>http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
also from the article, "Overture and Google's success came from an understanding of what Chris Anderson refers to as "the long tail," the collective power of the small sites that make up the bulk of the web's content."
"The Web 2.0 lesson: leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head." (which they've conveniently emphasized with italics)
new word for old concept, "long tail". In other words, Tupperware 2.0. :)
As I've said before, a few people make money from displaying google ads and a few ppl increase sales revenue using google ads. For them, individuals and small companies with tight budgets, it's often small change to give it a whirl.
So, the bulk of google ad revenue comes from the vast collection of hits on ads from sites like the LBO archives which, while it's a big site in terms of hits, is small potatoes in terms of monetization of those hits. :) The money generated from the google ads on doug's LBO pages and the archives is peanuts. (right Jordy? :) But when you add up those peanuts by hundreds of thousands, you're talking real money.
Just like Tupperware or Avon (in days of old) or even, dog help us, Kirby vaccum cleaners which were mainly sold by individuals to their network of friends, neighbors, co-workers. Few people who sold that stuff ever made a serious income from it. If they did, they stood out as the people who spurred along others to give it a whirl. In the end, those companies made their money on the Tupperware parties held by the housewife who wanted to get a few free and/or discounted Tupperware items when her friends bought items at her party and then signed up to have their own parties.
Social networking of yore.
Same thing goes on with Google ads. You see your friend has google ads on her blog, so you give it a whirl. Or, you see competitors use google ads when they advertise, so you give it a whirl. It's all self-serve, so it's time consuming -- which buys right into the long-tail which is where all the small business, entrepreneurs, and startups are, entities which typically have more sweat equity available to them than operating cash.
Meanwhile, not only does google make money from the small potatoes adding up to great sacks of spuds, they also take that data -- information about a gmail user, his or her interests, the ads s/he clicks on, the material s/he forwards to others and, if gmail users, what those others do with that forward -- and feed it into their arsenal of data crunching and social analysis projects about what people do with their clicking finger to better understand what products to develop next. Which, of course, is helped along by their APIs, which people use to develop their own stuff they find helpful to themselves.
I mean think about it. You can buy a service that will tell you what kinds of traffic you get. But why buy when you can get it for free from Google's service? And what a lot of great data Google collects by giving it away for free! All *your* web traffic data gets fed into their data and analyzed by their crack team of geeks hired from MIT's Media Lab and the like.
I should use links to powell's book more often but I use Amazon because someone built into Wordpress tools which make it easy to link to Amazon products. He did that because Amazon makes it easy for small potatoes me to make $100 over a few months from sales of books I've linked to. Small potatoes in the grand scheme, but at the time that $100 helped cover bills we couldn't have paid otherwise. Add that up by 100s of 1000s in the long tail, and Amazon increases its book sales in a way that keeps them ahead of places like Powell's. Plus, Amazon harnesses user generated content with the list mania, user book reviews which can be entertaining for their idiocy, but also useful and I, when I think they've been useful, will use the rating system to indicate that. And I have frequently used list mania book lists to get some free jollies, but also to get a sense of good books out there about topics with which I'm unfamiliar.
yadda.
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