Web 2.0, Revenue Models and Profitability: A Web 1.0 Comparison

The lameness of this article is that he's making all of his conclusions on 3 big companies. That's an enormous generalization.<p>He's missing the whole lean, mean segment by looking only at the top.<p>Try comparing the sheer number of companies during 2.0 and 1.0, and you'll start to see the difference.

Am I the only one who remembers the first Web 2.0 companies, before the 2.0 buzz word was around?<p>I'm talking about Flickr, the early Flickr, how lean and neat was that!<p>Can we now look forward to more creative and lean things? At least until Web 3.0 rises to drown it all in money and unoriginality, again.

Again, I must run and hide behind the great work Twitpic is doing.<p><a href="http://blog.twitpic.com/2008/12/be-yourself/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.twitpic.com/2008/12/be-yourself/</a><p><i>Twitpic is self funded and ran by one guy from his apartment</i><p>He does it because he loves it, not because it pays the bills. Does everything HAVE to turn a profit?

Someone mentioned a while back that advertising is a business model for web properties just as much as it is for tv shows/sitcoms. The shows that make money have a significant loyal audience. The few that charge money to the end users have a content their audience can't seem to live without (read porn).

I think the author makes a very good point.<p>"the fact that offering free, advertising-supported services to millions upon millions of people is not a lean and- mean undertaking"<p>and<p>"They figured that the revenue and profits would come eventually but clearly that was putting the cart before the horse"<p>I see lots of people on HN building great products who have clearly not asked (and answered) the most important question: How will my service make money?<p>It should be becoming painfully clear that layering advertising on top of a useful service does not work.<p>Adsense works because it puts <i>relevant</i> ads in front of people who are already searching for something.<p>FB users are connecting with friends not looking for products.

"Web 2.0 is not like Web 1.0. It's in a special (ed) class of its own."<p>The author clearly does not get it. Profitability is not a "pipe dream" for companies like Digg and Facebook. If profitability was the only objective, I'm sure they could achieve it. The pipe dream is attaining the massive scale necessary to build a publicly traded company.