Because that is what the web was asking for.

Digg is the king of social media sites and it is no secret that what we are doing goes up against them and a couple of other sites. Keeping Chawlk the way it was simply meant that we would be going feature to feature against Digg and that wasn’t a way I could see us gaining any traction. Sure we have “forums” when they are still trying to figure out a solution, but beyond that you can submit content to both sites and vote. Once you get down to it that is how these sites work.

You can take the Mixx and add features into how you submit and manage the site, but that doesn’t make it any different in the end. You still submit content and vote. Where is the differentiation then? The same place it is with any type of social site and that is the community behind it. When your site covers all topics you are bound to get a ton of different people with varying interests. How many of these people do you think you can relate with?

If you ask Digg users what their #1 complaint about Digg is they will tell you that they miss the smaller focus and tighter community. They want Digg to be about Technology again. Well I didn’t want Chawlk users to tell us a couple years down the road that they missed X community and wished the site was more focused around it so we made a tech site that they could enjoy. If we do the right thing maybe we could get Digg and Reddit people over and see a community they can get behind without any worries of us adding celebrity gossip or politics on there.

What’s great though is that the people who do love to talk politics now have a place for that as well. With these 9 sites we have created 9 separate communities that are linked together through Chawlk. This means that once you register on one site you can use that same account across all the sites and you can even use it on 9rules.

Many sites give you the opportunity to personalize the content that you see on the site, we do it at 9rules. On Digg for example you can make your homepage only show Science content if that is what you want, but that doesn’t hide the community from you.

This is also a reason why I don’t quite understand Yahoo’s reasoning behind doing everything on their domain. They have the technology to allow users to use their Yahoo account across multiple domains like Flickr and Mybloglog so why the need to keep them on a single domain? It dilutes the community and the community is the hardest thing to build.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are social media sites that cover niches and probably will never expand, but we are the first to have a distributed community amongst our sites that allows people with varying interests to bounce around to the content and communities that they enjoy most. For those people who crave information overload in their lives they can still get the running stream of information on Chawlk as well.

The task at hand now is getting the word out.

Are.

You.

Fucking.

Kidding.

Me.

Of course the Valley and tech world are buzzing like crazy about this stuff. Very few people have raised their heads and made the obvious point that in no way is Facebook even close to worth that much and if Microsoft is willing to pay that much then Ballmer needs to stop reading Scoble.

Some of the thinking behind this is that since Facebook is closed Google can’t search it and therefore if you combine the ability of Yahoo Search to go through Facebook you have a power hitter. Seriously guys, you embarrass me. What’s the point of being able to search Facebook when there is already search on it and if I do find something on there that I like there is a 99% chance I am not the person’s friend and it is blocked.

Facebook makes essentially no cash, while spending tons. Facebook is still behind Myspace in let’s see…everything? Ah but Facebook is the #1 repository for pictures and videos you say. Well guess how much those are worth to people? Jackshit.

Here is a list of people that need this deal to happen:

• The World. The world needs this deal to happen so Microsoft will finally kill most of their company. Could you imagine telling your shareholders that you paid $15B for an online website that will probably be obsolete in a couple of years anyways and doesn’t even have a sustainable revenue model? A super win here for Facebook if they pull off this caper.
• Yahoo. Yahoo just needs this so people stop suing them and they can say they were proactive in getting something done.
• Facebook. If alcohol makes you have sex with women you usually wouldn’t have sex with, then the Facebook kool-aid makes you think that this online site is worth anything over $1B just because people gave them money (which they promptly burned through) and wrote on a piece of paper that they thought it was that much. Because let’s be honest, Facebook is only going to have a huge payday when they get a buyout. There will be no IPO. There will be no miracle revenue model. They got swallowed in their own hype and can’t turn back now.

Maybe it is because I’m not that smart, a millionaire or live in the Valley that my thought process is different than the people I read. You have to wonder if there will be a day in the future when some of these people will look back and shake their heads and admit how foolish they were. I will look back and think how idiotic I was not to be able to sell out for millions when the world was covered in idiots that believe any hype you can toss their way.

This world sucks.

