I was pleasantly surprised that my post The Future of Personalized Start Pages get Dugg last week. Looking through the comments, most of the Digg readers liked Netvibes or Google's start page. btw Google is still promoting its start page on the google.com page, which I think is significant (not many other people do though, judging by the lack of Techmeme action on that subject).
On business models for start pages, the Postbubble blog floated the concept of "consolidation" as a means to rise above the standard advertising-supported model:
"An example of this would be to consolidate industry-specific news, market data, competitive intelligence, email, and even collaboration tools in such a way that it would appeal to companies interested as a corporate start page. You could even make it specific to the sales group, marketing group, or R&D.")
A business portal was one of the things I mentioned in my post as an option for start pages, so I like Postbubble's thinking there.
It's funny that I posted the
PlentyOfFish.com post not long before the Scoble-leaving-Microsoft
announcement predictably blanketed
Techmeme. Because reading Robert's
latest post about his decision made me think about the fundamental reason
why 'Web 2.0' is (dare I say it) in bubble phase right now. It's the exact same
reason the Dot Com bubble occured - Page Views... which in this
era leads to ads, but more on that in a minute.
In my previous post PlentyOfFish owner Markus Frind boasted about getting 500 million page views a month, more than Digg's 200 million. But even small blogs are posting 6-figure monthly page views these days - TechCrunch says it gets 3 million and Robert mentioned a video blog called Rocketboom that gets 9 million per month:
"Yesterday I was talking with Amanda Congdon, one of the co-founders of Rocketboom. Her videoblog is now seeing about 300,000 viewers a day. That's, what, a year or so old? Did you know that advertisers are now paying her $85,000 per week? That's almost as much money as I made in an entire year of working at Microsoft."
So Amanda is making $4.4 million, at least, a year from advertising - on her blog. I presume that her hosting costs are pretty significant though, because she runs a video service. But still it'd be a very healthy profit.
It just shows you the opportunities are out there to make significant money on the Web, which is - let's face it - driving a lot of this 'web 2.0' mania. Oh it's a bubble, for sure. But it's funny that this page views model is at its foundation almost identical to the Dot Com days (bubble 1.0). Drive as many users to your site as humanly possible - that's the modus operandi of all websites, web 2.0 or not. The main difference I can see is that in the dot com days, this rush for page views was a 'land grab' and there wasn't as big an opportunity to monetize it with advertising. The idea back then (late 90's, early 21st century) was to gather as many users as possible and then do an IPO - monetizing would presumably come later. Which actually has worked out to be the case for the survivers (Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, etc).
These days, 2005-06-onwards, the idea is very much to - you guessed it - gather as many users as possible. Only this time you can monetize them with Google ads, or your own advertisers/sponsors. You can go after a mass market (like PlentyOfFish) or a niche market (like TechCrunch). There are many more niche opportunities, obviously. Either way, as PlentyOfFish.com, Rocketboom and all the other success stories of this age are proving - there is big money to be made with relatively small-scale operations.
Robert Scoble and PodTech.net are after a slice of that action too - and good luck to them (they're both Web 2.0 Workgroup members btw). I think all of us small bloggers or developers are looking to grab that brass ring too. It's all about the Page Views - always was and probably always will be on the commercial Web. Well to a lesser degree, it's also about the RSS impressions - which are beginning to be monetized too. In time I expect RSS impressions to be a 'first class citizen of content' too, but for now it's page views that are fueling the new bubble - again.
The larger question is: can the online advertising business be sustained at this level (which we got to thanks mainly to Google)? I don't know, but a lot of people are enjoying the ride right now - and there are too many brass ring opportunities still out there to get too cynical.
Photo: Brian Oberkirch
Markus Frind is an interesting character, who has left some provocative comments on Read/WriteWeb before. He claims he's earning $10,000 per day from Google Adsense from his dating website, plentyoffish.com. These claims have been vigorously challenged by some, but external data sources (e.g. see this comment thread) do seem to back him up. Recently Markus has been trying to convince me to post something about the fact that he is running a huge scale website and earning lotsa money all on his own. His story is interesting enough to post, so I've relented.
Markus is basically a one-man band running a website that, by his latest traffic figures, is two and a half times bigger than digg.com. Digg.com gets 200 Million page views per month, but Markus says plentyoffish gets 500 Million:
"The site(plentyoffish.com and Forums.plentyoffish.com) serves ~500 million pageviews a month and does so using 1 DB server and 1 Web Server which is a far cry from the industry standard of 300+ servers for a site of this size."
