Growing Rich by Blogging Is a High-Tech Fairy Tale | Newsweek Daniel Lyons | Techtonic Shifts | Newsweek.com
http://www.newsweek.com/id/183666

More money was spent on e-mail advertising last year than was spent on blog advertising—yet you don't see anyone touting e-mail as the next big billion-dollar media business. Technorati, a blog researcher, estimates that bloggers who run ads earn an average of $5,060 per year. Don't call the Ferrari dealer just yet.

To be sure, some blogs are little goldmines. Gizmodo, a gadget blog run by Gawker Media, had record traffic last month, with 98 million page views, and is "fantastically profitable," Gawker CEO Nick Denton says. Dooce, a personal-diary blog run by a husband-and-wife team, does between $500,000 to $1 million a year, according to Federated Media, which sells ads for the site. Arrington says TechCrunch did $3 million in 2007 and even more in 2008. He says he could sell the company today, albeit for a lower price than it would have fetched a year ago.

http://www.boxuk.com/blog/monetizing-your-web-app-business-models boxuk.com

Business models for web applications

monetizing web apps

I'd pay for analytics for the company

As expected, money to get corporations "more features" on Twitter -- no launch date yet.

How To Monetize a Social Network: MySpace and Facebook Should Follow TenCent « abovethecrowd.com

"According to a report by Credit Suisse, YouTube is on track to lose roughly $470 million in 2009....YouTube will manage to rake in about $240 million in ad revenue in 2009, against operating costs of roughly $711 million."

One thing is clear: YouTube cannot maintain its current course and remain a going concern. Google can continue to fund the experiment for a period of time, but at some juncture, shareholders will ask hard questions about why Google is sacrificing half a billion dollars to support a project whose chances of providing a return, at any point, is dubious at best. Advertising cannot solve the problem, at least not in its current form, and not in the near term. With a diminishing field of options, a massive, growing, cost center, and an economy in recession, Google will need to make some hard decisions about the future viability and business model of its prodigal child.

YouTube on track to lose $470 million in 2009.

The economics are hard to overcome. Assuming YouTube delivers the 75 billion streams that Credit Suisse projects for 2009, and assuming YouTube manages to slot an ad for every stream (which is practically speaking, impossible, given the nature of much of their content), YouTube would have to achieve a $9.48 CPM for every video impression shown. Presumably, the videos YouTube is already monetizing represent the best content available, with diminishing returns as they reach deeper and deeper into a repository rife with copyright violation, the indecent, the uninteresting, and the unwatchable. Hulu claims to be charging a $30 CPM, of which roughly 70% goes to the copyright holder. Averages for other proprietary content hover around the $10 CPM mark. CPMs for user-generated content, assuming you can attract the advertisers, tend to be measured in fractions of a dollar.

WSJ: Firms Seek Profit in Twitter's Chatter <paying users for right to sell ads in their tweets,Magpie&Friends,GlamMedia http://bit.ly/WoI7b [from http://twitter.com/frankhellwig/statuses/1406214635]

Companies are trying to profit from Twitter's users by experimenting with business models that incorporate parts of the free messaging service.

Companies are trying to profit from Twitter's popularity by experimenting with business models that incorporate parts of the free messaging service. So far no companies on Twitter have reaped a windfall.

Twitter business models...

Companies are trying to profit from Twitter's popularity by experimenting with business models that incorporate parts of the free messaging service.

Over the past couple months, I've spent a bit of time looking at Flash gaming on web portals like Kongregate and Newgrounds. There are over 14,000 games spread across 30,000 portals with hundreds of new games coming out every month. The output alone is amazing. Let me cut to the chase. I think that you, Flash game developers, are some of the most talented and inspirational people working today in game development. Your passion for building games burns so incredibly brightly. Your ability to quickly make and distribute games is second to none. You hold immense potential to transform the future of games.

Ads are a really crappy revenue source For a recent game my friend Andre released, 2 million unique users yields around $650 from MochiAds. This yields an Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) of only $0.000325 per user. Even when you back in the money that sponsors will pay, I still only get an ARPU of $0.0028 per user. In comparison, a MMO like Puzzle Pirates makes about $0.21 per user that reaches the landing page (and $4.20 per user that registers) What this tells me is that other business models involving selling games on the Internet are several orders of magnitude more effective at making money from an equivalent number of customers. When your means of making money is 1/100th as efficient as money making techniques used by other developers, maybe you've found one big reason why developers starve when they make Flash games.

In order to understand why this promising game platform is such a surprising dissapointment, we'll look at Flash games from three perspectives: * Chapter 2 - Making money: How do Flash developers currently make money. * Chapter 3 - Generating value: How Flash developers currently create 'valuable' game for their players? * Chapter 4 - Reaching customers: How developers currently reach their players. * Chapter 5 - Premium Flash games as a service: A mental model for understanding the new world of web gaming.

Federated Media - Rep Agency

pretty darn fascinating

@venturedig

Four Primary Business Models in the social networking space that I’ve experienced–they primarily are concerned with Facebook Applications.

Freemium model.

marketing internet

An utterly enthralling rant about the economics of the web, written 40,000 feet up in the air. "Newsflash folks: The Internet does NOT want to be FREE... It wants to GET PAID on Fucking Friday, just like everybody else on the damn planet."

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ASSERTION #2: The default startup business model for 2010 & beyond will be subscriptions and transactions (e-commerce, digital goods). Newsflash folks: The Internet does NOT want to be FREE... It wants to GET PAID on Fucking Friday, just like everybody else on the damn planet.

