The next facebook is facebook
What is the next Myspace? what is the next digg? what is the Next facebook? answer: myspace, digg, facebook. There is no room for any more competitors. If you visit any forum or read internet related news you will see entrepreneurs trying to compete with the extablished social networking sites like Digg,, Youtube, Facebook, and Myspace. They spend thousands of dollars on scripts and coders trying to get their foot in the social netwroking web 2.0 scene TO NO AVAIL.
THE BATTLE LINES HAVE BEEN DRAWN. The victors gull the spoils. there is no room for a next myspace or a next digg. Such efforts are futile. First mover advantage is SO strong that even comanies with MILLIONS of dollars in promotional efforts and media coverage can barely make a dent.
Consider Google and yahoo. They control 90 percent of ALL internet search. #3 and $3 are microsoft and ASK. yes, even microsoft a 300 BILLION dollar company can only scrape 3% marketshare an Ask.com which has been around for oever adecade with hundreds of millions in marketing can only get 2% of all search engine based marketshare. Google and yahoo dominate search and it will remain that way FOREVER.
Trying to compete with myspace, digg, facebook, and youtube is like trying to compete with General Motors in 1930 or Microsoft in 1987. Not gonna happen. Linux and Apple only commands a tiny fraction of marketshare. here is another statistic. Myspace, myyearbook and Facebook combined control 95% of ALL social networking traffic. All those hundreds of other sites only have a tiny tiny fraction of marketshare. yet those sites were created with MILLIONs of dollars of funding. You think the founders will see a possitive ROI? Fat chance. I woudn’t be surprised if most of them go bust in the comin year.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop many entrepeneurs from flushing thousands or even millions of dollars down the toilet in a vein effort to compete with these established sites. My advice. Stop trying to
Auction ads review
Auction ads is a new service that allows internet publishers to display targeted ebay based ads on their websites. When someone clicks an ad and wins a bid on ebay the publisher gets a small commision. The publisher also gets a cimmision if the visitor uses the ‘buy it now’ feature or creates an ebay account.
I decided to run auction ads on my main website www.myspace-resource.info. each page has roughly 2-4 blocks of auction ads code. After a few days I noticed some clicks coming in yet no revenue. After a week I made my first commision. 25 cents. woo hoo! I decided to keep the ads running for an entire month so i would get a better perspective of the effectivness of the auction ads.
After one month here are my final auction Ads stats:
Total 1372029 3828 0.28 $81.87
I got 1.4 million impressions. Got 3828 clciks and made about $82. That averages out to a little more than 2.2 cents a click. OK but not stellar. Since I didn’t have adsense ads on Myspace-resource.info I was expecting more revenue for a month worth of clicks. With adsense I can make between $10-15 a day with my site. Auction ads earned me a a measly $2.8 a day. Not so great.
Does auction ads work? For some people , yes, but it doesn’t seem live a very good adsense alternative. The main problem with acution ads is that the person clicking the ads has ti auctually buy something. That is a MAJOR barrier. With adsense you get paid per click regardless if anything is purchased.
Overall Rating: Two stars out of Five
Why Social bookmarking is a waste of time
Social bookmarking is the practive of using bookmarking and aggregation type sites such as digg, reddit or stumbleupon to submit stories and ‘vote’ on stories you find useful. The more votes a stry has the higher is may rank and the more traffic it gets. Socail bookmarking is like traditional linking except there is a social element involving an online community.
Since 2004 social bookmarking has EXPLODED in popularity. Digg gets millions of pageviews a month and is rated as one of the most visited sites on the web. meanwhile webmasters and bloggers spend a great deal of effort getting votes and and trying to improve thier rankings on social networking sites in the hope of driving more traffic to thier sites.
Unfortunetely, social bookmarking is a waste of time because supply vastly exceeds demand. there are TOO MANY stories being submitted and simply not enough carbon based lifeforms to read them. To get an idea of how many stories are submitted visit the digg upcoming section http://digg.com/news/upcoming There are over 8000 stores 99.9% of which only have one digg. I can guarantee with great certainty that none of these stories are gonna make it to the front page, nor will they get any traffic.
So how does make it to the top of social bookmarking sites? Usually those with conections and a large readerbase. If your blog is very popular like DailyKos or Johnchow getting on the front page of a social bookmarking site is easy becuae you have a large readerbase to vote on your stories. if you don’t have a large reader base you simply won’t be able to garner enough votes to make a dent.
Also social bookmarking sites provide little if any SEO benefits. Having your link on some sub/sub/sub page with a [rel=no follow] attribute won’t improve your rankings. Being on the front page of a social bookmarking site yields the most benefits in terms of SEO but as i said before getting on the front page is exceedingly diffiucult for most webmasters.
So where does that leave us? Unless you get a lot of traffic and reader, I recommend ignoring the social bookmarking sites alltogether and focus on getting SOLID HARD links via old-school 90’s era link exchanges. Find sites that are related to yours and try to exchange links with them. It is much more effective to have a quality site giving you a permanent home page link than being burried on some social bookmarking site. Not only do you get SEO benefits but you also get some traffic as well.
As a word of caution don’t try to game social bookmarking sites via ‘digg clubs’ or other shenanigans. You may get your site banned and won’t be able to reap the later benefits of social bookmarking sites should your website become more popular and develop a bigger readerbase.
The Failure of Wickedfire
As a few people know wickedfire is an affiliate marketing forum created in May 2006 by Sitepoint member MookJon. The original selling point of wickedfire was to create a ‘free speech’ community where people can discuss affiliate marketing without all the constraints and rules of traditional forum edicate. For example, you could cuss or flame someone without be given a warning. For the fist few months months following its launch Wickedfire was a pretty cool place to hang out. There were lively discussions about Adsense arbitrage and various other forums of internet monetization.
However, in the past few months the forum has become very cliquish and the posting activity has fallen markedly. Noobs and anyone with an opposing views are usually banned immediately by one of the many mods without even a single warning. A simple question such as “What affiliate programs work best??? will be greeted by flames by Jon’s loyal legion of sycophants and diciples, and the orginal posted will eventually be banned.
In addition, these people have little sense of humor. It is extremely easy to agitate them since most members are unable to differentiate a harmless joke or irony versus a personal attack. ‘Free speech’ certainly exists on wickedfire unless, of course, someone gets offended or insulted. But isn’t the who point of ‘free speech’ to protect UNPOPULAR viewpoints? As a result, trolling wickedfire has become a perverse hobby of mine. In the past nine or so months I have created probably thirty troll aliases. Of all the forums I have visited they are BY FAR the easiest to troll. It is effortless and entertaining provoking these prudes into trite arguments.
As for the future of wickedfire it will continue to smolder until Jon either closes it down to work on another project or enough people get fed up at the hypocrisy and decide the leave the forum. Posting activity has declined markedly in the past four or six months and I expect that trend to continue. Even Jon’s loyal legion of ass kissers can’t save Wickedfire from its inevitable failure.