How Are We Going To Make Money?

Re:How Are We Going To Make Money? by Kaizyn on Friday March 28, 2008 @12:19PM (#148613)

FTA: "If there is one thing more valuable than eyeballs it is data. If your system collects information that you can reasonably package into trend data, you have a great source of additional income."

Am I the only one who finds this suggestion an apalling way to go about making money? It seems that if your startup is doing this, it deserves to go out of business.

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Re:How Are We Going To Make Money? by Readmore on Friday March 28, 2008 @03:06PM (#148766)

There are a large number of ways to utilize data from your web app to make money. It doesn't mean that you are selling user's account names, passwords, emails, or any identifying information. Trend data is very valuable in certain markets and there is no impact on the actual user in selling it.

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Re:How Are We Going To Make Money? by dkokelley on Friday March 28, 2008 @05:25PM (#148885)

Another way to sell the "data" is to use the information you know about your users and sell not only trends, but targeted advertisements based on your user data.

Think about Myspace and Facebook. They have a ton of information about their users (and a statistically relevant amount of info about the general population as well). The magic is that they can sell ads to men between the ages of 18-21 who are in a state college and earn less than $30,000 per year. Not many companies have access to that amount of information about their users.

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Re:How Are We Going To Make Money? by socalsamba on Friday March 28, 2008 @01:19PM (#148660)

Exactly. The meaning is not to "sell lists" but to use trending statistics you might acquire.

Compete Quantcast iTunes Music Store Amie Street Alexa

all built models on their data.

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Re:How Are We Going To Make Money? by wallflower on Friday March 28, 2008 @09:15PM (#149021)

Re: data

The slickest (if not sickest) example of this that comes to mind: www.gracenote.com

Thousands of users manually entered label/track/artist information, helping to build a massive commercial (read: license fee) CD Title database

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/commentary/listenin...

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Re:How Are We Going To Make Money? by theoneill on Friday March 28, 2008 @12:23PM (#148614)

http://alexa.com

http://compete.com

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