目前好像多是个人站长在小打小闹

当然，也和国内还没有更重视搜索引擎推广有关。

Internet marketing is big money, and so is the $12 million recently raised by HubSpot, a consultancy and software provider for sites looking to improve their visibility online.

The Series B round led by Matrix Partners comes on top of the $5 million raised from General Catalyst Partners last September, bringing the company’s grand total to over $17 million.

In addition to providing paid SEO services, HubSpot offers a free search optimization tool called Website Grader that will automatically assess your website, score it on a 1-100 scale, and show you where to make changes that will get it in front of more eyeballs. The tool claims to have assessed over 300,000 sites, and your score on the 1-100 scale represents the percentage of those sites that your site tops (kind of like the SAT).

计越的一个简单框架说明

从中国网络经济的规模来讲，06年的增长速度大概40%，逐渐的变为30%，到了2007年可能只有20%的增长速度。对于新经济领域的投资不会像过去03、04、05年一样有爆发性，可取得非常巨大的回报。相反的，这个领域会慢慢趋向平稳发展，但发展速度跟其他的行业相比还是比较高的。

　　接下来中国一段时间内，红杉资本会比较关注的项目：

　　第一个，移动增值。随着3G的到来，无线上网的速度越来越快。互联网跟无线产生融合，会产生一些新的应用。中国的这个现象会更加普遍，即便中国部分用户群第一次上网用的终端不是PC，更多是用手机。但是这些用户随着收入的增加，以及网吧数量的增长，慢慢会有一个融合。尽管随着运营商对于整个产业链的控制越来越强，传统的SP，像空中、TOM等等由于移动运营商的挤压收入已经是很大的下降，但是在这个过程中，一定会有两条路。一个是传统的SP，另外一方面是互联网公司往这个方面走。通过这两方面的结合之后，我觉得提供服务的运营商对于电信运营商的依赖会相对减小。

　　第二方面，我们很看好网络游戏。网络游戏并不是已经到了诸侯割据的局面。很多的新兴公司有很大的发展，3年以前基本上国内的游戏格局都是从韩国拿游戏过来进行运营，从去年开始，很多的本土游戏开发公司开发游戏，在国内运营取得了很好的效果。用户的认知度也非常高。在今后的几年，网络游戏将越来越趋向于本土开发和运营，会在游戏的产业链占一个很重要的地位。

　　互联网广告会产生一些投资机会。由于互联网内四大门户的广告收入下降，从过去的60%多到现在的40%，今后几年还会下降，整个产业链给很多的社区和中小门户带来了机会，广告这方面无论是从事广告的公司，还是能够带来广告价值的内容公司，都会产生一些投资的机会。

　　中国的B2B电子商务收入是超过搜索引擎的，这个在美国是不可思议的。2000年2B电子商务非常热，随着互联网泡沫崩溃之后，B2B在美国很难经营，远远落后于搜索引擎带来的收入，甚至可以用“天壤之别”来形容。而中国在05、06年，B2B产生的收入超过搜索引擎，这个是中国的一个特色。某种程度上意味着中国的很多小企业对搜索引擎的认知度还存在差距，可能是他并不觉得这能够带来多大的价值，或者是对他收入有多大的提高，反而认为像阿里巴巴反而可以帮他找到客户，给他带来更多的收入增。所以在B2B领域，企业用户更愿意付钱。但是，中国迟早会走美国的路，搜索引擎会占绝大部分用户以及企业入口。当用户越来越觉得搜索引擎能够给他带来价值的时候，支付的意愿会随之越来越提高。

　　电子邮件不存在任何投资机会，社区博客前景看好。现在的博客不是简单地早期博客中国或者是BLOGC]HINA，更多地是一个社区，是个人的展示以及社交，产生了新的社区的形态。随着社区的应用起来之后，用户上网的时间会越来越分散。拿门户来说，用户上网浏览的时间比例已经降低了12%，其余的很多时间，网民更愿意到自己喜欢的社区去获取信息，和大家交流。

　　另外，从个人需求来说，个人娱乐的互联网应用服务、视频、网络金融等等都领域产生的新兴公司，都会有一些投资机会。

Are serial entrepreneurs any better than first time entrepreneurs?