Social Media

Looking at Social Media sites the big players include:

• Digg
• Reddit
• Propeller
• Mixx
• Yahoo Buzz

I am reluctant to include Yahoo Buzz because they factor in other things that effect their rankings. Either way you have at least 3 big players with one of them completely dominating everyone else (Digg). If you were to go against them how would you do it? You could breakdown how each one of them approaches social media to see if you can find an advantage. If we assume Digg is the baseline of a social media site then we can see how the others differentiate themselves.

Reddit

They differ on how their algorithm works. Instead of getting a time-based listing of popular items you get a listing of what is hot for that moment you visit the site. Each pageload can bring a different look to the page. They also allow you to create your own reddits for people to participate meaning that there can be an infinite number of categories across the site.

This is usually the first place an old school Digg person ends up if they want to get back to the tech feel of things, but it’s becoming more and more apparent that Digg and Reddit are one in the same with regards to what becomes popular on the site. The rules seems to be that mainstream interests take over any site where mainstream interests are allowed. It can’t be fought.

Propeller

In all honesty the only thing I see this site has going for it is the fact that it is linked to AOL and Netscape and if it wasn’t for those it wouldn’t be anywhere. It differentiates itself from Digg by having a broader range of topics you can post to that shows how they try to cater more to the mainstream than even Digg is trying to. They also have specialized Propeller people who can boost a story if they feel the need.

Mixx

The kid on the playground has gained a lot of ground due to the people behind it and the hype that it received. Looking at the site you can see that it to caters to whatever people are willing to link to without a general focus on anything in particular. It adds a couple features with its stories that Digg doesn’t have, but these features aren’t enough to separate it from the crowd.

Commonality

If you listen to what an active member says that they like about any one of these sites they all seem to focus on the community. They love the community they are a part of unless it begins to change then they find another site to move to. However, if you noticed a trend above you can see that each community is going to turn into the same thing over and over again since there is nothing differentiating it from the rest. Each one allows more and more mainstream content onto their sites bringing in the same crowd that chases out the original users.

So if you take a look at the Social Media field you can see that the two most important “features” that a site can provide is content that a person wants to read and a great community. Understand those before entering the field and you might have a chance if you are able to avoid what sets the rest of the competition back. The key is you won’t beat Digg or any of the others if you take the same approach as they do. There really isn’t that much differentiation between them so another site in this field that does what they do with one more added feature won’t stand a chance.

I do think the solution is a lot simpler than you might think. Find the one aspect of the king that you want to take away and attack it.

Web 2.0 Blogs

For web 2.0 blogs I am going to use TechCrunch (baseline), ReadWriteWeb, Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable and CenterNetwork as examples.

There is an example that I wish to bring up before I dive into these sites because I feel it will help give you a good frame of mind. Consider Yahoo and Google back in the days. If you wanted to take over Yahoo and become the #1 destination on the web it almost makes sense to do everything that they do, but how far would that get you? Instead why not look at one aspect of what they do that users appreciate and do it better. In the case of Google they chose search and the rest is history.

TechCrunch is Yahoo in this sector. They have grown so large that they seem to wish to cover everything in the web world. If you pay close attention to the comments you can always find someone wishing for the old days when they just covered startups. That should be an alert right there for anyone wishing to grab a part of TC’s market. A similar alert can be found in the Digg situation if you pay close attention. Now let’s see what TC’s competitors do to try and differentiate themselves from the field.

ReadWriteWeb

I’ve know Richard MacManus for a long time before he made it big. I knew his site when there was good content that was posted with little frequency. Now you have great content posted regularly and the differentiating factor here is the analysis put into each article. It’s almost always original, thoughtful content that you might get once in a blue moon on TC. Of course this kind of content serves a small audience than the TC crowd because it goes away from the mainstream, but the point is to take a chunk of the market and they have done so. In the future if they wish to expand they now have the resources and audience to do so, a great position to be in.

Silicon Alley Insider

Very similar to RW/W in that they provide some good analysis on companies and take a deeper look into the business aspects of the web 2.0 world. Again this is more of a niche site for the market, but they have done well by differentiating themselves and grabbing a chunk.

Mashable and CenterNetworks

I combine these two because they are similar in their approach. They attempt to take on TC by following the TC model: quick hits. The key here is to get news before anyone else and if you know the publishing game this is a ruthless one to follow because if you aren’t first than you aren’t important. The thing is you can’t out TC, TC, so why bother? It makes no sense and although each of them have done well from themselves from what I can gather if their goal is to topple the baseline I don’t see them doing with their current approach.

Mashable had the fortune of being started a couple years ago before TC was big so that is why Cashmore’s numbers are higher than people would expect.

Gaming Blogs

In this segment the comparison is simple: Kotaku and Joystiq. Both very similar, if you catch a story on one you are bound to catch the same story on another so how do you being to differentiate yourself? You could write more indepth articles, but if your authors are paid by how many entries they put out the chances of this are slim. There is a bit more original content on Kotaku, while Joystiq posts more frequently. Still that doesn’t take one over the top.

Instead, Joystiq decide to go more niche, but didn’t do so on their own site because when you have a site that tackels every aspect of a market you can’t make it into a niche site. Joystiq now comes with its own network.

• WoW Insider
• Wii Fanboy
• Xbox 360 Fanboy
• PSP Fanboy
• Massively
• DS Fanboy
• PS3 Fanboy

So now Kotaku not only has to compete against Joystiq, but 7 other sites that have no problem attacking their niche with the same passion that Joystiq does. This approach works because gaming is such a huge market. For a smaller market you wouldn’t want to break it up like this, but who doesn’t think TechCrunch would be a better site if they split up into segments (Start-Ups, Old Media, etc)?

Looking at the Kotaku vs Joystiq battle you can see that it would be hard to outdo Kotaku at what they do and Joystiq keeps up with them and vice versa. However to go over the top what is the weakness of each site? They can’t focus on a specific segment of the gaming market and that is why these subsites do so well. You think all the WoW fans would continue to visit Joystiq to try and filter through all the noise just to get to the news they want? Doubtful.

Another approach would be to write more indepth gaming articles and let your site be known for that. A great example of this is Destructoid. Because of their approach though they will never be ahead of Joystiq or Kotaku, but like RW/W they are building up a great audience for expansion if they wish to do so down the road.

King is Dead, Long Live the King

I hope I have explained my thoughts well enough for you to walk away with the understanding that to take on an industry leader you don’t need to tackle every aspect of what they do. Find something that they do that people like and you think you can do better. If there is a market for it and you do better than the King there is a great chance you will succeed. So often in the web world sites grow to a certain size where they start to take on more than they can handle and they stop specializing and simply try to be the king of everything. Large corporations are no different.

Although Linux has no where near the marketshare of Windows on the desktop they were able to make a dent in the market by doing various tasks better than Windows. I think they tripped up when they tried to be a better Windows than Windows, but save that for another site to discuss. I can’t think of a good example where a king was toppled because the upstart had more features.

The iPhone and iPod have less features than their competition yet they are on top. Google has less to offer via search (well maybe not now) and they made it to the top. If you get caught up on trying to match the competition feature for feature you won’t get very far. Find something you can do well and maximize it to the best of your ability.

SuicideGirls

I’m starting off with SG because they were ahead of the curve a couple of years ago with regards to features they offer on their site. There are plenty of sites that provide their own images of women and you can find these images all over the web for free so SG had to step up and offer their audience something they couldn’t find elsewhere, especially since they charge a monthly fee to join.

This is a social networking site more than anything else. You are given a profile, groups and places to chat. Mixed this with the women and you have a site that brings you closer to the content so to speak than other sites in their genre. I have no doubt they could get away with neglecting these features because of the women, but they were smart in realizing that porn is a commodity on the web today and you need something with more investment for people to come back.

What I mean by investment is that you want your site to become a destination where people invest their time in because then they feel the need to return over and over again. Nobody likes to think that they wasted their time and when we invest our time into doing something we are less likely to give it up.

More Revenue

SG takes their revenue model a step further by offering a store with many items and have started to publish a magazine as well. This is a real business people. As much as we all love Web 2.0 and the great stuff that it offers, this is the kind of business you want to get behind because you can see the money changing hands here.

Playboy

Playboy is a dynasty. It doesn’t get mentioned in business school or brand circles, but they have the kind of brand that other companies would die for. They have a problem with the web though. Their business is women and as mentioned before, you can get women anywhere on the web so what else can you offer?

They offer you the chance to signup for three different clubs with different features. These can range from special interviews to videos to more pictures. If I’m resourceful enough I can get that anyways by doing a simple search. Is that right? No, but we can’t pretend it doesn’t happen. What does Playboy offer that I can’t go around searching for free? Nothing.

