Quote:
Originally Posted by chrishirst
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So what would you say are the "ways to riches" online in 2008 and 2009?
Here's my own opinion, let's compare:
1. Make Content (content is the most important product a web developer can produce right now - many companies pay more and more sources for content and small businesses all over the world exist, making 100s of 1000s a year from content publishing alone... selling all their space to adrevenue sources, which is Google adsense more than 90% of the time)
2. Buy Google adwords - for retailers of any kind, particularly former Brick and Mortar companies, there is usually very good scope for buying "qualified leads" from Google. The conversions of Google's qualified leads into sales are the best on the global sales market from what I have seen - and I have worked in just about every sales environment there is.
Trends I think can lead to a lot of money are:
1. Online video - for content producers it is important to realise that within another year it's going to be relatively normal to see video on most sites, all the time, whether advertising messages, communication/web2.0 tools or whatever. There's not just a lot of money in it. Much adrevenue from text will lose out to video.
2. Google webmaster tools - Google has spent a year developing loads of useful stuff, inspired by the attitude to network-space-use seen amongst, above all, millions of "facebook app" users. Google's tools for managing your online activities are amazing nowadays and not even a fractional percentage of people are visibly making any use of it. That is obviously going to change. Understanding the psychology of this change can definitely make you a lot of money from cashing in on similar schemes - i.e. "post-web2.0 sites" - recognising the failings of the web 2.0 genre but gaining from what they have taught us all about internet usage patterns amongst non-techies
Trends I see as failing to live beyond 2009:
1. Social networks (they serve no purpose, saturate the networks with genuinely useless info, endanger privacy/id-security and have increasingly become the plaything of spam-centric mass marketers showing adverts which irritate you in that precise but intangible way that all "real spam" does - you know when you see an advert for things you'd never dream of buying)
2. Online-Video-piracy's heyday - it's been too easy and big market forces have begun to take aggressive action.
3. Bookmarking sites - essentially all they do is make the world's web content rise like dough - the same info fills 10 times the space and actually becomes more confusing. Finding the originals becomes harder and worse still, wikipedia ends up being treated as a factual source a lot, without your knowing it.