FT的报道显示了不同的一面。

Until this morning my answer to this question would have ‘Yes, absolutely’, but new research reported today in the Financial Times casts doubt on that assumption:

In the UK, the evidence is that novices are neither more nor less likely to have a business that either grows or survives than experienced founders. In Germany, where much more extensive statistical work has been undertaken, it is clear that those whose business had failed had worse-performing businesses if they restarted than did novices.

They postulate that the reason experience doesn’t seem to make a difference is that luck plays a huge part:

One reason for this is the role of chance in determining whether a business prospers. In spite of volumes of airport lounge books identifying simple recipes for success, the reality is that starting a business is risky. The outcome depends heavily on luck - whether parking is suddenly banned outside your hairdressing shop, whether you or a member of your family become ill, or whether your Great Aunt Mabel dies and leaves you an unexpected legacy. This unpredictability means that it is difficult for entrepreneurs to learn. The best analogy is with a lottery: it is not possible to learn to win a lottery.

When I read this I started thinking about the serial entrepreneurs I know and who I’m working with and quickly came up with a bank of anecdotal evidence that seemed to run counter to this research. Then I remembered a blog post from Dick Costollo, founder of Feedburner where he was lauding Marc Andreessen, saying that Ning was looking like it would become his third billion dollar business, and that nobody could be that lucky.

So I started to doubt the research. Specifically I wondered if the same conclusions would hold if the sample of companies was limited to the sorts of businesses we invest in. They are (in general) less exposed to the sorts of risks outlined in the paragraph above (not least because the money we invest gives them the ability to survive a bit of bad luck).

But then I started to hear the voice of Taleb in my ear. Of Andreessen’s success he would doubtless say ‘given the number of people starting businesses these days an someone was bound to build three billion dollar businesses eventually, based on luck alone’. Then I realised I was falling for what he would describe as the Platonic Fallacy - i.e. looking for order, structure and predictability in the world (experience makes an entrepreneur better) where the available evidence points to the fact that randomness prevails.

It is also worth repeating a fact that my Californian colleagues at DFJ like to point out - many of the most successful tech businesses have been built by young, first time entrepreneurs - e.g. Bill Gates at Microsoft, Larry and Sergey at Google, Larry Ellison at Oracle, and Yang and Filo at Yahoo!

To wrap up, I guess I’m not ready to ditch the belief that experience helps, but it feels uncomfortable going against the research, even with the concerns I mention. It would be great to see the research done again to answer the more specific question “do serial entrepreneurs outperform first time entrepreneurs in venture backed companies?”

Finally - this is also a reminder on the importance of judging people on process rather than results. It is better to back the second time entrepreneur who did everything right in her first business but narrowly failed because she was unlucky than the guy who hit a home run solely because he was fortunate. Not that it is easy to tell.