Digg uses 3 web servers and 8 small database servers. Recently I asked Markus via email how much work he puts into the site on a daily basis. His reply:
"It is around 2 hours of work a day and that stays steady because as the site grows i automate more and more. Some of that work I get my girlfriend to help me with, she is far more diplomatic when answering mean emails. From what I can tell i should have no problem running it by myself even if it gets to 3 times its current size."
On the hardware side, Markus gave me these details:
"I have 4 servers.
1. DB server
2. Web server, handles 1 million pageviews an hour at peak. No static pages at all, way to slow. All pages are Gzipped on the fly.
3. Mail Server. Handles 1 million emails/day and also has a webserver that handles a Instant messager. That translates to 4-5 million polling pageviews/hour at peak.
4. Image server, Like all major sites it serves images to a massive content distribution system/cache.
5. Outbound traffic is 70 to 100mb/sec If it was uncompressed it would probably run at 140mb/sec"
So Markus has managed to set himself up very nicely with his Web operation. OK it is a dating site (sex sells!), but even so it puts the success of some of the more prominent web 2.0 blogs and sites into context, doesn't it? Or as Markus himself put it: "I think its time people stop hyping web 2.0 crap and start promoting real ideas that have real business models." Not sure I agree with that sentiment, but I guess you can't argue with the scale of success Markus has achieved.
As for what he is doing with all his money and free time, he said he's traveling a lot! OK, Markus has made me well and truly jealous :-) But congrats to him for the success. As for me and my humble blog, I'd just like to get to 1 million page views per month (real page views, not the inflated rss and bot-infested figues a lot of people bandy about!). That's what I call ramping up - sad isn't it :-)
Google is for the first time promoting its Personalized Homepage on the google.com homepage, using football World Cup modules/widgets. There is a "New! Add World Cup live scores and schedules to this page" promo link directly under the search query box, which leads to a "Welcome to Your Google homepage. Make it your own" start page.
This is great to see and shows (once again) that Google is tackling Microsoft head-on in key market segments. Indeed earlier this evening Microsoft announced an upgrade to its personalized homepage, live.com (it will be released next week, but I have preview screenshots on my ZDNet blog). Also of course, the little startups are doing a lot in this market currently (Netvibes, Pageflakes, et al). See my post earlier this week - The Future of Personalized Start Pages - for my analysis on this.
Screenshots of the google.com promotion and World Cup modules below. Game on!
p.s. I can't wait for the World Cup to start! I'm a big fan of Brazil, they epitomize the Beautiful Game.
This post was largely written by Ryan Stewart, a guest blogger on Read/WriteWeb. I've added my own Best of Breed picks for each category.
Feed readers can be divided up
into two general camps: The web based feed readers - such as NewsAlloy, Rojo,
Bloglines and Google Reader - are mostly powered by Ajax and
provide a basic, if unspectacular, list of features. However if you want to read your
news outside a web browser, having your feeds stored within these web applications
becomes problematic. The other camp is the standalone feed readers which include FeedDemon, RSSBandit, and NewzCrawler. They provide a lot of power, but are tied
to a single computer. Unfortunately, I have yet to see a true Rich Internet Application
feed reader which would provide the best features from the two camps and bolster mainstream RSS usage.
The current generation of web based feed readers have done a great job of using the web to make reading feeds a more social experience. Many of the web-based RSS readers allow users to rate a particular news post or tag a post so that it is more meaningful to other users. As a result, users of online feed readers can benefit from their peers and have a sense of the most relevant items. Rojo takes this a step further by allowing you to have "friends" that you can share posts between. However at the same time, when a user comes to rely on their favorite web based solution, they give up some control over their content. Services like Google's Reader are almost always available, but the smaller companies can have issues with downtime during maintenance or periodic disruptions.
Richard's Best of Breed picks: 
Rojo is my current favourite, although I still have issues
with its relative lack of speed. Bloglines is a
good solid choice, but lacks the advanced social functionality that Ryan alluded to. A Techcrunch
review late March by Frank Gruber rated Google Reader and FeedLounge highly for
performance.
The desktop solutions have a different problem. They offer powerful feature sets such as synchronization (allowing you to download your news to read later). However most can't provide the social aspect of the web based readers. They provide the users with a familiar user experience, which will be key to widespread adoption of RSS, but they can't provide the closeness to the web that the web based readers can. The desktop readers handle enclosures very well, which as RSS matures will become a very important feature. The ability to play music or watch video directly from the RSS feed is something that right now is possible with the desktop readers but has rudimentary implementation by the web based readers. The desktop readers all provide a solid tool set with an experience that most users expect and are familiar with.
