Difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 sites - interesting slide....

...from Buzzmachine.



Logging it here for reference, the Buzzmachine article says it all. Key notes are:

The largest circle inside iVillage is astrology traffic and the dark circle in that represents people who come to iVillage for horoscopes and nothing else. That may bulk up your traffic numbers, but it’s not saleable to advertisers. iVillage is built in the Yahoo model of sites it owns or controls; it tries to lure people in and then bombards them with ads.

Glam, represented by the larger circle on the left, is a network. You’ll see clusters made up of smaller circles, representing their content areas: fashion, beauty, fashion, lifestyle, celebrity, teen. Inside each of those clusters, if you squint, you’ll see a small yellow circle. Those are Glam’s O&O (owned and operated) sites. All the many purple circles around those in each cluster represent outside, independent blogs and sites in Glam’s network. That is the secret to Glam’s quick growth without the cost and risk of doing everything itself.

Glam finds the good blogs and creates a relationship. It features good content from them on Glam and also sells ads on the blogs, sharing revenue with and supporting those bloggers.

Th e argument is that Glam is a platform, not a site. TechCrunch has a different take:

But Glam isn’t really the largest women’s site on the Internet - not by a long stretch. Rather, it’s a collection of a few sites that they own that generate some page views, plus a big ad sales team that sells ads for 600 or so other blogs and websites. In August the company claimed 19 million monthly visitors, but just 3.4% of them (654,000) actually visited Glam.com. The company will lose about $3.7 million this year on $21 million in revenue.

The company still claims to be the largest women’s site on the net, and still talks about those big unique visitor numbers. But their real position is much different - they rely completely on their partners for page views and advertising inventory.

Jarvis says Glam only had to “fire” one content partner this year. That suggests the power in the relationship sits entirely with Glam, when in fact the opposite is true. For now, many of their partners have few choices in selling ads.

But competition is clearly coming (Sugar, Inc. is going in this direction, for example). And when publishers have multiple choices for ad networks, they’ll start asking for guarantees and better margins. That will cut into Glam’s already unprofitable business model.

Our take - Despite what Mike Arrington says, we know from our own work that you can build high traffic sites very quickly with Web 2.0 platform based approaches, yes they are more federated, but they still take traffic from earlier Web 1.0 competitors, and its clear that no one really knows what the future of Online Advertising will be (apart from much bigger) so its better to be in the game than out.

Web 1.0 sites, Nota Bene .....