The world is full of those chasing fame and fortune on the Internet. The glittering lures of e-commerce, Adsense and cult hero-dom draw them from far and wide, looking for easy money, good hours and groupies. It is not like that.
Just as the rock-and-roll industry has its Rolling Stones, Madonna and Led Zeppelin, the Internet examples of hitting it big are all there for us. Tim Ferriss achieves widespread fame with his (excellent) book and website The Four-Hour Work Week. Manolo’s Shoe Blog is reputed to pull six figures a year. And of course Mark Zuckerberg at the ripe old age of 22 turns down a billion dollars for Facebook.
Many of the reports of untold Internet wealth come from those who profit from the frenzy in the industry – their objectivity is often questionable. And just like the music biz, for every shooting star there are thousands of Internet wanna-bes banging away in seedy bars while holding down a day job.
Internet entrepreneurship is very like pop music. If Sony knew for sure how to engineer a hit they would only publish a few CDs a year. The model is that you keep throwing them at the wall and see what sticks. Same with websites. So many aspiring intrapreneurs seek that one great idea that will go platinum, like Craigslist or Skype or Facebook or Digg or YouTube or Wikipedia or MegaUpload or GameFAQs or so many others.
I have my favourite examples, where I think “dang, I should have thought of that!” These include Neopets, tinyURL, Wikia, MissBimbo and the New York Times.
(Just kidding about that last one, but let us consider it for a moment. It illustrates the point that along with the Internet poster-children of pure e-commerce, there is another large group of sites that succeeds on the Internet because they are just another channel to a successful bricks-and-mortar business. And contrary to common assumption, Amazon is more part of this latter group. Even though it was born from the Internet, it needs serious real-world infrastructure investment and management, so I do not consider it a pure Internet play. Other examples are CafePress and Lulu.)
That's A Lot Of Blogs
But for every success there are thousands of failures. Right now my most successful site has a traffic rank on Alexa of 1,341,140. That’s right -– it is on its way to being the millionth-most-popular site on the Web.
Blogging is the latest big thing: we’ll all grow rich by exposing our brilliance and wit to the world, who will come in droves to click on Adsense links and product referrals. ProBlogger tells us about the six-figure sites, but Technorati tells me they are “currently tracking 112.8 million blogs”.
The odds are against us.
The ones who really get rich in the music industry are the venue owners, publishers and promoters. In the same way the big winners on the Internet are the advertising middlemen like Google, and the myriad hosting companies. Thousands of aspirants risk their time and money each month chasing success and almost all of them lose.
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