ZDN, Zong Developer Network 1938media, pay-per-post, wordpress, Zong

Everyone on the web feels content should be free, but let’s face it’s not. Someone’s got to pay for it sooner or later. The consumer always pays, either by clicking on a sponsored link or banner and buying some other company’s products or by willfully deciding to pay because the service or the content is of value to him.

The more time I spend talking to “Web 2.0″ companies, the more I realize how tough it is for them to monetize their sometimes huge user-base. Some early Facebook application developers faced the reality of extra-low CTRs and had a bitter pill to swallow when ad networks went from inventory acquisition (a time where any publisher names its dream CPM level and gets it), to ongoing operation, where they need to make money. Some app developers saw their monthly revenues plummet from $50,000+ to $5,000 while doubling their traffic! Well guess what… If no one buys a product or service or anything that’s ad-driven, then advertisers stop buying ad-space. The web is not TV or billboards or even magazines where advertising agencies can cuddle the ego of high-powered P&G marketing execs with cutting edge branding campaigns. The web is about measuring every single interaction, cost and ultimately ROI. Branding dollars, where ROI doesn’t matter, are not going to the web and they won’t anytime soon. My point, and advice to any new or seasoned entrepreneur is that you need to figure out a business model! Don’t build a business thinking that you’ll find an easy way to monetize your user base if it’s big enough and that this will be easy by simply adding advertising, it won’t!

I’m not pretending or even assuming that anything is monetizable with a bona fide transaction. I’m saying good quality content, time-sensitive services and specific features of a given web service can be monetized and if the price point is below $10, mobile is the best way to do it. Let’s imagine you’re house-hunting on Craigslist, and let’s assume these guys decide they want to make money, which is another story. Would you pay $2 a week to instantaneously receive on your cellphone new listings matching your search criteria, with immediate access to pictures and contact details of the seller? I bet a good 50% of the people looking for a house in a competitive area would pay for that.

So is Loren/1938 Media going to become rich by selling a few posts at 99¢ a pop? Probably not. But he will get some transactions and it’s a good experimentation to measure take-up. Would any of you type in your credit card details to watch any of these videos? No you wouldn’t.

Precisions on the video below: although we’re working on covering the globe and 3 billion mobile subscribers sometime in 2009, we now cover a little over 500 million mobile subscribers across the US and Europe. Our target is to reach 1 billion+ by the end of the year.

ZDN, Zong Developer Network, Zong News 1938media, Mobile payment, Zong