Popular websites which are not making any revenue
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Get bought out by a megacorp who subsidizes them while trying to figure out how to get revenue without offending the users. :rolleyes:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
dan neely wrote:
Get bought out by a megacorp who subsidizes them while trying to figure out how to get revenue without offending while not giving a stuff about the users.
FTFY
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YouTube looks so unprofessional; that I always thought that it has been started form a couple enthusiast in a garage.
The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
Deyan Georgiev wrote:
YouTube looks so unprofessional; that I always thought that it has been started form a couple enthusiast in a garage.
Kind of like Apple and Google beginnings, eh?
"My interest is in the future because I'm going to spend the rest of my life there." - Charles F. Kettering
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Deyan Georgiev wrote:
YouTube looks so unprofessional; that I always thought that it has been started form a couple enthusiast in a garage.
Kind of like Apple and Google beginnings, eh?
"My interest is in the future because I'm going to spend the rest of my life there." - Charles F. Kettering
No, Apple actually had a *real* product and a business plan that led to generating, gasp, income without scratching your head and wondering how it was going to work. Google and *especially* Youtube don't have that.
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I've been edjumacated by the best! Thanks! I won't be misunderestimating that again!
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The standard business model on the web has actually changed only slightly from the pre dot com crash days. In the beginning, people launched companies and lived on venture capital. This let programmers play with their toys on somebody else's nickel without worrying about all that generating revenue stuff. The end game strategy was not that they'd end up bringing in money, but rather that once the product was done, they'd make a ton of money by taking the company public and profiting from the stock market. After the crash, taking a company public is no longer the end game, but it's been replaced (albeit subtly) with a minor variation. They still have no clue as to how they're going to generate revenue, so the game is start a company, live on venture capital so that programmers can play with their toys on somebody else's nickel, and hopefully before the VC tires of pumping money into a black hole some fool of a large corporation will buy the startup out for a large sum of money. It's a very, very minor variation that simply shifts the sucker left holding the bag from those who buy company stock to those who buy the company itself. Either way, P. T. Barnum would be proud.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Got a career question? Ask the Attack Chihuahua!
Christopher Duncan wrote:
live on venture capital so that programmers can play with their toys on somebody else's nickel,
What is wrong about that? As a programmer and a capitalist you have no reason to complain. ;)
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It's kind of scary to know that some of the popular websites: YouTube, Twitter and Facebook(not that sure?) are not making any money. Surely they can not last long if they don't have a good revenue model. So what do you think will eventually happen to them? Is there a second big burst coming which will engulf all these social media sites? In my opinion it has to come the only question is when.
modified on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 1:01 PM
Hi Rama, Some companies are started on a "wing and a prayer" and by the clever extraction of other people's (investors) monies with business plans that are sheer "science fiction." Often the end-goal in both the founders and the investors minds is not revenue per se, but reaching a critical mass in either popularity, notoriety (Pirate's Bay ?), usage, or reputation for uniqueness that then triggers the buying out of the company at which point the "fantasy" stock of the start-up becomes "real stock." What accumulates at some of these in-the-end-we-will-be-bought companies is the technological capital and the human capital they amass and what marketers call "sizzle." I personally have been at a small company that used exactly this model, and, praise be, we were acquired by a very large company at an incredible valuation. It was only years later that I realized the founder of the company from the beginnings was deliberately shaping the company to be the "apple" of this very large company's eye. You can be sure we employees were never told this, but you can be sure it was discussed with the VC's who put two rounds of financing into it a a time when VC money was in short supply. "Hitch your wagon to a star" is a timely adage, perhaps. best, Bill best, Bill
"Many : not conversant with mathematical studies, imagine that because it [the Analytical Engine] is to give results in numerical notation, its processes must consequently be arithmetical, numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine numerical quantities as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and it fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly." Ada, Countess Lovelace, 1844
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Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
Is there a second big burst coming which will engulf all these social media sites?