• AndroidScan - Use your phone to scan a barcode, get pricing information from dozens of stores, product reviews and more. Never make a bad purchase again! (by Jeffrey Sharkey)
• Beetaun - Social network around geographical content created by people and for people (from your neighborhood, from your city, from your country, from all over the world). By Sergey Gritsyuk and Dmitri Shipilov
• BioWallet - A biometric authentication system for Android. This application features iris recognition and can act as a password safe and provide single sign-on for other Android apps. Jose Luis Huertas Fernandez
• BreadCrumbz -Navigate your route using pictures instead of a map (there’s also a map, if you like). Easily record routes using your smartphone. Share them with your friends, share them with the world. By Amos Yoffe
• CallACab - Konrad Huebner and Henning Boeger
• City Slikkers - a Pervasive Game (alternatively Location Based Game) which takes place in the real-existing city. It is designed to connect a large number of players through-out the world and change the way the surroundings are seen. The central idea behind the concept is to give people the opportunity to symbolically interfere with the everyday urban environment and come into contact with previously unknown people. By PoroCity Media and Virtual Logic Systems.
• Commandro - Commandro shows where are your friends REALLY are and what they’re doing at the moment. Using GPS location information, it will display 100% true real-life event and location information with regards to you and your friends. By Alex Pisarev, Andrey Tapekha.
• Cooking Capsules -Simply “watch” a very short cooking show, “shop” with the grocery list, and “make” using the handy step-by-step recipe directions. If you are out of your usual neighborhood you can use the ‘find nearest market’ gps feature. If your friend is stopping at the market, simply hit the ’send to friend’ button to text your list to them. By Mary Ann Cotter and Muthuselvam Ramadoss
• Diggin - Daniel Johansson, Aramis Waernbaum, Andreas Hedin
• Dyno - Virachat Boondharigaputra
• e-ventr - The domain is password protected, but a Whois Lookup shows it is owned by the developer named by Google. By Michael Zitzelsberger.
• Eco2go - Reduce your carbon footprint. Eco2go finds and suggests public transit alternatives for your trips - right on your phone. By Taneem Talukdar, Gary Pong, Jeff Kao and Robert Lam
• Em-Radar - Em-Radar is a revolutionary mobile product that alerts you about emergencies and severe weather anywhere, any time. By Jack Kwok.
• fingerprint - Robert Mickle
• FreeFamilyWatch - Navee Technologies LLC
• goCart - Rylan Barnes
• GolfPlay - give support to all the real time necessities of a golf player during a game, using GPS location and an online querying site where it is possible to access to their game statistics, tournament creation and a social network to exchange impressions with other users about the sport that links them: golf. By Inizziativa Networks
• gWalk - Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus ten Hagen, Christian Klinger, Marko Modsching, Rene Scholze
• HandWx - Delivers 7-Day weather forecasts to your phone. By Weathertop Consulting LLC.
• IMEasy - Yan Shi
• Jigsaw - Mikhail Ksenzov
• JOYity - Coming soon. By Zelfi AG.
• LifeAware - Mobile Tracking Service formed to help people be aware of where their friends and family are. A quick search on the Internet shows that approximately 700,000 children are classified as missing annually. The intent of Life Aware is to help you be aware of where you family and friends are. Gregory Moore, Aaron L. Obrien, Jawad Akhtar
• Locale - Locale is one of 7 Android applications submitted by MIT students. It enables you to set up location- and time-based profiles for your phone, so you can make it shut up when you’re at work, forward calls to your landline when you’re at home. Clare Bayley, Christina Wright, Jasper Lin, Carter Jernigan.
• LReady Emergency Manager - A quick Whois Lookup shows the domain is owned by Chris Hulls, named by Google as a developer of LReady. By Chris Hulls, Dilpreet Singh, Luis Carvalho, Phuong Nguyen.
• Marvin - Marvin allows you to publish and browse geo-localized objects around you. Objects can be static or move by themselves and follow you. You publish and browse where you are, based on your current location or where you virtually are on the map. By Pontier Laurent.
• Mobeedo - Mobile Search. By Sengaro GmbH.
• Multiple Facets Instant Messenger - A Whois Lookup shows the website is owned by Virgil Dobjanschi who is named by Google as the creator of this application. By Virgil Dobjanschi.
• MyCloset - Mamoru Tokashiki
• PedNav - an application that helps you plan your activities efficiently when moving around and interacting with an urban environment. Like a good personal assistant, PedNav first inquires about your general plans for the day. By RouteMe2 Technologies Inc.
• Phonebook 2.0 - Coming soon. By Voxmobili.
• PicSay - Eric Wijngaard
• PiggyBack - Christophe Petit and Sebastien Petit
• Pocket Journey - connects your location to the voices of a global community of artists, historians, architects, musician, comedians, and others so you can quickly know everything about anywhere. By Anthony Stevens and Rosie Pongracz.
• Rayfarla - Rayfarla turns your phone into a musical instrument as well as providing a variety of mini games that are music related. I’m not saying too much about Rayfarla at the moment as I’m now in competition with 49 other semifinalists but suffice to say there will be some interesting twists when it is finally released on hardware. By Stephen Oldmeadow.
• Safety Net - Michael DeJadon
• SocialMonster - Ben Siu-Lung Hui and Tommy Ng
• SplashPlay - SplashPlay offers the next generation in musical tuition and learning to play the guitar just got a whole lot easier. Simply attach the pod and light panel to your guitar and start strumming to your favourite songs in minutes. Songs are sent to the pod from a mobile phone or computer using a USB or Bluetooth connection, giving total portability. Other features include a guitar tuner, guitar metronome and a hands free, Bluetooth foot pedal. The product will provide an easy, portable and fun method of learning music.
• Sustain- Keeping Your Social Network Alive - Niraj Swami
• SynchroSpot - Shaun Terry
• Talkplay - Sung Suh Park
• Teradesk - José Augusto Athayde Ferrarini
• The Weather Channel for Android - The Weather Channel Interactive Inc.
• TuneWiki - Our goal is to have the lyrics always on, always available, always synchronized to music - on any device that can play music back and connect to the internet. By TuneWiki Inc.
• Wikitude-the Mobile Travel Guide - Find points of interest based on your current location. By Philipp Breuss.
• Writing Pad - ShapeWriter is an innovative, original, fun, and highly efficient method of entering text into touch screen mobile phones. ShapeWriter lets the user to simply draw a continuous stroke from letter to letter on a soft keyboard and lift to complete the word. The resulting trace is recognized as the intended word. For example: to write the word “fun”, land the pen (or mouse cursor) on the F key, drag to the U key, continue to the N key and lift up the pen. ShapeWriter recognizes the curso trace F-U-N as the word “fun”.By ShapeWriter Inc.

