zlacker

App.net and Medium have the same issue (why advertising is more lucrative than selling blogging software directly to content creators):

Let's say for every one content creator that are on average 100 eyeballs on the content they create (1:100). Almost universally, the 100 eyeballs can be translated to more economic value than the 1, and hence why the advertising model is so lucrative.

>>mbesto+(OP)
The advertising model is "lucrative" because that's where all the money is shunted, because that's what MarCom knows how to do. There's a century and a half of advertising agencies who need to capitalize on their training, and the newspaper/TV model is what we've gotten for it.

>>mbesto+(OP)
App.net from what I understand wasn't so much trying to sell to content creators as it was trying to create a Social-Graph-As-A-Service thing. I thought the original pitch was essentially two fold:

build your network with App.net and users can basically just opt-in automagically importing their data from other App.net networks thereby reducing the friction and hopefully making it easier to over come the ghost-town problem.

build your network with App.net and tool makers (including you) automatically get a well defined/robust/tested API to write apps against to interact with your network.