I think you mean third burst/crash, don't you? Yes I think there will be, or maybe it will be more a whimper? Eventually this stuff will pass, maybe to be replaced with something more useful? Or something that has some way of generating money? Youtube I can see being just absorbed into Google's cost of running the company. Facebook and Twitter though are virtually worthless, and I wouldn't at all be surprised to see them dumped eventually. Here's hoping! :)
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Jim Crafton wrote:
Facebook and Twitter though are virtually worthless
I trust you're joking. Google has a market cap around $130US billion based mostly on selling advertising. Facebook and Twitter both have large and growing user base, ripe for targeted advertising...
Jim Crafton wrote:
Eventually this stuff will pass, maybe to be replaced with something more useful?
I do agree with this though, MySpace was the social networking site a few years ago (remember how much News Corp paid for it!), but it's code and appearance are crapulent and Facebook is now dominating.
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It's kind of scary to know that some of the popular websites: YouTube, Twitter and Facebook(not that sure?) are not making any money. Surely they can not last long if they don't have a good revenue model. So what do you think will eventually happen to them? Is there a second big burst coming which will engulf all these social media sites? In my opinion it has to come the only question is when.
modified on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 1:01 PM
Facebook is actually making a boat load of dough with all those "single's/date matching" sites such as Match.com and eHarmony and the like. Plus, they sell these "gifts" at about a dollar a pop that you can give to other people. I'm not sure if those "gifts" are just images or if they are the real deal little toys. I still haven't extrapolated how YouTube gets it's financing, other than the whole VC's infusing it on a regular basis. I've been on MySpace and it was a novel concept, just poorly executed because the site was crap and not well maintained IMO. Facebook had a much cleaner structure and made it simple for many to extend with those applications (my all-time favorite app is still the sheep throwing one :-D).
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Facebook is actually making a boat load of dough with all those "single's/date matching" sites such as Match.com and eHarmony and the like. Plus, they sell these "gifts" at about a dollar a pop that you can give to other people. I'm not sure if those "gifts" are just images or if they are the real deal little toys. I still haven't extrapolated how YouTube gets it's financing, other than the whole VC's infusing it on a regular basis. I've been on MySpace and it was a novel concept, just poorly executed because the site was crap and not well maintained IMO. Facebook had a much cleaner structure and made it simple for many to extend with those applications (my all-time favorite app is still the sheep throwing one :-D).
MySpace is profitable from what I heard. It sells enough advertising to support itself. YouTube is owned by Google and is financed through Google, at a tremendous loss. Google is in talks with Disney and other content providers in an attempt to make some money. Twitter is run by the original owners of Blogger, which they sold to Google a while back. They are independently wealthy and can apparently afford to run Twitter at a loss for a long time. Twitter has made noises that it doesn't care about how it will make money and is content to stay in its current unprofitable state as long as it can.
Idaho Edokpayi
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It's kind of scary to know that some of the popular websites: YouTube, Twitter and Facebook(not that sure?) are not making any money. Surely they can not last long if they don't have a good revenue model. So what do you think will eventually happen to them? Is there a second big burst coming which will engulf all these social media sites? In my opinion it has to come the only question is when.
modified on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 1:01 PM
the make millions with advertising !
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No, Apple actually had a *real* product and a business plan that led to generating, gasp, income without scratching your head and wondering how it was going to work. Google and *especially* Youtube don't have that.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
Wow, you really believe that? You haven't read much from the Woz have you. He was as anti-planning as any startup has ever been.
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Wow, you really believe that? You haven't read much from the Woz have you. He was as anti-planning as any startup has ever been.
