I am worth 4 dollars

» YouTube, Digg, MySpace: How much is a non-paying 'user' worth? | Digital Micro-Markets | ZDNet.com

Following the ongoing "Hot" Web 2.0 topic of "commercializing the Web 2.0", this interesting article pops up over @ ZDNet.

If you haven't been following this, let me quickly put you up to date. Jason Calacanis of Netscape and Weblogs Inc. fame came out and said that he was willing to pay Digg's top users $1000 dollars if they started to submit their stories over and exclusively on Netscape.com (which as it is right now works and looks very similar to Digg.com). Basically Jason is willing to pay these "Top-Users" to switch over  to Netscape.com and in the process, he hopes at least,  get some much wanted traffic  and good content.

Going back to ZDNet's article, the article exposes the great popularity and revenues today's top Web 2.0 sites like Digg and Myspace are getting:

While traffic and usage numbers have grown at Web 2.0 properties, the very low ratio of contributing users to non-contributing users has not evolved.

From YouTube, to Digg, to MySpace, Social Web stars are touting enormous traffic and usage metrics.

The traffic overwhelmingly involves non-contributing, and non-paying, users, however, and the usage is not well monetized.

Additionally, the Web 2.0 leaders in traffic and usage are incurring greater infrastructure costs to support the growing non-paying users, and under-monetized usage.

The article concludes that your average user of these site is actually worth 2 doillars. By average user I mean nothing related to the "Top Users" list, which means the type of guy that Jason isn't interested in. Myself been holder of a Digg as well as MySpace account *sighs* can say I am worth 4 dollars. Interesting to say the least..

technorati tags:, , , , , , ,


About this entry