Financial Times is reporting that many Web 2.0 are failing to create (significant) revenue.
I’m far from surprised, as it is something I’ve argued in many discussions before and wrote about in my blog

Web 2.0 as a concept looks to me to just be a buzzword, and worse – a reminisces of the “happy venture days” in the mid 90s, where mentioning the word e-solution, webpage or something similar had people standing by with a big bag of money, cause it was the “new economy”.

I seriously question all services which does not form their business on some tangible product or stream of income. Information about consumers are valurable, but if the information stands alone and doesn’t create sales, it is doomed to fail. And then there are all the other services which now have to be plastered with advertisements to make a buck.

It seems more and more that Web 2.0 is just the re-emerging of advertise driven content …. Just now the users are better armed and prepared towards advertisements, and so the struggle between users and advertisers continue.

Web 2.0 indeed. It is still Web 1.0, just with faster broadband connections.

Seems Google is thinking about placing advertisements on YouTube in an attempt to get it to make a profit. http://news.ebrandz.com/content/view/1897/568/

Well, personally I do not mind such advertisements myself, as long as they do not come in the form of "roll over", pop up or other such annoyances, and especially not if they starts containing sound and music.

What strikes me most though, is that YouTube isn't making Google much money (nooo, really, a free service isn't turning a large profit), which fits nicely into my Web 2.0 piece I wrote the other day. t looks to me very much like people (companies) just though that money would flow in, if you "Web 2.0"-ified your websites, whereas even a company as Google decides to start using ads on their Web 2.0 sites. And this is on top of the copyright problems associated with a service such as YouTube which I bet is also a large cost.

Now I'm sure Google doesn't need the money, but it all comes back to my point - Web 2.0 is not a silver bullet. Revenue is not guarenteed, and it is not a new economy (like the internet bubble buzz back in the mid 90s). It still needs to provide a product - adverts now - to be able to turn revenue.

It will be interesting to see how far Google will go with their advertisement, cause if they go a overboard (I doubt it, but well, I guess it is possible), the "customers" will simply move towards the next service which provides something comparable. A number of them already exists.  

 

I’m getting sick of hearing about "Web 2.0" and "the future of the internet" and all such predictions.
The term Web 2.0 seems to have changed significantly over the last period of time, because when I first started hearing about the term a year or two ago, it was used simply to describe websites and services which was based on user driven content, which – well, when you think about it, is pretty much every single user driven forum out there.

Anyways, it was meant more for site such as YouTube and MySpace et al.
Along the same time the MMO like game, or world if you will, Second Life started getting incredible hyped in the media, online as well as offline traditional media.
Suddenly “everybody” wanted an avatar in Second Life and companies had to buy virtual land, build virtual company buildings so to “meet” the customers on their terms. People earned real life actual money in this game. I even read about somebody becoming a millionaire based on Second Life revenue.
Strangely enough, most of what I heard of the game though was about how you could have sex in the game, and how people bought virtual genital for their avatar. *sigh*.

Since then, it has kind of collapsed on its own. You hear little about Second Life now, you do not hear about companies spending big buck building virtual corporate headquarters there anymore and well – the hype has gone away, and it seems to have taken its place as just another MMO.

Now you can’t rule out that Second Life was a preview of a more "graphical" internet where people roam as avatars and interact more “real”, a kind of Tron-type cyberspace with better graphics. But Second Life as a concept seems to have blown over.

Anyways, back to Web 2.0 , then nowadays it seems to be about the next interation of the internet and describing new technologies used to make webapplications – but I already hear people talk about Web 3.0 or 3.5 without anybody ever having figured out if we truly are moving away from web 1.0 (which I would think is what we have today) or even what Web 2.0 actually is about.
A simple “Web 2.0” search in Google lists 559.000.000 results, many of these arguing over what the definition is.

So if we take the original meaning – user driven content – then is it truly so different from Web 1.0? User driven content, well we are all users online – a company providing a webpage is a user, however the users can’t change the content but do we want them to do so? If I go to a companys page, I want information from said company - and if I want reviews of said company, I know where to find that as well.
Is there even a place for user-driven content in online business? I mean actual user driven content, from you and me?
Well, not in the traditional business in my humble opinion - at least as I see it, so we’ll have to look towards the "new" Web 2.0 services (no, not the forums – they apparently aren’t Web 2.0, cause they were there even in Web 0.5) to figure it out.

If we take a service such as Facebook then it is hugely popular right now and Microsoft bought 1.6% for 240million dollars. Is the site worth that much? Is there actual money to be made in the long run, or is it just another bubble like we saw in the late 90’s early 2000? The only way you can make money off Facebook right now seems to be advertisements and sharing the information which is generated from the users on there. And considering how many are starting to block adverts, and block cookies and how much privacy issues are starting to become public domain, well then I question such a strategy. It seems the value of such sites are solely connected to only how much people/companies are willing to pay for them, or how much people/companies think other people/companies are willing to buy the service for. 

Will it be enough once the next fad hits the web? The next online sharing your feelings and sit in a circle - community? Web 2.0 buzz or not?

I have my doubts, because if we compare with the happy internet days right smack in the middle of the bubble, everybody talked about “The New Economy” and how it’d replace the “Old” (traditionally).  I think this Web 2.0 trend strikes a lot of resembles to how companies behaved back in the bubble before it burst.
People uncritically assigning huge number values to services which have no obvious or firm revenue stream. Companies are seemingly willing to pay these numbers right now, just as they were back in "those days" – E-Bay and Skype ring a bell (pun intended), where E-Bay paid huge sums for Skype and now is rumored to be selling it off again because “it doesn’t fit their business plan” or something like that. Does that not sound like all the nice venture companies which went belly up when the bubble burst? Just so far on a smaller scale (E-Bay will not go bankrupt on this, but somebody else might if they "try")

Of course – it might not be that Web 2.0 bursts like the previous bubble, bringing down services like Facebook (I doubt YouTube is going anywhere, lest copyright brings it down, because Google is earning big buck on search advertisements) if they do not find a steady stream of income, or possible being sold off to another big company which fails to do anything significant with it – aka Skype.

Personally though – I think Web 2.0 is just another buzzword management can use combined with ROI and SOA, web services, thin clients (yeah – we tried that once already) and what not.
But deep in my heart – the Web 2.0 buzz still feels very much like the internet bubble, and while I'm not holding my breath, I would not be surprised if it burst like it.