I’m not a fan of the “drive traffic to a site and monetize via ads” business model. Too often it feels like all the creativity and effort goes into monetization, with building a truly great product or service merely an afterthought. That being said, there are plenty of startups that have created valuable offerings for which ad placement is a legitimate source of revenues. Now while, I’m quite comfortable with the ad driven model, I don’t feel I fully grok it. As such, I’d like to know which blogs, books, articles, speakers, etc. you turn to when seeking original insight on the subject?
Everyone has their own opinion and here is where you can read what they are. These are blog posts, not necessarily endorsed by anyone – except the team member who wrote them!
by John
Just in case no one else has heard of the word either:
To grok (pronounced /ˈgrɒk/, rhymes with oak[wikipedia]) is to share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity.
by Heri
i am not a fan of ads either – and also the common view is that you have to get millions of impressions a day to make it work. there are no real solutions for smaller websites, even if they a quality audience.
about experts, there is markus frind, who cofounded plentyoffish. He is the top earner for google’s adsense. His blog is at plentyoffish.wordpress.com
the weblogs inc. network is also a top earner (the network includes autoblog and engadgegt). they get tens of millions of pageviews with hyper-focused, frequent posts and breaking news.
by Bruno
“Too often it feels like all the creativity and effort goes into monetization, with building a truly great product or service merely an afterthought”
I share entirely that point of view. It feels akward when your revenue clients are not the same as your service client. At one point, this has to come to a point where one will suffer for the benefit of the other … but still, Google, seems to overcome this problem for now!
Anyone with a smaller audience than Google can share insight in building a successful application where your revenues (and therefore your survival) comes from people other than the users of what you spend money developing? (I’m talking about an actual app, not internet business comparable to a magazine or newspaper)
by Chris Advansun
“Too often it feels like all the creativity and effort goes into monetization, with building a truly great product or service merely an afterthought”
I’d like to submit an alternative view. The internet age has brought a unprecedented focus on creating value for individuals before considering monetization. For the first time ever, entrepreneurs and publishers can focus on building a valuable offering for individual users without devoting an undue amount of time to the issue of revenue. If web-based enterprises can do a superb job of solving a problem or creating value for users, it is understood that the company will eventually be able to extract revenue, most likely by exposing their audience to advertising. This “value comes first, revenues will follow” approach has meant that the entrepreneurs behind such inventions as , and (to name only the most obvious) were able to myopically obsess with creating utility for their users. Only after exquisitely creating this user value did they shift their focus to extracting advertising value from the offering in order to generate revenue.
I would only add that entrepreneurs developing offerings that they believe will eventually be platforms for advertising must give early consideration to the technological implications brought by the imperative of audience segmentation. Facebook knew damn well that they were building the world’s most segmentable audience long before they served their first obnoxious display ad.
by Chris Advansun
“Too often it feels like all the creativity and effort goes into monetization, with building a truly great product or service merely an afterthought”
I’d like to submit an alternative view. The internet age has brought a unprecedented focus on creating value for individuals before considering monetization. For the first time ever, entrepreneurs and publishers can focus on building a valuable offering for individual users without devoting an undue amount of time to the issue of revenue. If web-based enterprises can do a superb job of solving a problem or creating value for users, it is understood that the company will eventually be able to extract revenue, most likely by exposing their audience to advertising. This “value comes first, revenues will follow” approach has meant that the entrepreneurs behind such inventions as YouTube, Facebook and Google (to name only the most obvious) were able to myopically obsess with creating utility for their users. Only after exquisitely creating this user value did they shift their focus to extracting advertising value from the offering in order to generate revenue.
I would only add that entrepreneurs developing offerings that they believe will eventually be platforms for advertising must give early consideration to the technological implications brought by the imperative of audience segmentation. Facebook knew damn well that they were building the world’s most segmentable audience long before they served their first obnoxious display ad.
by daniel
@Bruno: “when your revenue clients are not the same as your service client”. I really like that way of putting it. Very clear, very concise.
@Heri: I’ll check out Marcus’ blog, thanks.
@John: personally, I prefer this definition: “to understand to the point where the concept becomes part of the person understanding it, and changes the way that person views the world and life around them due to the intimacy of that understanding.”
by Antoine Azar
I highly recommend Andrew Chen’s blog,
http://andrewchen.typepad.com/
A very smart guy with great insight.