azeem.azhar

Alan Patrick raised the per-weekly question of Twitter’s business model: how and when will it make money?

Now, as a quick aside on web20nomics, I am encouraged by Facebook‘s ability to make money, heading towards $550m this year on 250m users, which isn’t a bad monetisation rate for a business without a business model (as it was described in 2007).

As monetisation rates go, it ain’t bad: $2-3 per user per year. On it’s current user base of 250m, if Facebook could triple their monetisation per user (which would put them below Yahoo), they would be a $1.6bn revenue company, which makes Yuri Milner’s call today a smart one.

But at least an order of magnitude off Google’s, which is between $40 and $80 per user per annum.

With Twitter heading north of 30m monthly users, monetisation rates as good as Facebook’s, Twitter would be making close to $10m per month, which ought to pay the electricity bills. The question is how?

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 17% [?]

I have been mucking around with Aardvark, the new social search engine which has been making the rounds.

The premise is simple: use Aardvark to ask a question. Aardvark will then route the question to your friends and their friends and hopefully find someone who is qualified to give an answer (and who then gives an answer).

It is sort of a use case that we see on Twitter: “Can anyone recommend me an Indian restaurant in Manhattan?” or ” What is the default password on a new WordPress blog?” but in this case Aardvark aims to route your request across multiple friend-of-friend networks.

When you sign up for Aardvark you need to give a list of topics you feel qualified to answer. These in-turn will drive the routing of questions.

So what is good about Aardvark?

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]