Who's Making Money From Your Web Presence?
Howard Reingold has a link to Trebor Scholz's post at Collectivate.net called "What the MySpace genereation should know about working for free." It's a good reminder that much of the value of sites like MySpace, eBay, YouTube, StumbleUpon, etc.is created by the people (us!) who use them. And that value comes with a pricetag. News Corporation paid $580 million for MySpace. Google paid $1.6 billion for YouTube. And eBay's market cap is currently over $46 billion.
We, as users/creators at these sites, need to keep those numbers in mind, and ask ourselves if what we're getting in return is worth it. Collectively, we create the content and the data (much of which we are completely unaware of) that makes these companies worth billions. Are they giving us enough in return?
It's an interesting question, and definitely something we need to take into consideration when we decide to create our own web presence. And I also think it's important to think about how things might change in the near future as envisioned by KirkH in his comment for Jeff Jarvis' Who Owns the Wisdom of the Crowd? The Crowd. post at BuzzMachine. How will things change when everybody is connected to the net all the time? When we don't need an ISP or a web hosting company or a webmail service, and all the software we need is available for free? Will we still provide billions of dollars worth of content, data, and attention to a bunch of big companies, or will we each get our own slice of that gigantic pie?
Technorati Tags: sociable web, web 2.0, cyberculture
We, as users/creators at these sites, need to keep those numbers in mind, and ask ourselves if what we're getting in return is worth it. Collectively, we create the content and the data (much of which we are completely unaware of) that makes these companies worth billions. Are they giving us enough in return?
It's an interesting question, and definitely something we need to take into consideration when we decide to create our own web presence. And I also think it's important to think about how things might change in the near future as envisioned by KirkH in his comment for Jeff Jarvis' Who Owns the Wisdom of the Crowd? The Crowd. post at BuzzMachine. How will things change when everybody is connected to the net all the time? When we don't need an ISP or a web hosting company or a webmail service, and all the software we need is available for free? Will we still provide billions of dollars worth of content, data, and attention to a bunch of big companies, or will we each get our own slice of that gigantic pie?
Technorati Tags: sociable web, web 2.0, cyberculture
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