Indeed. If one were wise, you could stalk Google/Yahoo/BigCo properties that are being neglected, launch a paid competitor and reap the reward when they shut down.

Pinboard and now Newsblur.

Quick, someone make a search engine!

See https://duckduckgo.com/ :-)

Thats actually a really good idea.

I wonder what would be next? Most of Yahoo's properties seem be be neglected at the moment, but what about Google? Google News perhaps?

Probably Google Alerts. It's rather niche but people who use it absolutely rely on it. But the VC-funded Mention seems poised to take that one.

Google Alerts is a good candidate. Pardon anecdotal evidence, but the people in my circles who rely on it are executives who watch for their own names, or brand managers who watch for coverage of their company.

This information is very valuable and I'm sure a good service could charge a nice premium.

I've received some deliverables from a marketing team which uses the following service for just such a purpose (at a nice premium) @ https://www.meltwater.com/products/meltwater-news/online-med...

I have been using warble.co recently, which does alerts for twitter

flikr -> openphoto

but delicious is still around, it was never shutdown, and from what i can tell, is better (from a functionality perspective) and has a bigger community than pinboard. the site design of pinboard alone turns me off to it

It does make the truck number rather low. This is still probably less of a risk than trusting Google to keep a marginal product around (as recent events demonstrate), but there are different risks for small organizations that big ones don't share.

With currently only 3400 paying users it's only 80K pr. year of revenues (and the profits are probably much lower). It's still far from a good business and this kind of money does not have any kind of guarantees.

> "Since the announcement, NewsBlur has welcomed 5,000 new premium subscribers and 60,000 new users (from 50,000 users originally)".

That's at least $200,000/yr with high margins.

That math doesn't seem to work out. 5000 subscribers * 24 (dollars/year)/subscriber = $120,000/year.

5,000 new subscribers...

3400 is only the number of new paying users in the last 24 hours.

The amount of annual income from this product will now end with "million".

Oh, wow. I had not realized that number was the DAILY signups...

revenue, not income - he's going to have high server costs now and if he wants to keep this scaling up, i suspect he'll need to bring on another person soon. at the very least, a customer service rep.

still should easily net him a nice recurring six figure salary.

Currently adding over 4k paid users per day.

He reaches $1 million at just over 40k paid users.

Factor in the userbase he's already been building for 4 years, the hundreds of thousands of Google Readers currently leaving, the millions that will need to find a replacement before July, and the last-minute movers on July 1st.

I don't think server costs and a couple of employees will put him below a 7 figure income.

I agree, this is a great model. To shameless plug myself I plan on doing the same with Pinry: http://getpinry.com/