Richard's Best of Breed picks: 
Newsgator leads the pack in my opinion, mainly
because of its synchronization functionality. Newsgator has a second-to-none suite of RSS
Reader products, covering all the major desktop platforms - Newsgator (Outlook plugin),
FeedDemon for Windows, NetNewsWire for Mac, plus its other specific solutions. I can also
recommend BlogBridge, a free and open source
desktop reader. I've been testing Blogbridge over the past couple of months and found the
smart feeds (basically custom searches) to be especially useful.
Ideally, a news reader built as an RIA (rich internet app) would take the best things from the Web and desktop - and provide all of the benefits. It’s important to realize how valuable a quality user experience is to the average person. The ability to give that user experience in a package that also leverages the power of the web, is what sets RIAs apart. An RIA news reader provides the power of the desktop reader, but without the install. It can also incorporate the exciting social aspects of the web based readers. Because RIAs can be deployed on a variety of platforms, the user has absolute control over their content. They can read the news on their PDA, on their laptop, or on their cell phone. The ability to download content for use offline would be a big part of the RIA - and while online, the user could take advantage of tagging and seeing what their network of friends is reading. Nothing stands in the way of desktop applications implementing these kinds of features, but with an RIA the user isn't tied to one computer. The goal is to give the user access to their data at all times, regardless of how they want to consume it, and then get out of the way. Therein lies the elegance of the RIA solution.
Richard's Best of Breed picks:
As Ryan noted, there
doesn't appear to be a market-leading RIA RSS Reader at this point. In many ways
Ajax-heavy web-based RSS Readers would fit into this category - so I'd nominate the likes
of Google Reader and FeedLounge, as well as apps like Goowy that use Flash. But like Ryan, I don't have an
overall top pick in this category - perhaps people can make suggestions in the
comments?
The ability to deliver desktop level functionality is something the web has been attempting for a long time, and we're getting closer every day. News readers are becoming more and more indispensable as people turn to blogs for their news - and even major news sites are making increasing use of RSS feeds. Being able to take that content wherever you go - online or offline, is going to become very important. The explosion of mobile devices and the coming of the living room entertainment system are going to provide new ways for users to consume RSS. The solutions that are going to get the most attention are those that can deploy on any of these platforms and also provide the '2.0' functionality that has changed the web.
Sun Microsystems is a company that doesn't get anywhere
near as much attention in the techmeme world as
Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Which is kind of odd for a company whose motto seems highly
relevant to this era of the Web - "The Network Is The Computer".
I was listening to a podcast that Tim O'Reilly did with Business 2.0 the other day and, even though Tim is now acknowledging that the 'web 2.0' term is "a very broad umbrella" (which has been my point over the past 6 months or so), he still essentially says it's about being in a "much more fully networked world". Which brings me back to Sun - they're all about networks and increasingly about the integration between the desktop and the Web, a topic which I'm becoming more and more interested in. Plus James Governor has been clueing me up to what Sun is doing these days, which helps too!
Sun's latest stated vision is "everyone and everything participating on the network" and they talk about the "Participation Age" on their About page. With new CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun does seem to be opening up more. Jonathan Schwartz wrote in his latest blog entry about an upcoming new initiative that seems very 2.0 (or chmod 777 if you prefer):
"...you'll see something very interesting next week start to appear on Sun's web pages and throughout our on-line store. You'll start to see product reviews written by users. You'll see user defined ratings, right on our products. Just like book or product reviews at Amazon. We're starting with just a few products, but it'll ultimately extend all the way up to our highest end enterprise offerings."
As well as attracting users, this will probably also have the effect of stirring up interest with bloggers. Which will result in Sun coming back into the light and getting more attention (yes, the Sun/light witticisms will be plentiful too!).
From another angle, James Governor noted in a recent blog entry that Sun has been somewhat isolated in recent years in terms of 'coopetition':
"Most other industry players have long responded to coopetition, both competing and cooperating with other major firms, and changed their business models accordingly.
Sun on the other hand often looked somewhat isolated. Vertically integrated yes, but isolated also.
It seems like Sun is now finally making that transition."
So this may be the dawning of a new era for Sun, where their rays of light reach out and touch users - probably resulting in a warm reception.
Photo: podtech.net
Mike Arrington's a bit peeved at Google. His post is a good vent, but to me the key bit was way down in comment number 33:
"...my main gripe is that I want to understand what Google’s overall game plan is. I just don’t see it."
