Spent the past week in Las Vegas attending a convention called Pubcon. Pubcon is for web publishers – and suppliers to the web publising industry. Web publishers own websites. For me, a very interesting and exciting conference. Some general – and not very deep observations:
- VERY entrerpreneurial crowd – this is still early days for making serious $ on the internet – the business models are many and varied
- serious $ being made by web publishers who have found ways to ‘monetize’ their traffic – in many cases from advertising – whether through Google or through successful affiliate and/or referral programs
- the heart of this crowd is programmers – entrepreunerial geeks who have shunned corporate jobs and bosses to do it on their own – and have found making serious $ is a realistic goal
- corporations need to figure this stuff out and tap into these geeks – there’s some serious marketing and advertising implications to what these people are doing – when forward thinking corporations tap into this crowd, they will create a lucrative competitive advantage
- the crowd is limited – I foresee attracting and retaining people with internet advertising skills as a serious growth business
- the high traffic web site mantra: content, links, links, links
- most forward thinking and (at this point scary) web notion – destination sites – those sites you get to by typing in the url – will decline in importance with the advent of tools (called widgets) that will move site content easily to other community, personal and aggregator sites like Diggit and My Space
- second most scary notion – success will be all about technologial innovation – new tools for making access to web content simpler, more usable, more accessible – where would YouTube be without the viewer??
All in all, very exciting space. Some key links to check out if this stuff interests you – and if you’re a CEO – you should be interested:
