Webby Thoughts

When I go to somebody’s blog and see adsense or any other type of advertising, I barely notice. I’m starting to get disturbed when I see it on service sites. Even more disturbing are service sites that don’t have any way of earning any money.

Having no income stream on a service site tells me that the creators are only hoping to get bought out by Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. Then what happens to the service. In the best case scenario, it will continue to be free but probably with more advertisements on it. In the worst case scenario, the site won’t earn the money the buyer expects and they’ll kill the project.

I like Writely quite a bit. I’m a big fan of any service that let’s me store my information online since I like to be able to access things for short periods of time from lots of different locations. If Google decides that it will take too much work to make Writely fit perfectly in their business plans, what will it’s future be.

Bloglines is a service that I use daily and that I’ve already bragged about here. I would hate to see Bloglines disappear or really altered that much. I like it as a big fancy rss bookmark organizer that I can access from anywhere.

I read a lot of complaints that Bloglines doesn’t handle search very well. I’m not concerned with using them for search. I would prefer if they gave up that avenue for a while and focused soley on making my big, fancy rss bookmark organizer work flawlessly. I would be willing to pay a small fee, probably up to around $5/month to use Bloglines in this manner.

Paying a fee does not guarantee that the creators of a site plan to stick with the project, but if the money starts to roll in, it sure makes it a little harder for them to bail on the project. Plus, if a project can convince people to pay a few dollars a month, that has to look like a better business prospect to the Big 3 when they come around to buy something.

Flickr and Myspace both survive entirely by advertising revenue. I am the last person to suggest that advertising money is going to be leaving the internet. I expect it to be around in various forms for as long as the internet is around. The big monsters of the internet like Flickr and Myspace can make quite a bit of money from advertising and good for them.

The internet is an enormous market place. I think some of the niche service sites would do better to focus on making money by making a product that people love and are willing to spend a small sum each month on. Once people commit their money to a product, they are going to be a lot more loyal to that product as long as it continues to serve their needs.