很酷的创业想法

Canadian inventor Ben Gulak is apparently behind this Segue-inspired motorcycle called the Uno (there are actually two wheels, they’re just side by side).  As an entrepreneur, many people tell you your idea is crazy (and all but the most dedicated give up in the face of such criticism).  I can only imagine the feedback Ben got!  Best of luck Ben.

有点长

没时间翻译了，有问题直接找我吧^_^

Affiliate Marketing Is Dead

Today, it’s all about 2.0. Are you already late to the game?

By Shawn Collins

Affiliate marketing is dead. Long live affiliate marketing.

But before you accuse me of being some Chicken Little type or just another clown infatuated with hyperbole, let me explain.

The way affiliate marketing was done back in the 1990s — and still today by some folks — is done. I’m talking about banners. It’s all about Affiliate 2.0, and you might already be late to the game.

What is Affiliate 2.0?

You’ve probably seen those definitions of Web 2.0 that sound more like a game of buzzword bingo than a definition. Well, I’ll keep it easy: Affiliate 2.0 is the stuff you’re probably not doing.

Now, that could be a pretty long list, so let’s skip all of the specialties of affiliate that you already should be concentrating on, like data feeds, search engine optimization, e-mail and pay per click. Instead, let’s look at affiliate-marketing opportunities in Internet video and mobile phones.

Affiliate video opportunities

Video creative with affiliate links built in is being crafted by professional video producers. There’s also amateur user-generated content, which is wildly popular on sites such as MySpace and YouTube.

According to the comScore Video Metrix report for July 2007, nearly 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched an average of three hours of online video during the month. This translates into nearly 134 million Americans watching more than 9 billion videos online.

“Besides the obvious Google universal search benefits of having a well-ranked video, affiliates should understand that if they move quickly, they can saturate and dominate just about any niche with video right now,” says Jim Kukral, co-host of the VideoNinjas radio show on www.WebMasterRadio.FM. “It’s just a matter of doing it, right now, before another affiliate does it.”

Google AdSense video units, a new advertising unit that can be embedded on AdSense publishers’ sites/blogs, got lots of press when it rolled out in fall 2007, but it’s not the only game in town for affiliates in video.

As far as affiliate networks go, LinkShare has been something of a leader in video with Flex Links, which offers affiliates the capability to post videos, widgets, flash or any other kind of clickable objects from advertisers on their sites to earn commissions.

