3 ms·

I've heard the line that, for most startups, advertising is where business models go to die.

• beat 11y ago
  I saw a great presentation once that put a slide up with several well-known companies - Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. The presenter asked what business they're all in. The answer is advertising. Then he put up a slide with over 200 companies. What business are they all in? Advertising. Then he pointed out that advertising is only 2% of the GDP, and internet ads aren't even a majority of that. The point was to consider enterprise and medtech for startups instead, places where real businesses will pay real money for your products, rather than going out to find a million eyeballs and trying to sell them.
• mej10 11y ago
  If you have a lot of high quality page views (like at least 10M per month, more if they are low quality) and you don't have a business model, maybe consider advertising. At a CPM of $3.00, you could pull in 30k revenue per month. As long as you are seeing good user growth, you can build a decent business, but not an "up and to the right"-style startup. Otherwise the economics just don't work out, and it is a painful road.