Re: Hello, Opinions on SBI!, Please, and "Infopreneur****p" in General

Prisoner at War <prisoner_at_war@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
(snip)
> Anyway, SBI! is the biggest (and just about only) proponent of it that
> I know and I'm curious what you all think.  A google search on them
> turns up extremely little (a mere handful of c/sites on either side of
> 90 SERPs) that isn't basically trying to sell you on their service.  I
> only signed up finally because they have a good 100% no-hassle money-
> back guarantee for the first month, and then a pro-rated refund policy
> thereafter.
(snip)

At a glance they don't seem too bad (to my surprise). They're providing
a small fraction of the total solution, though. It's like the people who
were making XML middleware several years ago or the people building
ontologies to help solve problems now: sure, they're doing something
useful but, despite the suggestions of their promotional literature,
they're not doing the largest nor hardest part.

As I see it, the two hardest parts are:

Content: What can you provide that isn't better-provided by someone
else, through Web-2.0-style user submissions or otherwise? (Note that
some answers here make sense in a B2B sense: for example, where does the
machine-readable TV scheduling information come from to feed services
like TiVo? Someone presumably did some deals somewhere but I don't know
who or with whom.)

Monetization: Despite the claim that this is the "easy" part, there are
extremely many sites I use that once they became more `commercial' I
didn't use that part or I went elsewhere. Everyone from dictionary.com
to imdb.com I use the free part but not the commercial part. (IMDb's a
good example: the free site makes money from advertising, but they also
have things like IMDbPro; they pursue multiple monetization paths.)
Don't underestimate the size of the step from free to paying.

I'm not saying that either of these are necessarily difficult. Indeed,
SBI gives some good food for thought in outlining different basic ways
that monetization can be achieved. I just have a suspicion that what
they're offering is fairly well-known common sense and that an awful lot
(quite reasonably and honestly) still stands between you and success.

They're a nice catalyst for discussion though!

Mark