Other players in the video arena that are providing affiliates with the opportunity to earn commissions include Adotube, blinkx, Magnify.net, Metacafe, Qoof, Revver and Toldya.

Phoning in affiliate innovation

While video gets all of the headlines as the vehicle where marketers need to have a presence in 2008, mobile phone marketing quickly is making headway and putting performance-based ads in front of a multitude of eyeballs.

In September 2007, Google launched AdSense for Mobile, a program that allows AdSense publishing partners the ability to earn revenue from their mobile Web sites through the targeted placement of mobile text ads. This opportunity is a little tricky for a lot of affiliates, since AdSense for Mobile requires server-side scripting — unlike the client-side scripting in JavaScript — which is not supported by most mobile browsers or Web pages.

There are two Google AdSense for Mobile ad formats: single and double. Participating mobile Web sites must be written in one of the following markup languages: wml (WAP 1.0), xhtml (WAP 2.0) or chtml.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many future mobile phone marketers look to Google for the standards for mobile, similar to how Amazon.com’s affiliate agreement was adapted by countless affiliate programs at the turn of the century.

Not surprisingly, LinkShare entered the mobile affiliate space in the fourth quarter of 2007 with Mobile Links, which enables affiliates to tap into the mobile consumer market and track mobile transactions on a pay-per-action basis. LinkShare is a subsidiary of Rakuten Inc., headquartered in Tokyo, where mobile phone marketing is far more established than in the U.S.

But the biggest name in mobile affiliate activity seems to be AdMob, a popular mobile affiliate network, which routinely serves more than 1.5 billion targeted ads each month. In addition to the ads served by AdMob on sites formatted for mobile phone browsers, it also serves advertising on Facebook Mobile, which allows developers to build mobile Web applications for Facebook, and developers can monetize these mobile applications with ads from AdMob.

But wait, there’s more

Video and mobile are two prominent opportunities for affiliate marketers, but there are countless ways to leverage new technology to generate affiliate transactions.

For instance, Twitter, a social-networking and microblogging service that uses instant messaging, short message service or a Web interface, has been the launchpad of various affiliate plays. One example is TwitterLit, where creator Debra Hamel has endeavored to go about “Twittering the first lines of books so you don’t have to.” Each of these Tweets (messages via Twitter) includes an Amazon affiliate link to purchase the featured title.

Facebook is another site fertile for affiliate activity. In May 2007, it launched its Facebook Platform, a framework for developers to create applications for Facebook users that interact with Facebook features.

Affiliates have been creating their own applications for Facebook with increased frequency. There are many ways an affiliate can interact with the Facebook audience, one of which is the adaption of an existing site.

Mike Allen, president of the affiliate site www.Shopping-Bargains.com, created a popular Facebook application, Shop Bargains, which “delivers a summary of online coupon codes and shopping deals to your profile page.”

There always will be long-tail affiliates working banners and the like. Don’t settle for the tail — move on to Affiliate 2.0 and be the dog.

Shawn can be reached through www.affiliatesummit.com

Can Microsoft Turn The Xbox Into A Wii?

作者：Jay Yarow

Microsoft (MSFT) is developing its own version of Nintendo’s Wii controller for the Xbox 360, says MTV News (really). A rather chatty source–who provided the illustration below — tells MTV that Microsoft has been working on the new device since August, and should have it ready to go before the end of the year.

Based on the art MTV has provided, the supposed Xbox controller looks a lot like the Wii controller, but MTV’s source says the company has something much more ambitious in mind. Supposedly it will work not just with simple bowling/tennis games, like the Wii’s, but also with complex fare like Halo. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft’s attempt at complicating the Wii has not been working so well — their source called the process a “clusterf–k.”

Even if it was going well, we’re not convinced it’s a good idea: The Wii works because it’s simple. But if they pull it off and can combine Wii features with some compelling new titles, maybe it will give Xbox a chance to stave off the PS3 unit sales growth.

By the end of the year the Xbox could have a Blu-Ray player, sell Netflix movies and be just as much fun as the Wii. Perhaps this year’s Christmas story will be Xbox shortages?

