If the rise of new and popular Web sites has shown us anything, it's that you can serve up crap and make a shit load of money. Look no further than MySpace to see what I mean. Seriously, it's everything that Geocities was, only worse. It's visually offensive, and yet a serious phenomenon.
Then I was reading in Business 2.0 (which, by the way, put out the first good issue in more than a year for April), where the guy who started the Friend Finder sites (including the notorious Adult Friend Finder) is just rolling in the cash. Nevermind that the app that drives those sites is total crap compared to Match.com or any of the "real" dating sites (none of which have AFF's traffic).
Even e-mail doesn't make sense. Yahoo has a huge market share of the free e-mail space, and it's hands down one of the worst, behind only Hotmail. But it's what people like to use.
What is fascinating to me though is that while all three of these properties are wildly popular, they're successful for different reasons. MySpace is successful in terms of "eyeballs" but isn't yet making Murdoch any more rich. My theory is that advertising is even less effective when you can't figure out how to navigate around that piece of shit. AFF is successful by not giving much of anything away, but yet letting people post nudies of themselves. And Yahoo was just among the first to the game. Their ad revenue is slipping.
The very definition of success is not constant. What's most surprising is that, if you read the article, the Friend Finder guy makes the point that the "Web 2.0" cats are just now figuring out what most didn't back in 1999: All you need is a computer and a couple of smart people with a good idea. Venture capital, huge marketing budgets and flashy press don't lead to gold.
And that leads me full circle to my post about modern media, and in particular filling a niche. I think that being successful really is about creating something you love and making a decent living from it. I think that going beyond that might be largely accidental for entrepreneurs like me. Clearly you could think of the next great thing and grow a company, but that's creating a company. Creating a company is something that is very different from creating some kind of feeling or experience for other people, the kinds of things I enjoy doing by way of Web sites or future films or whatever.
It's funny how talking through these things helps you better define what it is you're after!
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