With how beautiful the Playboy models are and how worshipped they are by men across the world why wouldn’t they go the SG route and offer up a community that connects men even closer to the models? No doubt women pose for Playboy for the fame and fortune, but imagine being able to establish a fanbase that can last over an extended period of time beyond your one photoshoot in the magazine. What woman wouldn’t jump at that opportunity?

Last week it was reported that Playboy posted a quarterly loss causing its shares to drop.

The worse-than-expected results illustrate the trouble that Playboy and other publishers and television companies face as more people get their entertainment online, and often for free.

They are stuck in the old fashioned publishing model where you have to pay to see everything. I’m not saying they should be giving their stuff away for free, but there are so many different ways to utilize their strong brand you have to wonder why more effort isn’t being put into their online venture.

Online revenue fell 3 percent to $15.2 million because of lower pay site revenue. Hefner said the company is redesigning the Playboy.com website to attract more visitors and create a better portal to its other properties.

The site does need an overhaul as the homepage and subpages are outdated, but what features are they going to bring in to attract more people and cause them to stay? More pictures won’t necessarily do the trick because again we can get those for free. Give me a community around the bunnies that makes me feel like I have a chance with them (this is how guys think) and you might have a paying customer.

Porn and Music

If anything, the adult entertainment industry is going through the same growing pains that the music and movie industries are going through now. No longer do they have a tight grip on their content and the ability to charge premium prices for it. They must step out of their comfort zone if they wish to continue to increase revenues, otherwise they will become nothing more than bit players in the world.

Lucky for them they can take a glance at SG to see how they can move forward and expand their business even more than before. Hell, any business on the web would be wise to study SG’s model to see if they can gleam anything from it.

* For the sake of this article what Playboy and SuicideGirls offer is being considered porn.

Last week Tyme wrote an entry about what we do for our group and a majority of the comments didn’t know that I handle most of the programming duties. They probably thought I was just the face of the company. The fun guy if you will and that is understandable because I do not come out and say what I do.

When we do a streamcast or drinkcast it is more of a party than anything. It’s not in us to sit down and pretend we are in a classroom. The best teachers were the ones that made learning fun and if you want to know about our company all you have to do is know about us. This means seeing a group of people who have a different take on professionalism. This means that no matter how big your company is it is always based around the personality of the people running it.

When Bill Gates ran Microsoft it was feared, when he stepped down and Ballmer took over it began its downward spiral. Apple is Steve Jobs just as much as Dell is Dell.

I don’t have the experience of being a top executive in a corporation before I go off to run one of my own. I started my own with my feet already moving. I didn’t learn the rules of proper business etiquette that told me when I host a video chat or podcast that I have to bore the excitement out of my audience. All I know what to do is be me. Sure business and personal are separate, but you are never separated from yourself and so that is how things will probably always be.

I have to admit, before attending this streamcast, the personalities at 9rules were largely unknown to me. I didn’t follow their Twitter accounts, I wasn’t active on Chawlk and didn’t do much to get involved.

Now I feel somewhat connected to the whole thing. It’s odd but now I feel like I want to be part of it. I did submit my site and I hope I get accepted. On a larger scale, it’s very interesting to see how the human element changed my feelings toward what is normally just data and graphics.

Vocino

The great thing here is if you like us then you might be more interested in what we do, however if you hate us then you could probably care less what the sites are all about. It definitely works both ways. With so many brands and companies out today it is hard to make your’s standout. It is hard to get people to notice you and build that connection. Connections are built with feelings so you have to make your audience bond with your brand on an emotional level and for now we like to do that by showing them who we are.

Your company will always be you no matter what the past brand is or will be.

We all waited for RSS to make its breakthrough, but unless I’m missing something that has yet to happen. What about del.icio.us and Flickr. Still minor players that are huge in our world. Either way all of this got me thinking what if someone were to create a Twitter clone now and targetted a different audience?

You would have the experience of seeing what made Twitter huge, plan for scalability and possibly add some new features and a revenue model. Absurd? Why? Don’t go for the geek crowd because how often do they play a role in making anything break into the mainstream? Think about it. The major hits of this web’s generation are:

• Myspace
• Facebook
• Skype
• Youtube

Did any of them need geek cred to make it big? Nope. Hell most of them seemed to have actively avoided any contact with that audience for as long as possible.

