Last Friday we looked at high profile role models—LinkedIn, Facebook, Zynga and Google.

With the exception of LinkedIn, which developed serious products that sell for serious bucks, they all rely on advertising for revenue generation; even Zynga’s virtual products revenue, which has tanked, is earned from its specialized ads on Facebook.

In March we looked at Angie’s List, also a subscription product.

Monetizing humongous user bases isn’t all that easy.

And it’s getting more difficult.

• Mobile ads are ignored more than 99% of the time.
• Privacy laws in other countries are far more onerous than in the US.
• Much like a slowly awakening Goliath, American’s attitude towards privacy is changing.

I’m no kind of expert, but I think founding a successful company based on ad revenue is going to be a much tougher sell as time goes by.

Even mighty Facebook seems to be following LinkedIn by creating products and even offering gambling outside the US.

Founding a company—wonderful.

Creating something that could change the world—fabulous.

Generating non-ad-based revenue—priceless.

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Flickr image credit: dh

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2012 at 1:15 am and is filed under Entrepreneurs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: Angies List, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, role model, Zynga
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