The Great Big Social Land Grab - Call it Bubble 2.0

Nokia has just bought the social media site Twango and when you add it to the purchase of MySpace by News Corp, YouTube, Last FM by CBS, Mybloglog by Yahoo! as well as others, there have been plenty of web 2.0 companies changing hands recently.

It just reminds me of the ol' days when companies not making a dime in profits where being sold for extortionate amounts in the anticipation that they'd make a fortune in the future.

The Internet is obviously very mature now but it doesn't stop hype and hyperbole. It doesn't stop people with too much spare cash buying companies that don't offer anything new. Look at Friendsreunited.com which was bought by ITV for £120 just 18 months ago. It's traffic has bombed whilst other sites offered more flexibility and interactivity - web 2.0 anyone?

Look at the chart below:


If ITV would had done their job properly they could have really leveraged the 12 million users they had. However, less miopic people spotted the web 2.0 opportunities earlier and created sites and flogged them on for megabucks. It's just the same as before, sites don't have to be great or current revenue streams to offer great potential revenue in the future. But that's the problem - it's all "potential". It seems what big business is buying now is not technology but user data.

This information can be milked for all it's worth. I've got a client that gets 20,000 visitors a day and does he offer site registration where people can leave their details for relevant information? No! I'm tearing my hair out thinking of the 6 / 7 million visitors a year he gets and they're wasted.

Google and all companies in the sector are fighting for sites that have consumer data and it'll only get more gutting when you see sites being bought for £100m when they've got thin usefulness but a full wod of users.

But it looks like some of the glory and hype for some of the web 2.0 sites may be waining. Just look at this chart for some of them:


Has the shine started to come off already? Well no.

Just like before there were sites like Boo.com and Altavista which got all the exposure and the visits that came with it, but then "failed"; there will be web 2.0 sites that are doing the same now, but we won't hear of them in three or five years. There will also be 2.0 sites that aren't even on the radar now that'll be huge in the future. It is down to us marketers and affiliates to spot them as early as we can so we'll keep the bank manager happy in the future.

There'll be some out there that don't see the internet having changed much. They'll see the charts above as supporting their argument that web 2.0 is just a flash in the pan. But, perhaps they should read some Hitwise blog posts about LinkedIn, Flikr and CafeMum and then they may see the bigger picture. So is there something to this bubble? Well yes, it's a 2.0 Bubble filled with all our user data! Nice!