How to make money on iTunes!

原文作者：Alexander Muse

Our favorite help desk manager / lead singer, Shannon Barrett took some time out of his busy schedule this morning to show me how ANYONE can start making money on iTunes.  I suggested that my musical chops weren’t up-to-speed, but Shannon told me it didn’t matter and explained this sure-fire way people without talent can make money on iTunes:

• Step One: Find an unsigned band’s album.
• Step Two: Scan the cover art.
• Step Three: Covert the music to ACC format.
  
• Step Four: Submit ACC files and cover art to iTunes.
• Step Five: Promote the album and start watching money roll in.

Wait a second, I thought, don’t you have to share the revenue with the artist?  I remember hearing something about that on one of the blogs ~ i.e. that artist get pissed when you make money on their music without paying them too.  Shannon set me straight; evidently on iTunes it isn’t terribly important who owns the music, simply who posted it first.  Think of it like a domain name, whoever registers it first wins.

So can ANYONE releases someone else’s music on iTunes?  According to Shannon Barrett, it seems as though this is the case.  Why is this a big deal? Now that iTunes has overtaken Wal-Mart to become the top music seller in the U.S. it is a huge deal.  Shannon and his band are now researching the ins-and-outs of the DCMA and will be sending a take down notice as soon as a) they can figure out how to do it and b) where to send it.  Good luck guys!

版权作者：Furqan Nazeeri

While the title of this post sounds like the beginning of a Mastercard commercial, it’s actually describing my experiences over the past couple of months launching and running a small social network.

First, a little context and then I’ll get to the tips.  A couple of days after Super Tuesday I noticed on the Obama campaign blog that the posts were getting several thousand comments each.  Curious to see what that was all about, I quickly found out that there was a little “community” in the comments section.  People were communicating with each other on various topics, most not related to the original blog post.  I also noticed that many people were “recycling” campaign gear–essentially passing gently used materials from states that had already held their primaries to those yet to vote.  It occurred to me that there was a better way to do this than blog comments, so I decided to set up ObamaCycle.com, a site where supporters can recycle used or extra campaign gear.  Over the past couple of months, the site has gotten a lot of use and attention (hundreds and hundreds of cases of recycling).  So, here are ten tips I learned from this experience:

10.  It is fast, easy and cheap to launch a community site.  I had this idea about noon and the site was up and running with its first members joining starting at 2pm that afternoon.  The first thing I did was check GoDaddy to see if I could get the domain ObamaCycle.com.  It was available so I plunked down $9.99 to buy that.  Next, I surfed over to Ning and set up a new community, which cost me the grand sum of nothing and took about 10 minutes.  After configuring the community (basically selected features like blogs, discussion forums, picture/video sharing, etc.) I bought a few premium services: custom domain name (i.e. to use ObamaCycle.com instead of obamacycle.ning.com) at $4.95 per month, remove Google adds from the site at $19.95 per month and remove the Ning promotions on the site at $7.95 per month.  The thing that took the longest was it took about 2 hours for the DNS to propagate so that ObamaCycle.com pointed to the Ning site.  So now 2 months later my total investment is $75.69 and it took me all of about 2 hours to set the site up.  I read a blog post recently that if you hear of a “stealth web services business” something is wrong because it doesn’t take much time or money to launch a site. 

9.  The community is your best source of product features.  The beauty of community sites is that you have a direct line of communication to every member.  Gone are the days of doing a focus group with a few customers to get product ideas.  Just a few hours after launching, I was getting messages asking for changes to the site.  For example, I set up categories for the forums based on states and very quickly people wanted it changed to type of campaign materials.  The lesson here is that you shouldn’t over think community site features in advance, rather put something up and plan on making changes after launch based on user feedback.

8.  The community is your best PR agency.  If you Google “ObamaCycle” there are almost 10K results (there were zero when I started) the overwhelming majority of which are the result of member evangelism.  Essentially members post comments on major blogs and their own blogs.  I think one metric for the vibrancy of your community is how much and how frequently members talk about it outside of your site.  That’s something which you should measure and track.

