"An absolute idiot with 10-20M users can make a ton of money. So, get to tens of millions of users and forget about money." | Hacker News Reader

"An absolute idiot with 10-20M users can make a ton of money. So, get to tens of millions of users and forget about money."

calacanis.com

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Is it just me or does this seem like Jason is advocating the "get as many eyeballs as you can" business model//frenzy of web 1.0?

He is. But also qualifies that this is especially true for Twitter. You have to read the footnote:

Note: if you're not a player like Ev, and you don't have unlimited access to capital do not take this advice and focus on building revenue streams.

Yes and no. The eyeballs model has been maligned too much, I think. If you have 10-20M attentive people, it is easy to make money. Just ask NBC or USA Today. Then ask them about their plans now that their audiences are declining.

The great thing about the massive-eyeballs model is that it's very easy to measure, very easy to pick and choose between advertisers, etc.

The bad thing is that it reminds me of that saying "if X is so easy, why isn't everyone doing it?" Well, everyone is. So they need lock-in mechanisms like subscriptions.

In short, it's fragile & cut-throat but it has a great potential for buckets of easy cash.

I think that the "eyeball" model is fine, as long as you're not spending too much money to get those eyeballs, which was the problem with web 1.0.

Amen to that.

Sure, this strategy will work for him, but will it work for everyone? What if you're not an absolute idiot?

Perhaps you should hire one, put him in a suit, and give him a three letter title?

"Complete Idiot Officer"?

I was going to say something snarky about "users" being the currency of the Internet... but you _can_ buy, trade, and sell them...

PlentyOfFish.com

Hey may not be a web designer, but he's certainly not an idiot.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/08/30/cited-in-the-fi...

"I am amazed I managed to create this program in the first place, I barely barely even understand how it works and I wrote it. This is because the program scans in multiple dimensions is very hard to conceptualize. "

He may indeed be a savant.

I believe he is plenty smart but that he does have a lot of traffic and he monetizes it only one way. It seems to me that he could be getting multiple levels of monetization out of his system but he is not. He has been determined and dare I say smart enough to get this far, but he could be reaching out to the next level and building upon his success.

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