6 comments

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  Sid Steward

  3 years ago

  I am also sensitive to the bottom line. Last year I hatched a related commenting service called GoJot.com. I still love it, but I was never able to figure out how it could make money. My takeaway: mission statement first, then code! (-: It was fun, so I really have no regrets.
  
  Glad to see you have comment RSS on your blog. I think co.mment.com is on the right track. In a year, we'll have a dozen good comment RSS aggregators to choose from and all platforms will offer comment RSS.
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  Amy Gahran

  3 years ago

  Hi, Matthew. Good article, and thanks for linking to my article.
  
  Regarding a potential business model for a service like CoComment -- yeah, I was wondering about that too. One obvious option that occurs to me would basically be serving Google or Yahoo ads onto users' CoComments pages.
  
  But there are more sophisticated options, if they can successfully make this service fairly comprehensive, so that it works with almost any blogging platform or comment service. (How they plan to wrangle Haloscan or OPML blogs I have no idea.)
  
  For instance, what if CoComments or one of its competitors launched a premium service that ties it in to an advanced toolkit for effectively monitoring online conversations? I bet a lot of organizations (and even some individuals) would pay dearly for that, if it worked.
  
  It's important to remember that what makes blogs cool is not that they're new or online, but that they're a very useful and accessible aspect of conversational media. Although blog commenting is clunky and non-uniform, the tools will continue to improve. Long after blogs aren't cool anymore, conversational media (and whatever tools it adopts in the future) will be popular, because people love to talk.
  
  IMHO, of course.
  
  - Amy Gahran
  RightConversation.com
  Contentious.com
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  Eric Berlin

  3 years ago

  From a business/corporate blogs standpoint (an area that is only going to continue to rapidly expand in my view) companies are going to want to track what customers/readers are saying in comments across the web.
  
  Hell, during one dark period of my "professional" life, I transcribed answering machine messages from customers issuing complaints about services and products! Getting medieval on comments will get right up on the biz world's radar at some point.
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  Mathew

  3 years ago

  I think you're right, Sid.
  
  And thanks for the comment, Amy -- those are good points. I can see the potential for the kind of thing you're talking about, where companies could use CoComments to track what is being said about them, which is what Eric is talking about too. And you're right, it is important to see blogs as comments as part of the larger conversation, a theme I've been emphasizing for some time.
  
  Mathew
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  Murali

  3 years ago

  I would strip down all potential business models into 2 buckets :
  1. As mentioned eariler in the comments, monetizing the content using Google / Yahoo contextual text ads
  2. In the longer term, if the service is really worth, go the subscription route for users (eg., TypePad vs Blogger). Free services at some point in time would start stuttering, that's when paid services start making sense
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  Mathew

  3 years ago

  Thanks for the comment, Murali. Those are good points.
  
  Mathew
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