(+ why Facebook, Google, & Apple will own your wallet by 2015)

Case Studies in Freemium: Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and MailChimp

great read RT @nickdemey @lizgannes - Case Studies in Freemium: Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and MailChimp - http://bit.ly/9w7ofE

using technoloyg

RT @davewiner: Twitter VC :there will be "sudden" changes and then we'll know what Twitter's business model is. :-) http://bit.ly/15lTiK [from http://twitter.com/rohitharsh/statuses/1267090367]

RT - Twitter VC Laughs at Idea that Twitter Has No Bus Model - ReadWriteWeb http://ff.im/-1hDCY. +++Some said that about Google early on. [from http://twitter.com/paulwalker/statuses/1266876050]

Todd Dagres, founder of Spark Capital and one of the VCs that poured an additional $35 million into Twitter recently, finds it amusing when people talk about Twitter's lack of a business model.

$ frm twttr VC says: "All of a sudden...some changes...won't undermine...but...pretty obvious how we...monetize it." http://is.gd/llEp [from http://twitter.com/DrIanFenwick/statuses/1292447685]

is it obvious? will those first to react to it be in a position to leverage it?

Dagres, who claims that Sparks and Union Square Ventures are the two biggest shareholders in Twitter, said that there is a business model - it just hasn't been implemented yet. But he did provide one clue. "All of a sudden there will be some changes that won't undermine the experience or the vitality -- but it will be pretty obvious how we're going to monetize it."

A growing number of game makers on Facebook are making money from virtual goods — from poker chips to virtual clothes that users can buy or earn while playing gaming applications with their friends on Facebook. The combined ecosystem of these game developers and other companies supplying services to them could generate half a billion dollars in revenue in 2009.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who is no Twitter slouch himself with 61,266 hard-earned followers, thinks that being one of the top 20 on the suggested list will be worth as much as a Superbowl ad within five years. He is offering Twitter $250,000 to lock in a spot on the suggested list for two years, or $120,000 for one year. I emailed Calacanis (who is our partner in putting on the TechCrunch 50 conference) and he confirms the offer is dead serious. In fact, he contacted Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams last week about it, and is lobbying investor Fred Wilson.

How It Works If one of your users clicks through to a product or service and buys something you automatically earn a commission. In return for the service we typically take 25% of those commissions. There is no risk, you only pay us a share of what you earn. Often you earn more with VigLink due to collective bargaining on commission rates, even after our 25% cut.

good bullet points on the common challenges facing the freemium model.

YouSendIt

RT @igrigorik great read on freemium models / patterns for startups: http://tinyurl.com/d5a5xs [from http://twitter.com/nealrichter/statuses/1575106507]

service enables publishers to offer premium tweets via direct message to paying subscribers

Is this the end of the world as we know it? Maybe. I'm not ruling out that a good Twitter stream is worth paying for - I just haven't seen it yet.

reading Paid Twitter Streams Are Here: Super Chirp http://ow.ly/cPDN [from http://twitter.com/ploked/statuses/2072907093]

A new service from 83 Degrees called Super Chirp launches this evening that lets Twitter users get paid for their content stream.

A new service from 83 Degrees called Super Chirp launches this evening that lets Twitter users get paid for their content stream. ...

A new service from 83 Degrees called Super Chirp launches this evening that lets Twitter users get paid for their content stream. This is a theme we’ve touched on in the past. There is a huge market for celebrity fan pages that Super Chirp will play right into. In fact, 83 Degrees CEO Narendra Rocherolle wrote a guest post here last year called A Missed Opportunity - Britney On Twitter where he talks about the idea. Twitter is mobile and it’s real time, two huge advantages over normal fan sites. And it’s constantly refreshed with new content. Britney Spears has 1.7 million Twitter followers. How many of them would be willing to pay $1, or $10, per month to see a premium stream of her content?

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MySpace will be implementing the system with initial support for content from MTV Networks, with shows including The Colbert Report, Punk’d, and Sarah Silverman. So every time you post a clip of Jon Stewart ripping on the presidential candidates, someone is going to get paid, and users won’t have to deal with the often-clunky proprietary video players offered by each network. And instead of trying to prevent these clips from making it onto MySpace in the first place, content owners will want users to upload as many as possibl

MySpace has implemented an exciting new ad platform called Auditude that willautomatically identify any uploaded video clips from a number of shows produced by MTV Networks and will display an overlay when the clip is played that shows which episode the clip originally came from, its original air-date, and links to online stores where users can buy the entire episode.

Since YouTube heralded the era of user-uploaded videos, media corporations have been fighting a hopeless battle to regain control of their content, sending out endless waves of DMCA notices in a vain attempt to take down countless clips scattered across the web. In the last year sites like Hulu have made progress - it’s finally possible to legally embed a clip of The Office in your blog, but publishers continue to lose out on millions of video clips that were uploaded without permission.

Yep, there’s a proliferation of unlicensed video content out there. Media co’s have tried, largely in vain, to track and act on the zillions of daily infractions. Whole companies have popped up to try to help them in the tracking. Well another company has popped up that might make those companies, and the problem, go away. MySpace is testing a service provided by Auditude which intercepts video uploads, compares segments to its last-4-year, 250M video catalog and, if found to be a copy, tags the video w/ header information, overlays ads and/or provides links to full, pay versions. This is a game-changer, these guys are smart.

Dell Starts Offering Exclusive Discounts Through Twitter http://tcrn.ch/ainRDr

Over the holidays, Dell was offering discounts exclusively to the 11,844 people who follow @DellOutlet. For instance, here is a Tweet with a link to a 30-percent-off deal on an XPS laptop. When you click on the link, it takes you to this product page on Dell.com.

In 2000, a company in Mountain View, California launched a program for keyword-targeted advertising with 350 clients known as AdWords. That company, Google, is

In 2000, a company in Mountain View, California launched a program for keyword-targeted advertising with 350 clients known as AdWords. That company,