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A comment on Disruptions: With No Revenue, an Illusion of Value. Parent comment

Re:Disruptions: With No Revenue, an Illusion of Value by georgemcbay on Sunday April 29, 2012 @05:42PM (#3907228)
A very significant open question, IMO, is could they have enabled any of those revenue streams without decimating their user base? I don't think they could have because their product is relatively easy to duplicate.

Given that Instagram was free, there was little incentive for anyone else who is serious about getting in front of people to bother duplicating what they had, but had they started in-app ads or anything else that would have irked users, that would have changed very quickly.

tl;dr -- Millions of users can be monetized in a number of ways, but not if your service can be duplicated fairly easily.

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Re:Disruptions: With No Revenue, an Illusion of Value by kunle on Sunday April 29, 2012 @06:54PM (#3907376)
For something so easy to duplicate (40m users) I see frighteningly few duplications (photo services with 40m users after 18 months.).

Making a camera app that has filters is easy to duplicate. Aggregating an audience of 40m users on no advertising is not. Period.

EDIT: "on no advertising" should read "on no marketing".

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Re:Disruptions: With No Revenue, an Illusion of Value by jarek on Sunday April 29, 2012 @06:10PM (#3907287)
Well the usual catch is network effects. For instance Twitter is putting increasing amounts of ads into the feeds, but because everyone's there people will stay on for the time being despite the ad-free alternatives. I've never used Instagram so I'm not sure how strong its 'social' ties are.
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