How will (some of the) Web 2.0 make money?

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Have you noticed? There’s quite a buzz about on the web at the moment. For me it started a while back with Gmail, went on to the things 37signals were doing, fell into Ajax, bounced into Web 2.0 and has now just exploded.

New websites/webservices are launching every day. Here’s my list of personal discoveries for just for the last two days:

I haven’t checked, but you can guarantee sure as holes is holes that each site will have an RSS feed. And if you sign up you can probably get a personalized RSS feed. But now that you have all those feeds what can you do with them? Look no further for I have the solution…

This is currently concatenating content (9/10 for alliteration) from my blog, my bookmarks, my wife’s photos, and a list of blogs with comments I was following. It’s nice. With those feeds it shows a snapshot of me on the web.

But it might also be useful for a team to join up all their blogs and images together. Alternatively it might be used by a team to stay in touch with a range of external sites that refelct their shared interests. For a large website that has many feeds available this could provide a snapshot of activity on the site. Someone on the forum points out it might help fight censorship in China. There are quite a few possibilities…

But, one question – and a question that keeps cropping up for me: what is the business model? Remember hearing this question before? Yup – that’s right, it was during the last dotcom bubble.

So, how do suprglu plan to make money?

The answer may be Google ads. To be fair to suprglu they’ve not said that this will be the case and their site shows that they’re trying to avoid it, but they will need some form of income to keep it going.
Which prompts the next question: how can every new startup gain enough ‘land’ in terms of users/viewers that they can make enough money from PPC advertising?
The answer for many of the services is the ‘give away a bit for free, but then charge for the full service’ model. This is good – but doesn’t fit all. How will this ‘a bit free’ model work for suprglu? I guess at the moment it’s just an interesting environment where plenty of people are trying plenty of things, and some will make money whereas others will be bought by Google!

2 Comments Add yours

  1. John says:

    Hello Michael,

    It’s John the founder of ingesti here… our first plan for ingesti is to see whether there is a market out there which will actually use the product.

    The only reason I made ingesti was because there was nothing out there which did what I wanted yet and I don’t want to shamelessly self-promote but it ticks all the boxes that I want out of a personalised news service.

    Cheers and thanks for the mention. I would be interested how did you find out about ingesti?

  2. Michael says:

    Hi John

    Sorry – the post was from back in April and I’m afraid I can’t recall. I thought it might have been via a mention in TechCrunch or Digg, but I’ve just checked their archives and it’s not obviously there.

    Are you about to launch a live service? The site is just taking email addresses at the moment…

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