.<p>It was actually very nice for it's time, I wonder if anyone from DO remembers this.<p>Edit: See <a href="http://jessecha.se/work/buoy.html" rel="nofollow">http://jessecha.se/work/buoy.html</a>
I’m sad to see Chris step down from CSS Tricks, loved his designs, content moderation and writing style.<p>I don’t know if I trust DO as his „successor“, I’ve lost way too much money on their platform for me to consider them trustworthy. And that’s coming from a person who now uses Oracle Cloud.
CSS Tricks was the biggest help back when I was first teaching myself proper web design and then doing freelance web development back in my early days. Chris Coyier and Ryan Bates (of Railscasts) alone taught me 80+% of what I needed to know to get my start in the industry.
Congratulations to them. I’ve always respected css-tricks for their sensible approach to online advertising: no malware distributing ad networks, just selling ad spots to companies that the audience of a css and web dev focused website might be interested in.
Congrats! I've referenced the site for my entire programing life and really like it a lot, but other than that I don't have much background on how it came to be. Does anyone know if Chris ever wrote about his motivations for or history of the site?
Last week I started poking around in some serious CSS again for the first time in ten years. I was a little rusty. CSS-Tricks definitely stood out for the quality. Truly helpful. I'm back in the swing of things now.
I've also recently heard of larger VC firms quietly (secretly) buying tech publications lately. There's a lot of value in the eyeballs -- perhaps also the narrative.
I don't really understand DigitalOcean's market here.
They're obviously. not going after the main cloud players, but it seems strange that they're targeting consumers directly. They spent a lot of time/money crowdsourcing documentation for things that weren't cloud-specific, like patching wordpress, installing apache etc, and now CSS-Tricks.<p>Wouldn't consumers who'd benefit from these sorts of tutorials prefer a properly managed solution rather than an IaaS?
Does this mean that DigitalOcean has become another platform company that is monitoring their customers’ business performance for possible acquisition?<p>If so beware.