pouët.net

I was having a discussion with my mate today about how huge sites like Myspace and Facebook have become and are some of the most visited sites in the world.

They're obviously multi-billion dollar projects, but these sites are free and don't seem to have much in the way of commercial advertising.

Surely they must cost a fortune to run, but how the hell do they make their money?

PS. Does Pouet or Scene.org make any money? If so, how? If not, who pays the bills?

i can answer the second part. no we dont make any money on either pouet or scene.org: rotterdam hogelschool pays the bandwidth, paypal contributions pay the server, good will pays the webadmins.

As old as the internets!!!

"Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base."

"This business model has been around for a long time. Shareware always used a model like this and there are many successful software companies that have been built with this model."

i believe this is a god as any oportunity to mention our all new premium priced pouet account! join now for a small fee of 1899.99 euros per month and get 300 glops each day for free!!

Ps. I really respect that! It would probably be quite easy to cash in on scene.org and Pouet and I'm sure there are times when you, the webadmins and coders etc feel they deserve some kind of compensation.

If it was me, you'd be looking at Russian girls, Google ads and screensaver adverts right now. :)


Keops: Smart! Very smart! But I'm yet to see Myspace (for example) offer these services kinds of premium services. I can't seem to find any fees on that site, unless members and bands pay to appear on the first page.

Ah, I've just found my answer. Looks like Keops was right!

all the info they're selling to other corporations through their social network knowledge mining more then covers any expenses they might be having anyways.

mind you, pouet would earn around $800 a month if we would append a google adsense box at the bottom.

Why not do it then? If it is only text ads they are almost invisible. The money could buy a more stable server and the rest could be used to sponsor the scene.org awards or something.

Yeah, slap an adsense box on pouet, nobody is even gonna notice in the color garble anyway :)



In internetworld this means 'all the features and services will probably stay free until we change everything or there is a new policy where you have to buy an account and even then we can't promise anything'

Myspace has a lot of advertising, and they hardly host anything, the music, the video clips, all the glitter graphics are hosted on other servers, all the content is user generated.

They also do deals with american companies, add burger king as a friend and get something rather, or watch the new "sneak preview" of this or that movie, exclusive to myspace. It all makes them monkeys.

Also they have a google search bar with a deseptive interace. Where you have to select what you are searching for but in a non traditional way so you always end up searching the net instead of all of myspace.

Just to clear this up, i dont troll myspace, a girl asked me how to post a picture on myspace. and while finding out whether they use bb code or real html i had a look around at all the advertising and stuf that revolves around that.

I am going to make millions providing glitter graphics to the masses.

Heh, yeah. I remember some guy on SA Goatseing a fuckton of MySpace teenagers because they where leeching an image of his server.

Who says they are making any money?

okkie - the goatse prank was Jason Scott.

He runs textfiles.com and is also very much a scener. What with organising Blockparty and all...

It all came about when some template site used a grim reaper image on his server as a bgimage on a popular template used by many teeny myspace users. When it started destroying his bandwidth he simply switched the image to goatse :)

they are making money, myspace esp.. via advertising is one thing.

have you also noticed certain musicians profiles load very fast or there mentioned a lot? while others don't.. that down to certain ppl/record labels giving them money. so it's not a totally fair playing field.

my friends band has had a lot of hits on it, when that started happening he noticed his access seriously slowed down.

he has some rendered video's for his music, bit of a plug, maybe you'll like it

http://www.myspace.com/eskb

if your click on "Looking Down On Heaven (SK-B)" in the blog , you'll see. video took 3 months in total, using 10 pc's to render it =) and joined together using a mac..

and no i'm not a band member, there are other sites like virb and tagworld though, for muso's / animators etc. with myspace etc, its a tad too well known, so you do get some "odd" folk on it.

I got tempest on my freinds list, but thats about the only person from here i think.

I would like someone/a group from the demo scene to work on something for my music, but hey =)

has anyone from the scene done such a thing before? i mean theres some seriously talented folks about.

forestcreature: ah right yeah, it was him! The image was horrible btw :)

hehe jollies. he seems such a great genius guy from his sites.

Note another myspace quirk which *could* simply be part and parcel of the fact that myspace is one big messy hack, but is more likely, I suspect, to be deliberate...

I have five different myspace profiles (and yes, I'm ashamed, but three are scene-related, one is non-scene but music-related and the other one is for spying on pics of mean girls I used to go to school with to see if they've become really ugly) and checking them all in one go requires a sort of ritualistic routine of logging in and out.

Myspace USED to have the default form focus on the email box, so people like me, who like to browse familiar sites almost entirely without having to reach for the mouse (too much effort) could just bash through, log in and out loads of times quickly, then get the hell out. Now, though, they've apparently nuked the form focus, and I suspect it's so that you *have* to spend even just a few more seconds looking at all the gazillions of revolting, garish adverts on the login screen...and on the 'home' screen, when signed in...and on the 'home' screen when you're not signed in...and on every other page in between.

In other words, I think it's in myspace's interests to use the faint reputation they have amongst web-devvy people for being a happy-go-lucky hacked together piece of shit to actually tweak cunning and sly little plots into the structure of the site just to hammer the fast-working, otherwise highly productive web-user (which is the hardest web-user to advertise to) who would prefer to get his or her entire myspace usage for the week over and done with in twenty seconds flat.

By the way, if anyone has a good Firefox hack for specifying the desired form focus on a specific site, or range of sites, please speak up now! I miss that on quite a few sites...

they make money with hidden pr0n parts :D

lol, they make money by selling faked products in rome etc (you know those blacks & pakis..)

Crosbow: That's not a very diverse thing to say. It's not just about niggers and pakis - it's about poofs and spastics too...

Who coded Pouet or is it open source? Does anyone own the rights to the web code, is it for sale or is it freeware?

My friend is a html and Java programmer and he was well impressed with this site and said it would take ages for one guy to come up with something like this.

I never thought about it before, but Pouet rules!