TL;DR We ended the year with our highest quarterly revenue in company history while building some important product integrations (with Google Analytics , Algolia , Unsplash & GUN ), and dark mode . Our Alexa ranking is at 3.5k worldwide, up from a 5.2k ranking before removing Medium, proving the overall success of the move into our own infrastructure. We also had a company wide year end review where 100% of the team answered “yes” to the question “are you happy?” Traffic In 2019, Hacker Noon had 38M total site visitors, an increase of 35% from 2018 year over year. From Nov 2016 through early Dec 2019, Hacker Noon totaled ≈77M visitors. Redacted We closed the year as a top , which is up from worldwide Alexa ranking of 5.2k at the time of from our site. From mid July (launch of our software) through December 2019, we published 4,523 stories, which is an average of 27 stories per day, and our library created . 3.5k site in the world removing the Medium infrastructure 48+ years of time reading Internally, we have promoted from Technology Editor to Managing Editor, and expanded the editorial team with the part-time hiring of top community commenter as Software Editor. Natasha’s voice and data driven approach will be important to scaling our brand voice and rate of publishing. Natasha Nel Arthur Tkachenko Over the course of the year, Hacker Noon stories have been featured in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and elsewhere around the internet. Forbes ReadWrite VICE Coin tele graph Coindesk The Next Web CSO Tech Startups MarTechSeries TheNews.Asia Real Vail Decrypt Entrepreneur.com Code Opinion NewsBTC Tokenist Network World Robotics Online Silicon Republic Salon ProductHunt Stories GiveBat Reddit Crypto Daily The Block Seeking Alpha JJ’s Javascript Blog Connecticut Post Inverse Sociable Metafilter Inside Blogging JB Supra Crypto Briefing Business.com PR Daily Daily Hodl, Yahoo Yahoo Finance Value Walk Security Boulevard Merca 2.0 Tech Republic CNN CCN Newsmax Windows Club Aithority Packt Wright State University KingsCrowd Wikipedia Everipedia Dice CBS University World News IAB Tech Lab News Click Common Dreams Detailed CryptoNewsZ Tech Story Bitcoinist Interesting Engineering Study International Tech Advocate Blockonomi Hackaday, Singapore Fintech News Torrent Freak SiteJabber Business2Community TechDirt KeenGamer, Popular Mechanics GitHub G2 Jaxenter MarTech Today Irish Times Digital Journal, StackOverflow Blog Thrive Global Thomas ZDnet @Jack @Naval Tech Domains a number of Books Revenue Our 2019 revenue (over ) increased by 73% a year from 2018 year over year. accounted for the majority of our revenue at 55%, even though we could only start serving sponsors mid July after launched. The rest of our yearly revenue was made up of podcast sponsorships at 14% (which ends up breaking-even after expenses), program at 12%, at 6%, at 5%, and events/ /interest/ accounting for 8%. redacted The Top Navigation Billboard sponsorship Hacker Noon 2.0 brand as author newsletter sponsorships The Noonies shirts other In the less than five months of running the brand as author program and newsletter sponsorships, we totaled over 100 paying customers. For 2019 Q4 (pictured below), the ordered revenue by program breakdown was top navigation (64%), brand as author (18%), newsletters (14%), followed by interest and schwag sales for the rest (4%). Redacted Our largest two customers for the year are and . We have a number of six digit sponsorship deals in our pipeline, and will be investing in scaling our sales programs in 2020. In 2019, some of our more notable customers also include , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and . Seen by Indeed Heroku by Salesforce Google Cloud Codacy Passbase Stream Kloudless Nodle Polyient Labs Vettery PubNub Mabl Radix LogDNA ByBit SurrveySparrow Snyk Digital Ocean Kin We’ve done a lot of optimization work with our top navigation ad and expect to increase the revenue per day from this. Additionally, we plan to explore sponsorship packages by (i.e. placement by content relevancy) in 2020. tags Product Q4 2019, we integrated with , , , and the . We also . The GUN integration is our first use of blockchain technology in the Hacker Noon publishing platform. Starting in Q1 2020, this open source decentralized database will power our annotations and inline commenting. For the first time, we will be putting some content on the blockchain. With this integration, users browsers can contribute storage and anyone can also run their own “miner” on their computer or a cloud, distributing some of our hosting costs to our readership. Unsplash Algolia Google Analytics GUN blockchain launched dark mode For the full view of our year in product development, please read our CPO Dane Lyons’ . In summary, we now have the initial experience live for our core users: writers, readers, editors, sponsors and admins; and integrated with many great technologies like: Google Cloud, SlateJS, Algolia, Filestack, Unsplash, Google Analytics, Discourse, GUN, Twitter, and more. Product Update 2019-2020 Building a digital product is always a trade-off between inventing the wheel, re-inventing the wheel and figuring out a way to plug in an existing solution — all while making the thing feel like just one quality thing. We're getting there. Very excited to build more this year. We will continue investing heavily in improving and iterating on the core product experience, reading and writing, while also launching more curation tools, such as annotations and collections, to drive account creation and micro contributions. Profit & Loss Redacted Business Development Redacted Outlook and how you can help Redacted