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.
3 comments
Locally, I think we should think about how your Web 2.0 site will make money before starting out. Most of the “free” things have already been made after all, so no use in doing it all over again especially for a small and saturated market
Also, development in the mobile area is a bit weak compared to the net so that maybe something to look at.
The problem with most Web 2.0 companies is they think the real asset is having a hold on the “community”…. but they most never really figure out how to monetize these large communities.
Friendster is a perfect example! I visited their office in San Francisco a few weeks back and they obviously needed to find more ways to monetize their business.
So the question on monetization is something other big community companies like YouTube and MySpace need to figure out soon.
realm of the elite, well yeah, here in the philippines it can be where if you can make $10 adsense income a day you can make a living out of blogging, but not everywhere, especially in the us.. besides, these web2.0 companies, it think wider (or bigger – lack of term) than we thought.. primarily their source of income is the same source of income with bloggers, however they look at their project more of a business venture rather than a hobby or a past time, which gives them an edge against blogging if you ask me..