Six years ago, O’Reilly Media held its first Web 2.0 conference. This week’s annual gathering in San Francisco showed that content developers for the Web are struggling with a lengthy list of issues.
Making money appeared to be a big topic for many attendees at the Web 2.0 conference. One of the most widely attended sessions focused on the subject of “What Our Users Will Pay For.” After you get past porn, music downloads, and aggressively priced goods and services, the general consensus answer is “not much.”
Take an intriguing website called Local Dirt. Founded by Heather Hilleren in 2005, the site puts buyers and sellers of local food together. Backed with over a million in venture funding, the site is attempting to make money from subscriptions, charging only wholesalers or large farms. Everyone else connects for free.
What’s clear is that time savings or convenience are not what people will pay for on the Web. As Hilleren told the attendees, “You cannot sell time savings. People just do their thing.”
If doing your thing includes sharing your life experiences, Armen Berjikly will welcome you to his website with open arms. He’s the founder of ExperienceProject.com, an unusual social networking site where people share personal stories about their life experiences (cancer, birth, death, graduations).
The site attracted a major amount of press last year when they partnered with Hagen Dazs in a campaign to save the honey bee. Users who planted a flower and captured it in a photo, or who ate natural foods for at least 7 days were eligible for prizes and coupons from the popular ice cream maker. The campaign was a huge hit and brought a lot of new people to the website, although it is hard to tell whether this helped the site actually make money.
Participation in ExperienceProject is free, but the San Francisco based company offers premium memberships for sale and this has sustained them through the recession so far. Experience Project also benefits from a loyal set of users who contribute money to keep the site running, including a woman in Asia who periodically drops “a few thousand dollars” on them, according to Berjikly. Now that’s an occurrence more web sites would love to see.
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