Pinterest is not without risk but the potential is huge and it has many obvious monetization options. Risks include:
- clones and insufficient network effect;
- spammers/marketers creating noise;
- someone does recommendation better than they do.
I suspect Pinterest will either need to or should adopt a revenue sharing model with "pinners", copyright holders, etc with revenue coming from affiliate or affiliate-like sources (ie from driving traffic to a site in the case where the same item is sold from multiple sources).
I see the wedding market being particularly huge for this. Wedding planning essentially comes down to selecting a huge number of different things (clothing, where to have the ceremony/reception, food, decorations, etc etc etc) and this could be a really great platform for hosting that sort of thing and tying it in with recommendations.
Twitter as a counterexample I view as ultimately doomed. IMHO within 5 years it will be bought by one of the big players. They haven't come up with a good way to monetize it yet because there isn't one.
> Youtube: [...]
> ... owners had amazing amount of luck ...
Every man and his dog, prior to Youtube, had been trying to do VoD (video on demand) for years. 1-2 new startups appeared every month. I certainly agree there was a timing element in play but Youtube was also the most accessible and easiest to use. Everyone else was terrified of the bandwidth costs. Youtube had the courage to burn through an incredible amount of money to become "the" place for online video-sharing. That could easily have become a disaster instead.
As far as rightsholder issues go, I think Youtube is the poster-child for "it's easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission".
As much as people (myself included) have criticized Facebook's privacy blunders I do agree with Zuck on one point: you need to drag people kicking and screaming into the future. What people jump up and down about today they won't blink an eyelid at 5 years from now. Innovation is brinkmanship.
> Twitter as a counterexample I view as ultimately doomed. IMHO within 5 years it will be bought by one of the big players. They haven't come up with a good way to monetize it yet because there isn't one.
didnt you just say this: Just because you don't see potential doesn't mean there isn't any in your previous post?
> As far as rightsholder issues go, I think Youtube is the poster-child for "it's easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission".
I agree with you, but lets wait until all lawsuits settle or be resolved, and then see if they were forgiven. I am obviously not talking about the initial owners.
> you need to drag people kicking and screaming into the future. What people jump up and down about today they won't blink an eyelid at 5 years from now
It would be obvious Zack would say something like that, considering the service he is building. I am not sure if I like this approach anyways. While most people work on innovation the right way, there is lots of jaw dropping stuff coming up as well. On the privacy stuff, one day you may wake up with Police Drone in your backyard determining if that blue spot on your Google Maps picture was a swimming pool you haven't paid taxes for, or just a covered blocks of wood.
Pinterest is not without risk but the potential is huge and it has many obvious monetization options. Risks include:
- clones and insufficient network effect;
- spammers/marketers creating noise;
- someone does recommendation better than they do.
I suspect Pinterest will either need to or should adopt a revenue sharing model with "pinners", copyright holders, etc with revenue coming from affiliate or affiliate-like sources (ie from driving traffic to a site in the case where the same item is sold from multiple sources).
I see the wedding market being particularly huge for this. Wedding planning essentially comes down to selecting a huge number of different things (clothing, where to have the ceremony/reception, food, decorations, etc etc etc) and this could be a really great platform for hosting that sort of thing and tying it in with recommendations.
Twitter as a counterexample I view as ultimately doomed. IMHO within 5 years it will be bought by one of the big players. They haven't come up with a good way to monetize it yet because there isn't one.
> Youtube: [...]
> ... owners had amazing amount of luck ...
Every man and his dog, prior to Youtube, had been trying to do VoD (video on demand) for years. 1-2 new startups appeared every month. I certainly agree there was a timing element in play but Youtube was also the most accessible and easiest to use. Everyone else was terrified of the bandwidth costs. Youtube had the courage to burn through an incredible amount of money to become "the" place for online video-sharing. That could easily have become a disaster instead.
As far as rightsholder issues go, I think Youtube is the poster-child for "it's easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission".
As much as people (myself included) have criticized Facebook's privacy blunders I do agree with Zuck on one point: you need to drag people kicking and screaming into the future. What people jump up and down about today they won't blink an eyelid at 5 years from now. Innovation is brinkmanship.