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I basically agree with you, just I'm not sure which revenue sharing businesses are doomed and which are not. AdSense is obviously far from doomed. eBay is in th

• SwellJoe 18y ago
  I think those are a different model, but your bringing them up has put things into a really interesting light for me. It's the difference between a feudal system or a sharecropping system and owning your own land (but generally having to go through the commodities market to sell your goods--you still cut someone in on your profits, but you decide just about everything else about your business). And maybe that's actually why "revenue sharing" sites fail. Sharecropping worked for years...until something better came along. So, maybe the sharecropping age of the Internet never really came before an economy of independent production arrived, and so maybe it'll never happen on a large scale. It's also based on the, probably incorrect, notion that there can only be so many "destinations" for any particular type of information or good on the Internet. As search gets better, as the semantic web grows (slowly, ever so slowly), and as the Internet population grows ever more diverse, it seems likely that the idea of a "destination site" will seem rather quaint. So, destinations that allow people to sharecrop on their real estate are probably doomed to fall under the onslaught of independent farmers. Of course, the analogy could be flawed.