Business vs E-Biz and web 20

Real Business vs E-Business and what it all has to do with Web 2.0

Remember the notorious websites from April 16th? what was that CDnow, of course the much talked about wall-street favourite pets.com and about a 100 others?

Does it look the same now?

Certainly not.

To me there is still a big difference between virtual Businesses and Physical Businesses.

I have started about 70-100 Websites since Highschool I guess, this included all kind of stuff, Forums, informative pages for friends, my moms restaurant webpage,

the site of our school to all kinda slick ajax-javascript/ php stuff.

I even tried myself on search engines once a while ago.

Anyways, point is about 20 sites have survived, about 5 are profitable, and the rest I just have around and their bandwidth (share)-bills is until now beeing feeded with the 5 other sites that are generating enough cash for us.

So what have I found out? My 5 maybe 6 sites (don't feel like counting now) are far less popular then those that lose money.

All except one. Why? Because they are practical, I made them to survive, well or just live a little better, all of them have online stores in which I physically sell my or other peoples products.

If you want you're E-Business to stand time and you don't have enough cash at hand or a VC (devils!! haha) that can help you out for the next 12 Months, it may be a good idea

with spamming your users with something that you can sell.

Now we all are in the new web 2.0 fever and user experience is taking over, which is beautiful, of course, I mean every webmaster has this dream of his site with all these nice features, crazy cool design and no ads.

But it's gonna cost you, so I'm quite skeptical about a lot of these new web 2.0 sites on the market.

They spend all their money on new features, (not even on advertising) but try to rely on "Google Ads" alone, once it's popular.

There's nothing wrong with that, and it's not a problem, more like a paradox of beeing popular and these ads.

They like so many others are content-relevant ads, so if you're popular you become mainstream, if you're sites keywords are mainstream you're going to get the

usual ads, which don't pay much per click.

This changes once you reached Yahoo! status I guess.

I know it's more physical work and not everyone wants to sell his own products on a website, but hey it really extends your profit margins.

It can make those sites survive, and I'm quite interested why most of the little webmasters have figured it out, but the big silicon valley "Garage sites"

have not caught on at this part of survival and money growth-fuel.

You don't have to keep this up forever but at least until you can get the "Big Deals" from CBS for their new TV-Series.

I also part-own a shop and a private school, it's been much easier to make money of these two things because they are businesses.

We had profits from the first month in both because we're selling Product.

You can't free youth hostel business right? I think it's the same with websites that are for free, not selling anything and just trying to have you hang-around long enough.

Sure I love code, and I try to learn new code or at least understand other people's code everyday, I love making new things, features, giving people a nicer feeling hanging out online.

Why most of these websites of mine don't make it online anymore? I don't want to spend 18 Months of struggle for an uncertain aquisition by Google.

Of course Youtube is different, but the success was certainly not so certain.

I hate "cool sites" because it is so quick that they become not so cool.

We all know this, how often have we been like "Oh Wow, that's a cool site" and after 2 weeks of hanging there You're like "Ah nah, it got boring"

43things.com is an example to me,

I loved the site, but now I never log-on, they don't seem to get new members anymore either, the "buzz" is over.

I had an experiment once wih these buzz sites though, I made one, and I got about 8000 Member in the first month (which is quite a success for me)

and just used it to sell product.

So it didn't hurt me after these dudes don't log-on very frequently anymore.

I like squidoo and Hubpages altough I don't use Squidoo, just never got hooked on it, they sorta got a money making model, however even here you're relying on other people's products and commission.

Sure there is going to be lot's of arguments about this one, but to every webmaster here, one question:

"doesn't your CPR seem to decrease every month"?

Mine certainly does, that's why I am not hooked on the web 2.0 Wave yet.

It's still hard out there for a webmaster.