Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Pokémon.Com?

Author:Mike Duffy
Posted:11/17/1999; 9:42:02 AM
Topic:CallTheShots.com
Msg #:13146 (In response to 13134)
Prev/Next:13145 / 13147

Re:"monetization"

I think the premise is that if you can aggregate, say, 100,000 pairs of eyeballs, those (regular, sticky, repeat) viewers will have some value to someone.

ICQ is the perfect example. N million users of a completely free product (no revenue model at all!) gets acquired by AOL for $287M (possibly more than $400M after all is said and done).

The unspoken thinking is that you will either be acquired by someone who can use those eyeballs, or (much less likely), be smart enough to add for-payment services which your aggregated eyeballs will pay for.

You can also generate smaller revenue streams from targeted marketing to your audience (the simplistic version of this is "sell ads on the site"), and from mining data from their clickstream. And there's always e-commerce (sell 'em somthing!).

But I think most people are thinking acquisition, not IPO. Sooner or later, you've got to make money to survive as a business. An investor's perspective is different, however (maximizing share value).

How would you monetize the Scripting News audience? Just kidding. But I'm sure if you're talking to VCs, you get some variation of this question.

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:33 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.