Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 13th January 2009
6 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Rough times call for rough measures. That is why today we are announcing our new advertising policy.
Buy a 125 x 125 or the dog dies.
Okay, maybe not. But we do have new advertising posibilities for The Next Web Blog and they are juicy.
We just implemented the excellent OIO publishing WordPress Plug-In that makes it easier for us and our audience to manage ads.
All you have to do is fill out a simple, one page, form and upload your button. Payment goes through Paypal and the whole thing can take less than a minute.
In less than 100 days we are hosting The Next Web Conference 2009. The months leading up to the conference generally bring a lot of extra traffic to our blog so this is an excelent time to show yourself here.
The new rates:
 |
 |
125 x 125 button
placed in sidebar
7 days
40.000 pageviews
€ 99
Order it now! |
125 x 43 button
placed in sidebar (a little lower)
30 days
160.000 pageviews
€ 99
Order it now! |
If you have any suggestions or special requests (Price for tattoo of your logo on Patrick’s ass available on request) don’t hesitate to contact us.
Written on 3rd December 2008
3 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
A photo of the Twitter offices when we visited it in September 2007.
Evan Williams co-founder and CEO of Twitter spoke at a Churchill Club event in San Francisco on Tuesday and generated a few pretty juicy quotes. Check it out:
On Revenue:
“We will make money, and I can’t say exactly how because…we can’t predict how the businesses we’re in will work.”
On raising money:
“We’re looking at Q1 for revenues. The original plan was to focus on revenues in 2010. That’s no longer the case, since I don’t want to raise money in 2009.”
On scale and Google:
“We want revenues to be product-based. Google built something that can really scale, and that’s our intention as well.”
On ambition:
“I worked on Blogger for six years, and I don’t think that’s as big as Twitter. Twitter will dwarf that.”
On competition:
“I’m pretty sure they are (planning to), but we can’t worry about that. Focus is a really big deal. Even Google stumbles on the focus issue. It’s not as important as search and advertising. Innovator’s dilemma works against bigger companies.”
On Twitter for newbies:
“It’s amazing anyone uses Twitter today. It’s hard.”
Twitter has grown big by keeping Twitter simple and being extremely careful when it comes to introducing new features. But Evan promises some pretty drastic changes in 2009 with support for Groups and sub-networks. This is one of the most requested features and should make Twitter more attractive to business users too. And that might just be where a revenue model comes in.
Read the whole article on CNET with more in depth analysis by Rafe Needleman who was actually present at the Churchill Club event and selected these quotes.
Written on 13th November 2008
4 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Lonely Planet, who on Thursday relaunched their own website have made further changes, this time to their content. In an innovative move, the BBC Worldwide outfit will begin to republish online reviews written by travel bloggers and will pay the bloggers for their efforts via a revenue sharing scheme.
To be launched in February, the scheme (codenamed BlogSherpa) appears to be an attempt to combine the popularity of Lonely Planet with the passionate knowledge of travel bloggers to create unique content from a broad base of sources.
Matthew Cashmore, Lonely Planet’s Innovation Ecosystem Manager, explained “What Lonely Planet has is traffic. If we can provide a gateway to your content and if you let us put that content on lonelyplanet.com, we’ll give you the advertising on that page. Imagine how much you’ll be earning if your AdWords ID is on a Lonely Planet page.”
It seems like a terrific opportunity for bloggers worldwide to promote their content, earn money and prestige from their writing. However, is this possibly a reaction to the current economic climate and an attempt to gradually reduce costs and therefore the number of professional writers Lonely Planet currently employs?
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Written on 11th November 2008
7 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
A few days ago I was watching a presentation in which 50 companies were asked about their online business model. They had been given only 5 options to choose from. As you can see in the graph on the right here 11% had a Subscription fee model, 24% got their revenue from Advertising, 22% had Single Copy sales and 3% used Registration fees.
Interestingly enough 39% of those companies picked ‘Different’ as their business model. I joked that maybe “None” would have been nearer to the truth.
That got me thinking though. How many business models are there on the web? Can they be categorized and determined? Are the possibilities endless or limited?
Luckily I won’t have to invent anything myself. Professor Michael Rappa, director of the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University, did all the necessary thinking and research and wrote a detailed document titled Business Models on the Web which describes the following models:
Brokerage
Brokers are market-makers: they bring buyers and sellers together and facilitate transactions.
Advertising
The web advertising model is an extension of the traditional media broadcast model. The broadcaster, in this case, a web site, provides content (usually, but not necessarily, for free) and services (like email, IM, blogs) mixed with advertising messages in the form of banner ads.
Infomediary
Independently collected data about producers and their products are useful to consumers when considering a purchase. Some firms function as infomediaries (information intermediaries) assisting buyers and/or sellers understand a given market.
Merchant
Wholesalers and retailers of goods and services. Sales may be made based on list prices or through auction.
Manufacturer (Direct)
The manufacturer or “direct model”, it is predicated on the power of the web to allow a manufacturer (i.e., a company that creates a product or service) to reach buyers directly and thereby compress the distribution channel.
Affiliate
In contrast to the generalized portal, which seeks to drive a high volume of traffic to one site, the affiliate model, provides purchase opportunities wherever people may be surfing. It does this by offering financial incentives (in the form of a percentage of revenue) to affiliated partner sites.
Community
The viability of the community model is based on user loyalty. Users have a high investment in both time and emotion. Revenue can be based on the sale of ancillary products and services or voluntary contributions; or revenue may be tied to contextual advertising and subscriptions for premium services.
Subscription
Users are charged a periodic – daily, monthly or annual – fee to subscribe to a service.
Utility
The utility or “on-demand” model is based on metering usage, or a “pay as you go” approach.
The different models are explained in detail on his webpage and should be required reading for any Internet entrepreneur. Professor Rappa argues that these are the basic models but the list is not definitive or exhaustive. He writes “Internet business models continue to evolve. New and interesting variations can be expected in the future.”
If you think you know of another business model not present in this list, or a combination of models, please let us know in the comments.
Written on 30th October 2008
7 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Yes that is correct. Lycos Europe has been for sale for a while now. You can have it for less than €200 million if you are quick. Just offer €150 million and I’m sure you will have a deal. Management plans to sell the company before the end of 2009. Yeah, that is what I would say too.
€200 million doesn’t sound like a lot for some premium internet screen estate until you realize that they lost €4,6 million in their third quarter. They have been bleeding money for years now and their revenue is shrinking too. In the first 9 months of last year they had revenues of €58,4 million against €46,9 million this year. With the current state of the economy and its likely effect on Ad spending there is little chance of growth there.
They published a financial statement 2 days ago with little information about how they are planning to get out of this slump, except selling what is left of it:
In the short term, the company will continue focusing on the product offensive to stabilize traffic. Supported by the launch of behavioral targeting, this should help attract advertising partners.
Lycos iQ has already exceeded the key threshold of one million queries. The shopping guide portal “decido” will be further promoted. Cost management will be further tightened in the fourth quarter of 2008 to offset decreasing revenues
Oh Lycos, you were once so big, inspiring and innovative. What happened?
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