He may have been anti-planning, but they still had a real product, the Apple I, the Apple II, and a few other gadgets too, didn't they? And I seem to recall a story about Steve J taking one of the Apple I (or maybe it was the Apple II) to a bank to get a loan along with some rudimentary business plan that he'd put together.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
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He may have been anti-planning, but they still had a real product, the Apple I, the Apple II, and a few other gadgets too, didn't they? And I seem to recall a story about Steve J taking one of the Apple I (or maybe it was the Apple II) to a bank to get a loan along with some rudimentary business plan that he'd put together.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
Strictly from memory here, but I believe Woz built the machine and demonstrated it before he had ANY plans of ANY sort. It was a hobby. His friend Steve Jobs convinced him to sell the machine and they got together and found someone (Bytes or Byteshop or some name like that) to buy a few and then... the Apple I was born. Not the other way around.
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Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
Is there a second big burst coming which will engulf all these social media sites?
I think you mean third burst/crash, don't you? Yes I think there will be, or maybe it will be more a whimper? Eventually this stuff will pass, maybe to be replaced with something more useful? Or something that has some way of generating money? Youtube I can see being just absorbed into Google's cost of running the company. Facebook and Twitter though are virtually worthless, and I wouldn't at all be surprised to see them dumped eventually. Here's hoping! :)
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
I don't think social websites are worthless at all! They have great potential for analyzing consumers (ie. selling all your personal data to other companies) and viral marketing. It's not something the users like, but I'm pretty sure thats the business model they use.
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YouTube looks so unprofessional; that I always thought that it has been started form a couple enthusiast in a garage.
The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
That's not true! I think all the Google-Tools or nearly all the Google Tools :) look a little simple when seeing them first, but that's exactly the secret of Google. Everything is very well structured, and very easy to use and it just works. They wouldn't have any problem by using mega-stylesheets on everypage loading images for every header, but the best solution is just like it is.
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How they pay their employees’ salaries and the other expenses if they don’t make any money? Why Apple wants to by Twitter if there is no money in it?
The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
This may be a little off topic? I look at non-product, websites like a morphed model of what has always been used to generate advertising revenues. Simply a virtual corporation with the same objectives. 1. After the gestation period, these sites can support themselves with advertising revenue just as Free magazines do. Directly with their own contracts or indirectly with programs like Google AdSense. I see this with newsletters and lots of other web content as well. The idea is to get visitors/readers/subscribers in each case. You can charge more for ads if you can prove who your subscribers are and how many you have. TV is the same. Other than paying for cable and cable programs, which are optional, it is free. They make zillions of dollars on ads as we all know. I think of newspapers, magazines, and TV as the models that the business managers of websites use. Many magazines and newspapers have failed as the shift to the net continues. The people working at the website companies have migrated from these failed companies. 2. If they are big enough, the site can function as a feed for their product sites. Then the costs are just advertising expenses. 3. Creating a company with the intent to sell it and take the appreciated asset values is viable if you know what you are doing with enough precision, and your timing is good. You can get skunked otherwise. When the statistics for a website demographic, that a larger company wants to own, are at an acceptable threshold, the larger players get out the checkbook. This is not much different than the goals in acquisitions of brick and mortars. So if the website fails, it may be the same old reasons: a bad business plan, under-capitalization, or bad management. With the rapid growth the net allows, all of these things are harder to do well. The sources of revenue are there. The type of business plan that does not make sense to me is the Brick and Mortar that goes from commercial licenses to the open-source Free model. For example, SCO -> Novell Caldera. Predictably this failed. It never made sense to me. As you probably know, this then became The SCO Group, then Chapter 11 and now unXis. Well that is my 2 cents.
"Coding for fun and profit ... mostly fun"
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It's kind of scary to know that some of the popular websites: YouTube, Twitter and Facebook(not that sure?) are not making any money. Surely they can not last long if they don't have a good revenue model. So what do you think will eventually happen to them? Is there a second big burst coming which will engulf all these social media sites? In my opinion it has to come the only question is when.
modified on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 1:01 PM
I Think they do earn a lot of money, think of adds, supported apps, links you can find them everywhere on the internet for the websites you are talking about. there would be a lot of money involved from potential partners and adds
