MONEY MONEY MONEY !

The internet has been the scene of some spectacular success stories where young creators of sites or services have made huge fortunes.

There are two famous examples :

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Was created in mid February 2005 by three former PayPal employees. YouTube displays a wide variety of video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. In October 2006, Google announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for $1.65 billion in Google stock. Thanks to this deal, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim are outrageously rich and they are less than 30.

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  • Facebook : Founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former member of the Harvard class of 2006. He is only 23 ! As of November 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 50 million active members worldwide and expects to pass 60 million users by the end of the year (also from non-collegiate networks). On October 24, 2007, the Associated Press reported Microsoft had bought a 1.6% share of the company for $240 million which values the site at around $15 billion…

Secret of successful Internet starups

What is the secret of successful Internet starups such as Youtube, Facebook, Flickr and Digg? How have they managed to attract millions of monthly unique visitors in less than two years time?

There are two orientations a company must follow: it must either be a true viral marketing candidate or a strong candidate for leveraging natural search traffic.

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First, a viral Internet service is one where each new user must involve friends to derive personal value from the service.How about social services like YouTube or Flickr? The main purpose of these services was a way for friends to share video or pictures with each other. Users of YouTube or Flickr derive the main value from the service by showcasing videos or pictures to their friends.

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In the second case, the company aims at having its website rank highly on Google and other search engines. The success of Digg can largely be attributed to its success in achieving high natural search rankings, rather than social communication feature sets. Digg’s initial user base of tech enthusiasts provided massive web linking in a very short period of time. By collecting lots of inbound links, Digg submitted stories began to rise in the natural search rankings. Other Internet success stories like Rotten Tomatoes, About.com, and Zappos were built on the backs of natural search.

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