Re:“Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell Sys...
by scarface74 on Wednesday May 10, 2017 @07:21PM
(#14312624)
Whoever said that building a sucessful business "should be easy"? The two examples I gave John Gruber and Ben Thompson are both one man shops who built businesses based on writing articles that people wanted to read and building a reputation.
In Gruber's case, he built a reputation strong enough that he routinesly gets Apple's SVPs to come on his podcast. He doesn't depend on an ad network. He sells ads directly - one per week.
Ben Thompson built a strong enough following just based on reputation to get over 2000 people to pay him $100 a year for a newsletter.
How "risky" is it to start a blog on the side until you get enough readership to figure out a business model?
You're making the point. It's hard to build an online business without appeasing Google and that they need to is bad for small and fledgling businesses.
It's possible to build an online business without Google, of course. There are usually alternatives to monopolies, just ones that cost a lot more or are much riskier or much lower quality, etc. I don't agree that it's just as easy to build an online business without Google.