So you go and make your Twitter clone, pimp it out to the Myspace crowd and you might have a goldmine in your hands. Sure the blogs will go crazy saying how you are nothing but a copycat and so what? Pownce and Jaiku are arguably better than Twitter, but they hit the same audience so their chances of success were always going to be small.

What about FriendFeed you say? Sure let them take Twitter’s audience along with the other people who use the sites that the mainstream world doesn’t use. If done properly I think someone could definitely leapfrog Twitter and be on their way to millions. Honestly when you think about what is needed to code up Twitter it doesn’t seem that complicated. The hard part obviously is the scaling. Take care of that, get the right people on board and there you go.

If you do decide to push forward because of what I have written all I do is ask for two things from you:

1. A shoutout in the magazines that interview you.
2. A revenue model.

The biggest site of the last two years (YouTube) revolves around video so it only makes sense to think that video is the complete future of the web. Today I got to see the perceived future of comments on blogs with TechCrunch’s implementation of Seesmic comments and let me tell you…HOLY SHIT THIS IS THE WORST IDEA IN A WHILE. Why in their right mind would anyone think this is useful or a great feature is beyond me. Supposedly there are some pros to this so let me see if I can make some up.

Pros

Apparently people believe that you will be able to get the right tone of an individual from their video comment since it is so often lost in text form. However, how many people are still going to pop off at the mouth like they do in text if they must do it on camera? Not many. If anything this might make blog comments less of a warzone if that is what you want. But we will give the benefit of the doubt to geeks around the world that if they truly have something to say with emotion they will say it.

Next we get to put a face to a name. Couldn’t we do that with Gravatar or something similar? What does seeing a person’s face have to do with what they say? But again, benefit of the doubt for our need to stalk people online, too bad we will be staring at males between the ages of 400-900.

Cons

Instead of going into an essay format for this one I will just pop off of a list.

• Can’t scroll
• Can’t scan
• Can’t quote
• Can’t reply effectively
• Wastes time
• People aren’t entertaining
• People carry on about nothing
• Will be spammed even worse…SHOUT OUT TO MY SITE
• 99% of the people weren’t made for video
• Text is usually more articulate
• Background noise
• Umm
• Errr
• Argh
• *blink
• Upload time
• Rick Rolls forever

Let’s not pretend that this makes us more human. Let’s not pretend that this makes us more likely to engage. YouTube does it the right way, you can do video responses, but those are given their own section and if you wish to view them have at it. Integrating them with other comments kills the conversation. It breaks it up.

If you really love this idea then let’s just call you for what you are…a dork. Not even a geek. Do you spend all your time watching every commercial on TV? Nope. Why? Because they suck and what makes you think video comments will be any different? Oh because we like to believe that anything we say is important? Stop kidding yourself.

And dear god are we going to moderate all of them? Give me 10 text comments I can check in 5 seconds to see which ones are spam. Give me 10 video comments that are a 1 minute a piece and that’s 10 minutes I have to spend monitoring them. No thanks.

I don’t understand why people call a new feature the future. Do they even think about how people use the web? With a text comment I am always about 80% sure it is being read by people viewing the comments, but with a video comment? Maybe 1% if I got lucky or had a famous name to back me up.

One of the most important commodities to humans is time. We go to YouTube and don’t mind wasting time because the time isn’t wasted. We spend it watching popular videos that we know have a chance of entertaining us. Video comments waste time that I don’t want to waste. It really is that simple. When I want the weather I check the widget on my desktop, I don’t go to the weather channel and wait for a report. You aren’t making my life any better with video comments and you sure as hell aren’t making it anymore efficient.

To finish off this grand example of english prose let me link to you some of the video comments to see how wonderful and enlightening they are.

• Congrats to you man
• I’m delusional too at times
• Like a Rick Roll wasn’t coming
• Yes ugly mug

Digg is another site that has done a great job of using an API to spread itself around the web. Even on this site you can see the beginnings of our own scripts/widgets/API in the sidebar with the inclusion of Clips from our different communities. Because of the examples provided it may be a foregone conclusion that you have to create an API to really succeed on the web, but that isn’t always the case.

