The "I Have 250,000 Users, Now What?" guy just sold his Facebook app for $3 million

This young man aggregated a very valuable demographic in one place. Over 2 Million prime "hosteling" candidates, and travelers all accessible through his user list. As to the question of whether this is real, I am uncertain. It would be understandable however if it were.

What many entrepreneurs realize too late is that acquiring a lot of heterogeneous users quickly is of little value. Acquiring HOMOGENEOUS users is of great value. When all of a sites users are homogeneous, ie travelers, or runners, or 30 year old single women, the number of methods of monetizing them are legion. Monetization of an audience of less than 5 million is more difficult where there is no commonality.

This young man chose the simplest monetization method, sell the names.

Here is some juicy stuff - Tripadvisor says the report is not true: http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9761584-7.html

I'm dubious about this. There's no source. The Mashable and Techcrunch articles about this simply derive from this one. And yet Inside Facebook isn't claiming an exclusive, despite apparently having one.

It may be true, but there are a lot of fishy signs.

Wow, and this is one of those ideas at least two different people have suggested to me in conversations. I guess it was just waiting for the right platform. And no, none of them are mentioned in this article.

That's a good argument for keeping ideas like this in a journal or outliner or something so you can review them when a new-platform gold rush like this comes around.

And, as anomalous as this deal seems, I have to say it: it's also more support for the "get popular first and worry about profitability later" school of thought.

That's uh... well I'm happy for him.

Note to self: avoid management team of trip advisor at all costs.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30042 for reference

My gut tells me TripAdvisor can't expect to make back that money on the users themselves over the next few years. If they shift the app to include advertising to achieve that level of revenue, it's going to lose out to whatever copy cat is still ad-free.