Sooner or later, I will put all my 2009 predictions together, but in the meantime, I've come up with two business trends that I think we'll see next year:
- Web start-ups will move to premium services and subscriptions
- Self-funding will rule for "ecosystem" plays
Ad-supported sites will move to a "free-mium" approach or die by the end of the year.
Free-mium and paid services will become the norm next year, as advertising wanes and companies realize that ad-supported business models were not that great to begin with. Even Digg, with all its traffic, has little to show for the advertising model.
UPDATED: January 14, 2008 5:30pm
The book isn't actually available until May! Web 3.0 and 4.0 should be in flight by then.
My pal Sarah Lacy's book about Web 2.0 "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" is now on sale on Amazon.com. I have been giving her grief about the stupidity of Web 2.0 since she has been writing this magic tome, but I have to offer my sincere congratulations to her for cranking this sucker out.
It's the story of how entrepreneurs in silicon valley started to believe in the web again after the drubbing of the 2000 bust. It recounts the birth and growth of the most popular web 2.0 companies of today including Facebook, Digg, Slide, LinkedIn, Twitter, Six Apart, Yelp, Ning and others, by telling never-before-heard personal stories of the people behind them. and this isn't me (Sarah) just supposing what it was like-- the book is the result of hundreds of hours of interviews with the most important people driving, funding and even railing against the Web 2.0 movement.
I can only hope her next book follows the tale of open source destroying proprietary vendor market share.
Over the last few months I have migrated almost entirely to pure RSS feeds, primarily via Google Reader (I surrendered months ago to the borg) and find myself skimming a lot more without actually reading anything. Somehow I have been missing several feeds that I would normally visit, including BusinessWeek. So as I cruised through this AM I came across yet another article about Digg, the popular content sharing site. I have to ask if there is nothing left for the mainstream biz pubs to write about except Google, Apple, Facebook and whatever other Web 2.0 nonsense is hip that week.
I've had this discussion with Sarah Lacy a number of times about this media-driven drek, at which point she always reminds me that open source is boring enterprise software and no one wants to read about it. I get that part. I just don't see why Digg matters.
Lest this become a treatise on why Digg is is more folly than fact (easy--we are all morons and random clicks don't consistently correlate to real patterns) let me tell you a few articles that I found on the most popular list this morning.
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