Netvibes, Pageflakes, Protopage
February 11, 2007
No I don´t want to be cool and I am not buying the Netvibes hype. Even if they´ve got an article in the Economist and another in Wired. Why? Two simple arguments:
First, Google and Yahoo have already jumped into this space. Netvibes and other similar sites should have locked a bigger user base long before these 800-pound gorillas realized that there were eyeballs in this direction.
Second, what is Netvibes business model? Adsense revenue? Think again: each user does not come free, there are costs in bandwidth and storage space. These resources in big quantities cost a lot of money. So I wonder if the equation adsense money minus bandwidth and storage costs yields a positive value.
I am not saying that Mr. Krim (the french CEO of Netvibes) will fail. He may be lucky enough to sell his nice hyped site to one of the top portals, just like youtube did. It surely will pay off. The other option is to fade in the bubble 2.0.
I’ve been wondering the same thing — how are these site monetized? It’s not like RSS feeds pay per view or anything. And most of these sites have zero advertising? So, with Netvibes’ 5 million+ users, how are they turning a profit? I’ve been using BrowserStart.org and it works well, just like Pageflakes or Netvibes. And no advertising. I still don’t get the reason these companies are trying so hard to provide this free service!