Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Comments on Web 2.0 and Tara's HorsePigCow blog
Tara over at HorsePigCow has an interesting post on the choices we have now on the online marketplace for getting free stuff. Want TV shows? Go to Youtube, they have every TV show. Want free music? Go to Magnatune. It's DRM free.
I want to be a programmer. I enjoy getting things for free as much as the next person. Java is free, that's cool. Microsoft released all those Visual Studio Express products out there for free, that's cool. Linux is free, that's cool. All that open-source stuff is free, that's cool.
But it isn't really free. I don't pay for any of those products but someone is. Sun is paying a lot to develop Java. Microsoft is paying a lot to develop those IDEs. The guys who make all those Linux versions are spending money to create their products.
Lets look at Web 2.0 though. Web 2.0 is all about eyeballs and free stuff (sounds very web 1.0ish but now we have AJAX).
The goal with all Web 2.0 pages is to get as many people to the page. Why? To click on those ads of course. Oh, but there aren't any ads yet because they're all still in beta because at the moment, all those Web 2.0 pages have outside funding. When the funding stops, we're going to see an ungodly amount of advertising again on these types of pages.
Free stuff. It's like the essence of Web 2.0. Hosting videos? That should be free. Blog hosts? That should be free as well. RSS readers? Also free. Mashup sites? Oh, of course that should be free. Why are all of these things free? Because they're cheap to produce and thus, not worth enough to for people to pay for but probably not valuable enough to generate a solid amount of revenue.
Example:
Reddit - Did you know that Reddit almost ran out of funding a while back and had to shut down? Why? Because they can't make money from their site because they don't have any advertisements and they're a hugely popular site. They are getting massive amounts of hits but I wonder if those are even enough to pay the two developers of the site even if they had ads. Reddit though isn't really a hard site to create. I could build the site in a week if I really wanted to and the same goes for Del.icio.us and Digg. What makes reddit work is the number of eyeballs it has. Really, Digg.com does just as good of a job at pointing out cool sites as Reddit but Reddit goes in two directions for voting instead of one like Digg. I don't really see that as the "killer" feature that's going to keep them at the top of the pack.
Tara recently had a discussion on her blog about starting a Web 2.0 startup and how the idea is that you start with no real idea how to make money and then see what happens. So here is a question. What happens when all these bad Web 2.0 startups run through their investor's money with no success and either have to bomb or sell out for pennies (what most likely happened to Writely) and investors wake up to the fact that maybe there was never much to the whole Web 2.0 thing? Now we're back to actually having to make money so how do we do that again? ¶ 9:36 PM
I want to be a programmer. I enjoy getting things for free as much as the next person. Java is free, that's cool. Microsoft released all those Visual Studio Express products out there for free, that's cool. Linux is free, that's cool. All that open-source stuff is free, that's cool.
But it isn't really free. I don't pay for any of those products but someone is. Sun is paying a lot to develop Java. Microsoft is paying a lot to develop those IDEs. The guys who make all those Linux versions are spending money to create their products.
Lets look at Web 2.0 though. Web 2.0 is all about eyeballs and free stuff (sounds very web 1.0ish but now we have AJAX).
The goal with all Web 2.0 pages is to get as many people to the page. Why? To click on those ads of course. Oh, but there aren't any ads yet because they're all still in beta because at the moment, all those Web 2.0 pages have outside funding. When the funding stops, we're going to see an ungodly amount of advertising again on these types of pages.
Free stuff. It's like the essence of Web 2.0. Hosting videos? That should be free. Blog hosts? That should be free as well. RSS readers? Also free. Mashup sites? Oh, of course that should be free. Why are all of these things free? Because they're cheap to produce and thus, not worth enough to for people to pay for but probably not valuable enough to generate a solid amount of revenue.
Example:
Reddit - Did you know that Reddit almost ran out of funding a while back and had to shut down? Why? Because they can't make money from their site because they don't have any advertisements and they're a hugely popular site. They are getting massive amounts of hits but I wonder if those are even enough to pay the two developers of the site even if they had ads. Reddit though isn't really a hard site to create. I could build the site in a week if I really wanted to and the same goes for Del.icio.us and Digg. What makes reddit work is the number of eyeballs it has. Really, Digg.com does just as good of a job at pointing out cool sites as Reddit but Reddit goes in two directions for voting instead of one like Digg. I don't really see that as the "killer" feature that's going to keep them at the top of the pack.
Tara recently had a discussion on her blog about starting a Web 2.0 startup and how the idea is that you start with no real idea how to make money and then see what happens. So here is a question. What happens when all these bad Web 2.0 startups run through their investor's money with no success and either have to bomb or sell out for pennies (what most likely happened to Writely) and investors wake up to the fact that maybe there was never much to the whole Web 2.0 thing? Now we're back to actually having to make money so how do we do that again? ¶ 9:36 PM
