Are eyeballs enough?
"[..] the extent of the crash didn't dawn on us that quickly. I don't think it dawned on a lot of people. We just wanted to build momentum with this $500,000 and then raise more money later in the year."
"At the time it was pretty much the belief that, if you have a buzz and you have users and you have good seed investors, you can raise more money. We said, 'We'll make money, but this is down the road so we don't need to focus on that. We are going to focus on building more features getting more users.'"
-Evan Williams (Blogger.com from Founder's at Work)
Are we all doomed to repeat history? Is it a sound strategy to go for growth first and worry about making money later?
Has advertising really matured to the point where an advertising-only model can work? If I can get a couple million people to use my app on the regular then I'm sitting pretty in multi-million dollar acquisition land, right?
Someone please shed some light on this mysterious monetization thing.