Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

works in progress.

Archive for the ‘business model’ tag

NYTimes: One Internet Village, Divided

without comments

The “One Internet Village, Divided” article in today’s NYTimes is about the problems that poplular internet sites (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace) are facing with creating revenue from traffic in emerging markets.

The video site Veho has gone so far as to block users from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe.  MySpace is creating a default low bandwidth profile for users in India, and Facebook is focusing on member acquisition before worrying about monetizing.  YouTube had been developing localized versions of its service in Brazil, India, and Poland but has now switched to trying to make money with reports that it may lose around $470 million this year.

This news confirms my instinct that I should be exploring a business model for Pigeon that is not ad supported.  How can Internet companies balance the obviously huge demand for content and a need to monetize?  How can web-like services tap into the demand for content and be sustainable?

Written by drewcogbill

April 27th, 2009 at 11:40 am

TextMarks

without comments

TextMarks provides free many to many text messaging services in the US.  Free routed SMSs have an ad attached to them, but for a fee messages can be sent without the ad.

They’ve considered many issues of interfacing with more complex menus with just SMS.

Written by drewcogbill

September 21st, 2008 at 10:35 am