Some sites and services aren’t meant to be used with APIs and external services and sometimes the APIs can become more effective than the actual site. Going back to the Twitter example how many people that use Twitter visit Twitter.com anymore? One of the proposed revenue models for Twitter has always been to place ads on their pages, but if nobody is visiting the pages this model doesn’t work and sticking ads within the actual tweets would probably cause a revolt.

The only task you can do on the site that can’t be done in the API is change your user settings I believe. Think about that. You can do everything with Twitter through the use of the API. This is great for consumers and developers, but is it so great for Twitter? Without the API they wouldn’t be where they are now, but with the API are they still anywhere? Let us not pretend that Twitter is smashing the web just because we read about it on all the geek sites and everyone is clearly on the Twitter bandwagon. Let’s pretend we are looking at a company that has major hardware costs with no end in sight or any chance of bringing in money.

All the other API examples that I listed before utilize the API in a way that almost forces you back to the originating site. That seems like a good use of an API for a business. However, Twitter was never meant to be a destination site I suppose since its primary function is communication (the reason for it being so popular). How many other services that offer communication as their primary function require the site to be the destination site? Online email is the only example I could think of because IRC, IM and Skype don’t require it at all.

For Chawlk we could probably create an API that allowed you to setup your own Chawlk on your site, but where would that leave us? We aren’t in the API licensing business and I’m not sure many people would license an API so the other route is offering it for free. If our revenue model revolves around ads that leaves us in the same position as Twitter. From a geek standpoint you may want to do everything you can with your API, but your business sense has to kick in and see what aspects of the API actually benefit the business without taking too much away.

Other examples of sites that have blown up because of their ability to allow their data to be shown on other sites:

• Amazon
• YouTube
• Financial data
• Weather data

I could think of a thousand other sites that would do well to offer at least limited access to their data and content outside of their site, but maybe that will be used for a different entry.

This week comes news of another ad network being start up by SixApart and some people believe that ad networks need to stop, but they are just the hot thing like social networks and blog networks before them. What really makes companies want to dive into them is that the revenue model is already established: sell ads, make money. To be honest why shouldn’t larger companies get involved? There is enough site inventory out there to go around and financially speaking wouldn’t it be the same cost to pitch two sites as it is to pitch two?

What is funny and disappointing at the same time is that after all these years of online activity we have come full circle to going back to the concept we said we could live without doing: selling ads. Is that the only way to make real money on the web and with this economic downturn is it a good idea to rely on it? I suppose if your model is providing content this is the way to go, just crazy to not see any innovation in revenue models like we say in technology.

It all goes to free eventually right?

Things are a little different now though because the ad networks are not only competing with each other, but competing with content providers that sell their own ads as well. This is why you might see a lot of talk about ad networks buying up content sites because there is becoming almost zero distinction between an ad network and a content network.

It will be interesting to see how things play out over the next 18 months.

I always give a little laugh when people tell me that they wish they were in my shoes. The ability to wake up whenever I want, nobody to report to and keeping all the money you want. That sounds great. The problem? If you don’t wake up and stay on the ball you don’t grow your business. You have nobody to report to so if things go wrong you have nobody to blame, but yourself. You can keep all the money you want if you are bringing any money in.

And don’t forget the critics.

Good that you were able to review the poor choice you made regarding your core brand and are willing to attempt a roll back but you’re going to once again be fighting the hurt feelings of many who have taken their time to participate here.

Perhaps a little less booze when making important decisions might have led to more sound decisions instead of a tanking Alexa rank, falling Pagerank, and a member base that felt used.

Marcus

On the web you will get that a lot. Your successes and failures get magnified 1000 times when everyone can see what is going on and keep track of it in public. It isn’t fun and trust me the successes are much more enjoyable than the failures. When you come across criticism you will take it personally because your company is you. There isn’t a line between when people talk about your company and when they talk about you personally because you are the one responsible.

The great thing about running your own company is that all the responsibility is on you. The bad thing about running your own company is that all the responsibility is on you. There are many times where you will probably want to quit and throw in the towel. Working for someone else is much easier at times. Having the security of a paycheck every week brings joy to the world. Knowing that as long as you do your tasks you are in the clear means less stress (usually).

Would I ever like to go back to working for someone else? No. If I needed to of course I would. If there were 6 or 7 figures involved I would definitely consider it, but just to change paths just to do it? Never considered that.

The sacrifices are sometimes what make it all worth it in the end.