Nick Garner's Blog

Show me the money ???

I’ve been looking at ‘web 2.0′ sites and ideas surrounding how they can possibly make any money. This interesting project has loads of nice ideas and in late July some of these are going to get built!

Social Innovation Camp

Some of my thinking on this:

Just looking at this list: http://scotland.sicamp.org/?page_id=47

Nearly all of these ideas are based around exchanges, but as ever with this kind of thing its going to be critical mass that gets them off the ground.

So I reckon the basis of a great web 2.0 marketing architecture is:

- Site is of use to a niche group of the web searching public. You have to start niche since there is too much competition for anything mass market.

- Get mass decentralised participation (wiki’s) so it self generates. More is more whe you think about the long tail and the easy by which you can find stuff on teh most obscure subject.

- Organise your site so engines can get in and comprehensively index.? Search engines typically account for about 50-60% of a well built site’s free traffic and they are critical to the word of mouth effect on the internet.

- Make the content very ‘linkable’ so the engines and ‘connectors/mavens’ (bloggers etc) give these sites authority. Linkable is another word for socially acceptable on the internet. The more social standing you have, the more prominence you will gain.

- Make sure the meme behind the idea is very strong. If you can put it into 6 words, great! The simpler, the more useful, the greater chance it has of spreading

- Build the site so its in the self interest of the user to pass it on.? The clever thing hotmail, gmail, various IM’s, user reviews on Amazon, facebook apps, facebook, linkedin, any social network site has, is more people is more for me.

- Low barrier to participation, high barrier to exit. So its easy to get started with and hard to leave. Think web hosting, email accounts, photo upload sites facebook. In fact anything where you get a ton ov value, where you invest a lot of time, where its reall hassle to move on.

Then you have a good chance of reaching critical mass and thus making the site worthy of taking revenue as a middleman. Obviously people don’t readily pay for information, but if the site offers enough utility, then there is a space for charging:

- To advertise if the exposure is great enough, but craigslist shows us that there are only certain things that are chargable (cars, jobs, property) I think the caveat is that people will pay if they are sure they will get? a sale, otherwise they just go where the risk is lowest i.e. a free site

- To pay for the utility a site offers, like flickr pro. The catch is that you really have to offer something exceptional.

- If your informaiton can make individuals a profit, then its also chargable. Webmasterworld.com / expertsexchange? /ft.com / wallstjournal.

- When you reach critical mass and you are the only real choice…you can charge, but only enough to make users not go somewhere else / or where you stifle usage and so kill off the critical mass.

Since ad revenues have tanked and probably will continue to do so for a long time (or ever), there is no point in depending on ad revenue for income. Besides, until ads are really relevant, they just fall into the old school disruptive model of marketing. And thats really not web 2.0???

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1. WHAT IS WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING?
2. Wisdom of crowds, memes and affilaite marketing
3. Useful list of marketing blogs
4. Talking of speaking…Audiobook and ipadio
5. 13 prophecies for internet marketing