Meebo Needs Milo
Instant messaging company Meebo last week announced that it had raised at least $9 million in another round of venture funding. Meebo is an instant messaging company with some cute technology but it is in a commodity market with little to differentiate its service that cannot and will not be copied by the heavyweights, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo.
According to VentureBeat, "Meebo exchanges 75 million messages per day, with average sessions of 70 minutes — a length of time that becomes significant if you can advertise creatively during the session." To me, this is a classic case of a Startup in Wonderland generating Tribble Traffic. Tribble Traffic is web traffic that grows like crazy and consumes huge amounts of infrastructure resources, but is maddeningly hard to monetize. Perhaps the Meebos are hoping for their neighbor, Google, to buy them in order to beef up its laggard IM offering, Google Talk. But I advise Meebo to adopt the Web 22 - Where Everybody Has A Share model.
In the Web 22 model you pay people to visit your site, pay them more to click on ads, and pay more again if they then actually buy something. Venture capital is used by Web 22 startups to fund the visitor payments. The VCs raise their funds from the companies that might become advertisers. Advertisers pay the web sites for the clicks, and the sites share that revenue with the clickers. Advertisers also offer rebates to clickers who actually make purchases. This all works because everyone involved in the process has a share!
This business model was actually perfected in World War II and documented by Joseph Heller in Catch-22. Milo Minderbinder, whose Nobel Prize in Economics is long overdue, is the genius behind this business model. In Web 22, no one gets any real money, which is derisively referred to as "old money." All payments are made to a virtual account. The unit of currency is the milo. Milos are usable in any part of the Web 22 economy.
Meebo needs Milo.
Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman
Technorati: Business Strategy, Meebo, Venture Capital.
According to VentureBeat, "Meebo exchanges 75 million messages per day, with average sessions of 70 minutes — a length of time that becomes significant if you can advertise creatively during the session." To me, this is a classic case of a Startup in Wonderland generating Tribble Traffic. Tribble Traffic is web traffic that grows like crazy and consumes huge amounts of infrastructure resources, but is maddeningly hard to monetize. Perhaps the Meebos are hoping for their neighbor, Google, to buy them in order to beef up its laggard IM offering, Google Talk. But I advise Meebo to adopt the Web 22 - Where Everybody Has A Share model.
In the Web 22 model you pay people to visit your site, pay them more to click on ads, and pay more again if they then actually buy something. Venture capital is used by Web 22 startups to fund the visitor payments. The VCs raise their funds from the companies that might become advertisers. Advertisers pay the web sites for the clicks, and the sites share that revenue with the clickers. Advertisers also offer rebates to clickers who actually make purchases. This all works because everyone involved in the process has a share!
This business model was actually perfected in World War II and documented by Joseph Heller in Catch-22. Milo Minderbinder, whose Nobel Prize in Economics is long overdue, is the genius behind this business model. In Web 22, no one gets any real money, which is derisively referred to as "old money." All payments are made to a virtual account. The unit of currency is the milo. Milos are usable in any part of the Web 22 economy.
Meebo needs Milo.
Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman
Technorati: Business Strategy, Meebo, Venture Capital.
Labels: Business Strategy, Meebo, Venture Capital
posted by Phil Bookman at 10:36 AM
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