A few recent observations:
1. Boy the iphone has a really slick/easy interface for buying little chunks of apps and content that are not only super easy to find yourself buying, and also don’t even cost that much. (Blackberry just announced one too)
2. On the web, ad revenues are out of whack with the value of content. I get a ton of value out of a lot of web apps like gmail or web content through my feeds and so forth. If there was an easy enough, low-friction enough way, I’d be happy to pay some amount for a lot of this stuff. At least more than the nano-cents worth of ads I’ve ever never clicked on.
3. The long tail is getting killed by ads. You need a sick amount of traffic to make sense as an ad-supported business model. Um, whatever happened to the long tail, or at least the whole middle of that tail?
3b. Optimizing for ad revenue makes for for crappier content (celebrities, gimmicky top-ten lists, link-jacking and other attention mongering cheap tricks) and crappier user experience (superfluous page views, popusp, sites plastered like nascars).
4. There’s a recession coming. This fits in somewhere.
5. Only the valley is crazy enough to still be funding the get-the-eyeballs-first-we’ll-figure-out-the-business-model later
6. If you’re not in the valley and you want to monetize digital content, what’s your plan exactly?
7. Where is our app store for the greater interenet? who will make it happen?
Link: Woe to Web 2.0 Start-Ups: Too Few Ads to Go Around
Epilogue/Spoiler alert: You know that worlds are converging right? Cloud/web computing has far-reaching implications that may make this question the answer to it’s own question. We are moving to a world where regular folks will may many screens large and small and one seamless web environment. But that’s a subject for another post.