Comments on: All About The Page Views

By: Otis Gospodnetic

Otis Gospodnetic — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 20:38:55 +0000

Interesting. I wrote something very much along those lines at http://blog.simpy.com/blojsom/blog/2006/06/13/Mike-Arringtons-Business-Model.html. It's about profit = revenue - expenses, and expenses(blogging)

By: Pat McCarthy

Pat McCarthy — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:38:19 +0000

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the comment, I’d like to hear about your plans. They sound interesting.

By: Mark McGuire

Mark McGuire — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 13:39:26 +0000

Interesting post, but as the founder of a new start up, I continue to be amazed how few start ups are working on changing the underlying advertising model and making that be their value proposition rather than using advertising as a necessary evil.

If you are interested, you can see what we are up to at Jellyfish.com and read a post on why I think advertising is way behind technology here:
http://www.jellyfish.com/blog/2006/05/17/first-quarter-score-online-advertising-7-technology-28/

By: Pat McCarthy

Pat McCarthy — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 17:36:05 +0000

Great points Andrew, and I hope that many of them do have some premium features planned. It’s just shocking how few have actually released any if they do have them planned.

And beyond having them planned, are users going to pay for them?

Obviously it’s a case by case answer, but I do know there are very few that provide a valuable enough service for me that I’d pay for them.

By: Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:47:25 +0000

I think the critical issue here is how close do advertising revenues come to expenses? For a site like YouTube which presumably makes less on advertising than on their bandwidth costs this is already a bad business model. YouTube might be able to get away with it through a buy out, but your average low profile bandwidth hog won’t.

For some sites the expenses don’t even come remotely close to touching the revenues. Even if there is a downturn in the ad market they will do just fine.

Of course, we also have to look where the ad dollars are coming from. Vonage being the top online spender is not a pretty picture for the future. In an economic pullback those kind of dollars could disappear very fast.

I think right now everyone wants to be big and have influence. They’ve figured out that its a lot easier to do so if your content is all open and free. That doesn’t mean that these companies don’t have premium features planned.