J. Angelo Racoma posted an interesting analysis on the web evolution, citing that blogging is the realm of the elite. I tend to agree in his basic premise that Web 2.0 would turn out to be another Web 1.0 model. He offers one rationale–“we are but gradually moving into a state where the community aspect of the Web is losing out to dominance by a certain few;” I offer an additional rationale: there is little monetizeable business model to sustain such “Web 2.0” sites.
Unless there is a stream of money flowing in, there will be little to sustain such websites. Friendster, once the rage of the internet crowd, is already struggling. The question I always ask myself is how do these “œWeb 2.0″³ sites make money? While I can see how sites like digg and delicious are, as one poster put it, “œposterboys of Web 2.0,” I am still struggling on how these sites can be translated to monetizable and sustainable business-models. Take Yahoo’s last couple of acquisitions, Flickr and delicious””I have yet to see any significant changes which would allow Yahoo to recoup on their investments. The key revenue driver for most sites is ad revenue, and to deliver ad revenue sites have to capture eyeballs. As long as people visit such sites like digg and delicious, other companies will be willing to pay to pubish their ads in their spaces. But these sites””and the other so-called “œWeb 2.0″³ sites””are easily cloned. Techcrunch continues to announce new social-networking sites, but my feeling is that they do not offer anything significantly earth-shaking””all you have to do is toss in tagging, blogging, image sharing, and feed readers and you have basically the same type of experience.