Two Big Trends
#1 More and more sites are moving to the hybrid model I described recently of cross between destination and distribution.
This is the way a lot of sites are going to go, because it's the most cost effective way to drive new customer acquisition and generate awareness about your site. The big community sites already have tons of traffic, if you have some simple content you can syndicate out from your destination site "for free," then you can get click-throughs and drive traffic to your site as a result. This is the smart, smart way to drive traffic to web sites, and it's a lot cheaper than buying advertising.
The key is to give away just enough teaser content that people see value in what they can post on their profile, listing, or page on another big site, but that users see enough value in what's being shown to click-through to your destination site. This is the new wave in traffic generation.
It's sort of the next generation in RSS feeds, but there's no need for a reader... it's easier to use, with more diverse content, that gets incorporated into users' existing pages and listings.
#2 Later stage companies with millions in revenue who want to fund new and interesting online and Web 2.0 type businesses. These businesses are legacy or Web 1.0 businesses that need capital to fund new businesses that they could not be in unless they were in the original business. That is, their "legacy" business (even if it's not that old) is what provides entre into the new Web 2.0 business that they really want to do. I think we are going to see a lot more of these and they will be very interesting.
This is the way a lot of sites are going to go, because it's the most cost effective way to drive new customer acquisition and generate awareness about your site. The big community sites already have tons of traffic, if you have some simple content you can syndicate out from your destination site "for free," then you can get click-throughs and drive traffic to your site as a result. This is the smart, smart way to drive traffic to web sites, and it's a lot cheaper than buying advertising.
The key is to give away just enough teaser content that people see value in what they can post on their profile, listing, or page on another big site, but that users see enough value in what's being shown to click-through to your destination site. This is the new wave in traffic generation.
It's sort of the next generation in RSS feeds, but there's no need for a reader... it's easier to use, with more diverse content, that gets incorporated into users' existing pages and listings.
#2 Later stage companies with millions in revenue who want to fund new and interesting online and Web 2.0 type businesses. These businesses are legacy or Web 1.0 businesses that need capital to fund new businesses that they could not be in unless they were in the original business. That is, their "legacy" business (even if it's not that old) is what provides entre into the new Web 2.0 business that they really want to do. I think we are going to see a lot more of these and they will be very interesting.
1 Comments:
I think there are multiple levels of this now.
I hire "word-of-mouth" marketing guys out of India at $400 a month and they write in blogs, forums, etc. and that brings very high quality traffic.
Another thing I do is use Free-File-Hosting. A new site I am just about to launch (filelove.com) with a super advanced script makes the poster and the downloader view the page for 30 seconds using a count-down timer. If the user switches TABS or windows then the timer stops. This way I know for almost certain the user is looking at my ads. My ads are focused around people signing up for their own Social Networking Site so they can create their own youtube/myspace with a number of other features borrowed from the top200 Social Networking Sites.
I think that the circle will get bigger as I obtain more paid members. If I were to simply average the estimated user base across 1,000 community sites at 10,000 members per site we would have 10 million collective members. In fact according to numerous research sources this number is highly under valued. It is our conservative view that in less than 24 months we will be collectively control the largest user base on the world-wide-web among Social Networking Communities.
Of course as we grow our business many other copy-kats will follow. :-)
I think the main issue is not making my member base angry becuase the rate at which I can afford to launch new servers is a bit touch and go. I can ony fit 30,000 members give or take per xeon server and the cost is $1100 per server plus $1000 for bandwidth not to forget the storage server needed. ughhh I have nightmares that my servers will freeze from being overloaded. It is a case of do I take my girlfriend to dinner tonight or save money for the next server?
Anyway spending money on click-thru traffic is OLD-SCHOOL and lame! hehehe :-) LOL
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