Tuesday, 24 January 2006
Web 2.0 Disruption 
I am happy to say that, judging from the adoption rates, the reaction to Simpy's ad money give-away has been overwhelmingly positive.
The way I see this, it is one of the first 2006 Web2.0 Disruptions [1]. Why do I think this is a disruption? This is why:
Suddenly, with Simpy giving away advertising money, where 100% of the earned profit goes to people whose Simpy pages the ads are on, one can make some money just by being a good "bookmarker" and "tagger", by doing a good job of aggregating, marking up and organizing data of interest to others. While no single individual will get rich doing just this, think of it in aggregate terms!
All of a sudden, each and every one of the 300,000+ del.icio.us users [2] (or anyone else out there) can start making a bit of extra money, without even having to own a web site, a home page, or a blog, and without doing any extra work. Instead of thinking of their bookmarks as a $100 value that del.icio.us and its VCs made from them, these same people can now actually make some money from the work they've put into searching, finding, saving, and tagging links!
Think for a second about those 300,000 people. Imagine that each of them makes use of Simpy's give-away. Imagine just a single month passing. Even if each of them earns only $3/month, together they would generate nearly $1,000,000/month!
Although Simpy would not see any of that money, I am excited that I can provide a framework, a mechanism that makes this possible. As I always say, I try to mimic nature/life with Simpy. By providing this service, I am trying to provide an open market that individual Simpy users can make use of.
[1] Incidentally, John Battelle thinks this is a year of Disruption for the Web, and is looking for a suitable Web 2.0 Conference tagline.
[2] Note that this is not a move to get del.icio.us users! I am simply using that service as an example, because its numbers are more or less known, and because they have it extra easy: they already have a large collection of tagged links that may be interesting to others, and they can move it to Simpy with 1 click, but without having to move to Simpy and abandon del.icio.us.
