Agreed (from the outset) that Facebook is overvalued – much as Skype was – because it’s a popular website. The assumption is that there is inevitably a way to monetise that popularity (without destroying whatever made the site popular in the first place) despite the lack of any business model. Exactly the thinking that caused the dot-com bubble.

I also agree with Starbadger that you should do what you love, both online and off, and try if you can to make a living out of it. I don’t think anyone that comes here to read Shannon’s posts would disagree with that!

Hard for me but I’ll try to hold a focus given the interesting posts to shannon’s content should be king theme.

As I put my new web/w2iki/blog multiuser animal farm together I am aware with hard numbers of some of the websites or blogs that have been put up in a few months (the last few months) with a team of programmers

by bouncing off the social networks etc those sites are generating $25,000 net profit

the content is in the main $25.00/article graduate student rewrites of the real papers – and if you challenge one of the builders of these sorts of sites who is down here and speaks at the programmer meetings and fills young people’s heads with the idea that they too can be rick and by now the speaker is many millions over and his engine and his team of programmer is still chewing up the opportunity and of course he knows this stuff is difficult enough to actually do – I mean remember – shannon handed off a working site beyond critical mass and if you take a look at the self same reporting tools you can use that this guy uses to quickly build no new content websites – suffice to say – so this does not end on armwaving -

take a look at

https://www.mashable.com

that is an honest site that does it right not that there afre not a dozen ways to do it right and all too many ways to do it wrong

if some of you are thinking of building one of those money engines without content – don’t – shannon’s right – blog or web about something you love – the money might follw -
or not – it does not matter when it is your love

I think the point you make about the internet being ultimately corrosive to content producers is valid… and well-acknowledged. It’s going to result in the collapse of the print media (sad) and the record companies too (perhaps not so sad).

The one thing I would point out is that your comment “no site that’s a valuable destination will ever manage a good click-through rate since the users come for what the site offers, not what their ads offer” is not always correct. The obvious counter-example is Google, where users come specifically to be redirected to other sites. I suspect that aggregators and sites that act as “redirectors” in some way can get away with ads / affiliate marketing (price comparison sites are another example). Whereas sites that rely on their content or community need a model more like the one that you established for BME.

On a different note, have you seen the movie Contact with Jodi Foster? If not I think you’d really like it. It’s based on the SETI project and is one of my favourite movies.

Have a good day.

On a different note, have you seen the movie Contact with Jodi Foster? If not I think you’d really like it. It’s based on the SETI project and is one of my favourite movies.

Have a good day.