Nobody knows what Google's grand plan is - I suspect not even Google. Here's what I wrote in my post on Google Spreadsheet (nb: written the day before its release):
"So in the final analysis, the main benefit of web-based Office products is that they'll extend the functionality of desktop office products in many useful ways. I expect Google Spreadsheet to do all these things, but almost certainly in a beta form to begin with. If this release is like all the other Google betas, the functionality will be a bit clumsy to begin with - but watch closely as they iterate it over time into a very powerful web-based product (like they did with Gmail, etc)."
And that right there is Google's "overall game plan" - to release clumsy web apps and iterate them until they extend the functionality that we're used to. It won't always work - Froogle anyone? But they've changed the game before - I'd argue three times. First with search, then with online advertising, and thirdly with email (obviously not to the same degree as the other two!).
That's what makes Google so dangerous. You never know what you're gonna get.
Tim Bray doesn't like Web metaphors:
"The Web isn’t a platform or a database or an API or an OS a cloud or a clickstream or any other of those things. In fact, the Web isn’t even a thing, it’s a mesh of agreements with a nice straightforward engineering rulebook. Play by the rules and you can be part of it and build something great, struggle against them and you’ll look lame and you’ll fail. But don’t try to analogize it; sometimes the world has new things in it and you just have to deal with them as they are."
In one sense that's spoken like a true engineer. Try giving that definition of the Web to anyone without a degree in computer science ;-) But that last sentence does resonate with me, because the Web is a unique medium and is hard to contain in a single metaphor (more on that at the end of this post). Dave Winer liked that bit too.
Sam Ruby, who is also an engineer, disagrees with Tim:
"Fully Disagree. Metaphors are perfectly good thing to have, in a P.T. Barnum sense. And, it is working. Go with it.
The tipping point was Google Maps. The tip of the iceberg was AJAX, and that’s the bandwagon that a number of people have jumped on. And on balance that’s a good thing as people who previously had clung unto the idea of a fat client are starting to let go."
James Snell, another engineer, then posted his thoughts:
"I'll definitely admit that metaphors can be good, for certain audiences; but they can also get in the way, especially when they're vague and take longer to explain than the code they're meant to describe."
Let's take a short diversion into the history of metaphors on the Web. Did you know that in 2000 there was an Internet Metaphor Project? Neither did I until about 2 minutes ago. To quote from its abstract:
"The nature of the World Wide Web is unfamiliar to most people. In order to make sense of this foreign environment people describe the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. Metaphors are often used for this purpose. Since it is important to use the Web effectively it is important to acquire insight on user perceptions."
And of course metaphors have long been a part of computing in general - the mouse, the GUI, windows, surfing the Net, the Information Superhighway... well, OK sometimes metaphors can be a nuisance.
Also metaphors were a strong part of the early Web. Quoting from my own essay a couple of years ago for Digital Web Magazine, entitled The Evolution of Corporate Web Sites:
"In 1997 the Web was still a new phenomenon to most of the population; one of the easiest ways to make the Web seem more familiar, and less alien, was to make the Web look and feel as much like the real world as possible. So we were treated to a variety of shopping mall metaphors, city metaphors, home and room metaphors. It took a few years more for Web designers to realize that the Web wasn’t a mere copy of the real world, that it was a unique medium with its own characteristics."
So all in all I like metaphors and think they're very much appropriate for technical subjects. But after a while they seem to outlive their purpose, especially on the Web. That's the danger of statements like 'The Web is a platform', which I am fond of making. But right now, the Web is a platform - there are many services and apps that are being built to run on the Web, using the very infrastructure and standards that Tim spoke about. It may not be an appropriate thing to say two or three years from now, but for now it does help normal people (non-engineers) grok the power of the Web.
Interesting moves in the online video market as YouTube announced "a major upgrade of its Web site" last Friday, just a day after Yahoo announced its own video upgrade. Both have introduced a channels feature - similar to tv channels, or so they like to claim. Yahoo's June 1 press release was entitled: 'Yahoo makes Web video search more like TV channels'. The very next day YouTube announced its own channel feature, enabling users "to subscribe to channels that focus on the latest work of favorite artists or topical themes."
In the Yahoo Video site, a channel is defined as:
"A channel is a series of videos from the same source or user. If you like a channel you can add it to your Favorites page."
Here's what a Yahoo Video channel looks like:
And here's an example of a YouTube channel:
Yahoo's channels have all the usual 'user-generated content' features - ratings, tags, subscribe buttons, review. To set up a video channel, you click on 'My Studio'. It's all pretty slick and has a 'professional' feel to it.
YouTube's channels seem a lot more social - and blog-like. You can view subscribers, connect with them, leave comments in channels, send messages, add the channel owner as a friend, etc. All the features you'd find on MySpace or another social network.
