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Great comment: ...are doing something so trivial that nobody is willing to pay money for it. I have had many conversations with inspiring entrepreneurs that th

• wpietri 14y ago
  Good question. I can't talk about my current company's business model, although anybody looking at it would say that ads are certainly one plausible candidate. For what it's worth, the last company I helped start is ad supported, as is one I worked on in the 1995-2000 timeframe. Before that, I consulted a lot for publishers. (The old kind, whose business plans started with: first we slice the trees real thin.) I say that to demonstrate that I'm not entirely knocking ad-supported businesses. They can be a great way to pay for something that is otherwise hard to monetize. But I also know how hard they are to get to scale, and I know there's a difference between them and businesses that fill a need strong enough that people are willing to open their wallets. So in sum, I'm ok with ad revenue as a business model. But I hate, hate, hate people using it as a fairy tale so that people can pretend they don't need to think about their business model.
  • wpietri 14y ago
    And thinking further, "something so trivial" sounds too harsh. I don't mean it that way; I consume plenty of unpaid media that I like. I even like Facebook, and use it daily. But I think the fact that ad-supported businesses need millions of users says something: the value delivered to each user is pretty small.