Paid Diggs!

Only recently I have blogged about Wikipedia Paid Links. Today, there is another request on rentacoder.com (bid request 996851), which says

“I have two websites already submited on digg. I want someone to digg my website as many times as possible. Provide me your bid for digging from 50 users (You have to digg two websites from each user).

Very easy project for new coders to get 10 rating and also get similar project in very near future.”

The fact that it’s an easy project and if people are ready to pay for it, makes the whole web 2.0 type sites useless. When you hear of stories about people being recruited to click on ads and get a few cents, this could mean a new type of business model. Have people do digging, stumbling and delicious tasting to get a few bucks.

The Internearth

Except for one key difference, in many ways the Internet is like Mother Earth.

When someone buys a piece of land, if they invest money and effort and build a house, the value of the property increases. But if nothing is done to the land, while the land might appreciate, it’s potential value is not fully realized. That land may not be for construction. It could be for farming. Unless someone plows and farms, it’s not going to give much return.

Similarly, when someone buys an internet domain and just parks the domain, they are not realizing it’s full potential. If one invests money, time and effort and builds a good website, it has the potential to generate more revenue.

So, what’s the key difference? Well, the earth is physical and limited by the total available land. But the Internet being digital or virtual, however you want to think it to be, has no such limit. As many domains can exist, though only a small fraction are being converted into profitable websites with proper investment.

No (Page)Rank, No Revenue?

If a website has a lot of traffic, one could expect it to be making good revenue. If it’s a consumer oriented website, then it would make money displaying ads and selling products. So, usually there is a good co-relation between the traffic and the revenue. But what if it’s a business website? Is it possible to make good revenue without much traffic?

I recently had a discussion with a friend who has a outsourcing company and he gave me some insight into his website and his business (he actually revealed to me more info than necessary since he is seeking some advice from me on getting more website traffic) and as it turns out, his website rank has decreased recently (it wasn’t a good ranking to start with either) and his traffic has plummeted by more than a million as per the Alexa traffic ranking.

So, before I give out the numbers, here is a question that I want you to think about. A B2B company that has an alexa traffic rank of close to 2 million and which doesn’t even show up in the likes of quantcast and compete, what kind of revenue do you expect it to be making per year? Take any wild guess.

Anyway, the answer turn out to be between 4 to 5 million USD. Yes! That’s right. So, next time you look at a website, don’t judge it’s value just from these externally available numbers.