This chapter tells how if a company is born without a revenue model, it is difficult for it to have one when it is bought by another company.
That I will do very willingly, my lord," replied Sancho, "and let us return to my village in the company of these two gentlemen, who desire your good, and there we will give orders to make another sortie that will be of more profit and fame to us.
Don Quixote
Löic Le Meur, a friendly, intelligent and good-looking Frenchman, created Seesmic in June 2007, but it was far from his native France where he embarked on this adventure, he chose Silicon Valley, in the New World; Löic was already experienced in a thousand battles: B2L, RapidSite, Tekora or Ublog, attest to this. In the case at hand, Seesmic was born as a video-microblog application, which is why it is self-proclaimed as the Twitter of video; to be honest, Seesmic is much more than that, and it works quite well; so well that it has been receiving investments from Mike Arrington, Dave Winer, Martin Varsavsky, Ron Conway,... gentlemen friends who share a noble cradle in the Web 2.0 with Löic le Meur.
But there is an oversight along the way, the revenue plan, as far as this author knows, Seesmic lacks a revenue model, it relies on the success of its venture to be bought by a great lord capable of turning users into gold, and meanwhile it is looking for more money to sustain and improve the service.
La historia más reciente de Internet es un cesto de casos de monetización de externalidades, vamos negocios que han sido rentables donde menos se esperaba, si bien es cierto que hay casos como la compra de Youtube por Google en los cuales la empresa compradora no sólo no ha sido capaz de sacar partido a su nuevo súbdito, sino que mantenerlo le supone un gran gasto. Y es que a este historiador, este caso le recuerda a compras de empresas de Internet en el año 2000, compras guiadas por la concentración de información en un portal, pensando que dicha concentración vendría acompañada por los usuarios a los cuales se les impondrían tasas de paso. Pero resultó que el usuario de Internet era promiscuo en 2000 y lo sigue siendo en 2009, de modo que lo que no era monetizable entonces tampoco lo es hoy.