The channels I found on YouTube were predominantly of individuals, whereas on Yahoo I mostly found channels by entities such as website brands (or maybe I just didn't look hard enough). So I do get the sense that YouTube's channels are much more of a personal thing for YouTube users, whereas Yahoo is pitching their channels more like... well, more like a tv channel. But that distinction makes this quote from the YouTube press release seem kind of odd:
"YouTube said that it aims to move beyond depending on the latest hit videos, which spread like wild fire across the Internet via e-mail. Instead, it wants to create a personalized programming experience akin to TV viewers surfing channels with a remote control."
The "personalized programming experience" I can dig, but why compare that to tv channel surfing with a remote control? Ugh! I don't like this comparison to broadcast tv and I'm not sure why YouTube is going down that track, when they're promoting what is essentially a video social network. What's social about sitting on a couch and tv channel surfing?
Other than that, I like YouTube's more SNS approach. It'll be interesting to track YouTube and Yahoo as they each pursue online video channels in slightly different ways.
Personalized Start Pages is a growing, but fiercely competitive, market. So what are they? Predominantly they're homepages for Web information, gadgets and widgets. The difference from old-style web portals are: the user can personalize them much more (with RSS, inline email, etc), the content is more interactive and potentially much more useful (i.e. gadgets, widgets), they can be collaborative, and there is Ajax pixie dust to make it more of a desktop-like experience.
As I've blogged about before, the market has a lot of contenders. They fall into two main groups - The Big Guns (Microsoft's live.com, Google Personalized Homepage, My Yahoo) and The Little Companies (Netvibes, Protopage, PageFlakes, etc). Now, as Mike Arrington noted, the big list of little companies is potentially starting to thin out:
"Well, the inevitable is starting to happen - a few new web startups are starting to close up shop as they find that building an application is a lot easier than getting users to try it out, and keep coming back. Fold.com, an Ajax home page, has folded."
Looking at the Alexa charts, it clearly shows Fold.com (the blue line hugging the horizontal axis) never really got off the ground:
The chart also shows how successful Netvibes has been. This is also obvious from the Netvibes blog, which is chock full of new feature announcements and lots of comments from passionate users.
Pageflakes and Protopage are another couple of contenders which are hanging in there, to use Mike's apt phrase. So what's the business model of these start pages, when all the big guns have their own start pages? Microsoft and Google are seemingly putting a lot of stock into gadgets/widgets. Meanwhile Yahoo is happy enough (for now) to continue to serve the mainstream audience - for which widgets are still a fair way off being user-friendly.
I think there are still a lot of opportunities for the small companies. For example I took a look at Pageflakes' press kit and I was struck by this slide in particular:
It's a little hard to see due to the width limitations of my site, but here's a full-length version. My point here is that Pageflakes, and I'm sure Netvibes and the others too, are building up to a near future where gadgets/widgets will be much more plentiful and functional. Basically these start pages are expecting the world of web services to blossom in the next few years, which is my expectation too.
One key for the little companies is to persuade external developers to create gadgets/widgets for their platforms. Pageflakes is an open platform, so I think it's got a great chance at succeeding in this strategy - as long as they can sell themselves to that developer ecosystem. It currently claims 50% of their 'flakes' (i.e. gadgets) are created by "Community Developers" and they say this figure is rising. Netvibes is similarly well positioned - arguably better, because it has managed to get such a great user/developer uptake so quickly.
In terms of growing the user base, I thought Peter Cooper made an excellent comment on Techcrunch. After noting that Yahoo will likely keep hold of the mainstream crowd, Peter said:
"If anything’s going to really break through, it’s going to be Google’s (because of their sheer might), or something that appeals to the MySpace/LiveJournal crowd (because of the sheer numbers and the way memes spread on there). I dare say that MySpace could pull it off if they tried."
(emphasis mine)
Peter's right, the MySpace crowd will be highly attractive to start page companies. It's something which may potentially break this market wide open.
The other business model the likes of Netvibes and Pageflakes will pursue is the enterprise market - and maybe even white-labelling. For example I happen to know that one of the small companies mentioned above is exploring options as a 'business portal'. If start pages can integrate office apps like Writely and JotSpot into their pages (which is already happening) and promote that to enterprises - that's potentially a profitable market.
So while it's sad to see companies like Fold.com slip away, I don't think this is any reflection on the market itself for personalized start pages. In fact, I think it's full of opportunities - many of which may not clash with the plans of The Big Guns. And that's why Netvibes and Pageflakes have gotten funding. There is a future in their Personalized Start Pages, as long as they execute well.