7.  Members fall into three categories.  Members fall into one of three buckets: activists, participants and lurkers.  Activists are people that are incredibly engaged–they visit multiple times per day, they actively post, probably moderate and in a lot of ways act like employees.  Participants are those folks who will post or comment on occasion.  They find utility in the site, but for them it is a tool.  And finally, lurkers are people who like the concept are connected to the site, visit occasionally but do not actively participate.  My guess is that for every 1,000 members, about 900 are lurkers, 90 are participants and 10 are activists.  Each of these segments has different needs.  For example, blogs are great for activists, but polls can be a better way to engage participants.  The lesson here is to think about these segments separately.

6.  Press has a natural progression.  Over the course of a few weeks, “press” coverage progressed from small blogs and forums to major blogs and from there to regional papers / TV to national outlets.  I didn’t call any press, they all called me and I’m pretty sure that if I had pitched a story I couldn’t have gotten better results.  The lesson here is to go with the flow and not waste time pitching the press…let them come to you.

5.  Online press coverage is better than offline.  I installed Google Analytics about a month after launch and am really impressed with the data and presentation (and it’s free to boot).  One thing that jumped out immediately was that the main sources of traffic were other online sites (i.e. very little direct traffic).  One great example was a front page article on Wired.com that was (and still is) the largest source of traffic compared to a piece on CNN which resulted in a small fraction of the Wired traffic.

4.  Forget about making money off advertising.  In the last two months, the site has generated about a half million page views.  If I did run Google ads (or something similar), I’d be looking at $0.10 CPM which best case would result in $50 of advertising revenue.  A half million page views is a lot and even that doesn’t recoup my $75!  Bottom line, if you want to monetize a web 2.0 community, odds are it’s going to be via something other than ads.

3.  The name is important. If I had named the site RecycleObamaCampaignGear.com, I’m pretty sure that it would not have taken off.  Many of the reporters I spoke to latched onto the name ObamaCycle.  They wanted to work that into the story…often times in the headline like “ObamaCycle: A Craigslist for Obama Campaigners.”  A lot of members identified and commented on the name.  Bottom line: the name matters.

2.  Features don’t really matter.  If there is a true community around your site, then members will overlook a lot of faults.  On ObamaCycle, campaign materials are “listed” in discussion forum format, but the formatting sucks and it’s hard to find stuff.  Despite that a lot of people have and continue to use the site.  I think the lesson here is that if you find yourself saying, “geez, we really need to add [feature x] to get more members/usage” it’s probably a bigger issue with the community, messaging, etc.

1.  You can get real work out of community members.  On the second day after I launched, a member reached out to me offering to help.  I gave her “moderator” permissions and she became hugely involved (posting a welcome note to every new member, moderating forums, helping match donors with folks in need).  I originally launched the site with a standard Ning theme and some low quality graphics I got from a screen shot of the Obama site.  A couple of days later, a member of the site sent me some custom graphics (their day job was graphic design) all unsolicited.  The lesson here is that you’d be hard pressed to get better quality of work from a paid 3rd party as compared to your activist members.

这个网站很有意思，专门购买好的域名和相似域名，然后利用域名带来流量，出售广告。

因此，它们主要就是利用融资来购买一些域名好的网站，如run.com之类的。

但是因为是facebook原来的创始人创建的，所以，能够得到高盛，橡树都一系列的大佬们的投资。

BTW： 分众对于媒体的收购也是类似：P

Demand Media, one of the most heavily funded companies on the internet, has boosted its lifetime total to $355 million with a new $35 million investment reported by peHUB.

While the amount would be shockingly large for almost any other company, it’s a relatively small funding for Demand; for perspective, the new investment is about half what the company payed for the social media tool provider Pluck in a deal reported earlier this month.

Demand is better known for buying large numbers of generic web sites based on the value of their names, then plastering them with advertisements. The acquisition of Pluck makes Demand look as if it might finally be moving to build out its portfolio of domains with content, perhaps partially user-generated.

The source of the newest funding was not disclosed. Demand is based in Los Angeles, Calif.