Start Pages – Business Models revisited

Sometime back I wrote that I am still wondering how start pages can make money. So far, I haven’t come across any solid information on how they can make money, but I have been able to put some pieces together based on what I have been reading.
One of the major issues with start pages was that there are so many of them and with the presence of internet giants like Google and Yahoo, it might be difficult for the smaller players like Pageflakes, Netvibes etc. to make money. (I recently tried another page called Spotback and it was quite impressive.) And the other feeling was that these smaller companies were being positioned as acquisition targets. Now, I feel that as long as these players remain small and are not tied to any of the internet giants they do have the potential to make money. As long as these companies do not have any specific loyalties to any of the internet brands, they can carry advertisements from other big businesses on the internet and also from competitors.
I use Netvibes to a large extent. So, whatever information I post here would be Netvibes specific to an extent, though similar things can be found on other start pages also. When you open the site for the first time, on the left hand side, the widget of Kelkoo is displayed. I don’t know if Netvibes is making money out of this, but this can be a potential source. Businesses can advertise  on Netvibes like this and these can be classified under Featured Feeds. The way to make money from this would be that customers can be made to see content that is “Pushed” rather than the current way in which it is “Pulled”. Currently, you control what you see, but in an arrangement of a featured feed, the publisher can control (to an extent) what you see. Small businesses can also use these pages to offer discount coupons and other information specific to their areas of operation. The other modules that I am able to find on Netvibes are those of ebay, Meebo, Digg, AOL Music and Alexa. The smaller players will tend to benefit more from these partnerships as the bigger players own their own set of products. They will tend to push those products more on their start pages and that might just be their downfall. I can’t see a Google showing coupons from some other vendor when they have Google coupons.

Another way in which these start pages can make money is by offering services to corporates. Allow the corporates to redesign their start pages based on widgets and allow the user to see what he wants. Suppose I want to visit the BBC website, if I have the option of choosing what kind of news I want to see on BBC, it might be great. Widgetize the start page of major websites and that business could run into millions of dollars. Going to the next level, this can be a great boon, if parents want to control access to certains kinds of news from children. Basically, allow the kid to view only certain kinds of news items.

The next thing for start pages to do is to make them available in other languages. (I mean in languages other than English and certain european languages.) This is something that the internet giants have done and localization can provide the start pages with the next growth phase that they will require to gain that critical mass of customers. Once they get to the critical mass of customers they can get advertisers to their sites and get a cut from the sales that the advertisers make via the site. This sort of a mode is just going back to the time when e-commerce sites were wanting customers to visit their sites so that they can get more suppliers. But, the suppliers would come only when there were enough customers and the customers would come only when there were enough suppliers. These start pages will face the same kind of problem as they don’t have content of their own. So, they cannot have any advertising based revenue from their own sources. Due to this they are dependent on people visiting their sites regularly and also accessing content through their sites. Looking at how things are now, most of the early entrants are poised nicely to succeed provided nothing goes terribly wrong with the web2.0 and some other revolutionary stuff comes up.

Google and the Business Model of web2.0 companies
Google and Web 2.0 continued

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