Solo Netrepreneurship Better Than Big Portals?

Dan Mitchell points out that, while building large profitable ad-supported sites remains difficult, solo netrepreneurship provides a viable alternative.

Let’s say you wanted to build an advertising-supported online media business that took in $50 million a year in revenue. How many users would you have to attract to get there?

Probably too many for most people to even try, if the numbers run by Jeremy Liew, a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners, are accurate.

The analysis is “sobering,” wrote Tim O’Reilly, the chief executive of O’Reilly Media, a publisher of computer books. “This may be why more entrepreneurs are going for low-investment sites that don’t need an exit but provide ‘lifestyle businesses’ for their owners,” he wrote on Radar, his company’s blog.

That is, rather than seek venture financing and hire a staff, it may be better for one or two people to create a relatively simple site — say, a hobbyist blog for guitar enthusiasts — and use a service like Google AdWords to, hopefully, make enough money to live on.

Most Philippine Web strategy still revolves around empowering “communities“. With Filipinos taking over the blogosphere, perhaps we should start thinking about empowering individuals.

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March 19, 2007 | Filed Under Blogging, Entrepreneurship, Media 

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One Response to “Solo Netrepreneurship Better Than Big Portals?”

  1. Emerging Earth - Queen of MySpace Bashes MySpace on March 21st, 2007 1:40 pm

    [...] No wonder Pete Cashmore calls MySpace evil: mammals chained to dinosaurs will not survive in the the emerging Earth. The only good I can see coming out of this is hot babes getting their sexy butts off MySpace and building out their own personal sites, probably using the same widgets MySpace is restricting. That should add some sex appeal to the fall of closed social networking and the rise of personal publishing. [...]

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