As an amateur blogger I’ve always found this drive to monetize every tittle on the web as a curiosity bordering on the annoying. If anything it’s felt like the invasion of the MBAs eager to put their degrees to work. You know, guys who know everything about business and nothing about the web looking to turn a buck.
And therein lies the problem. The product they’re pushing isn’t a product at all, it’s a pass time. It’s like trying to monetize kite flying. To make things worse, the only viable monetization business model to come out of the web–apart from actually selling something tangible à la Amazon.com–is advertising. But it isn’t working. Why? Because advertisers aren’t interested in paying to be displayed next to an old man smoking a pipe.
Monetizing UGC is the wrong approach to business on the web. The quality just isn’t there, and advertisers want quality, yet 99.999% of the web’s UGC is anything but. So maybe the right strategy is to find a different way to make a buck off the web. Maybe that’ll be the next big thing.
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