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Aug
31
One of the best programmers I know is selling a web application on eBay, that he’s been developing and running for the past three years. Given the starting price and considering what one lucky person or company will walk away with, I must say, it’s an amazing deal. I’m writing about his auction here so that I can help it get the proper exposure it deserves and because I think it’s an incredible bargain for anyone who is interested!
BlogBabel, the aforementioned site/web app, is a blog indexing and aggregation service that began in 2006. Amongst its features are the ability to detect and show the most popular blog discussions, weekly posts, books, videos, and even popular blog entries based on their location (through geotagging). It also features leaderboards of the most popular blogs.
Its codebase uses Python and Django, and consists of 27,359 physical lines of code (roughly equivalent to 6.46 person-years, according to sloccount). The R&D alone makes this application worthwhile to an interested party.
At this stage, BlogBabel has an Italian interface (located at it.blogbabel.com) and aggregates almost 15,000 Italian blogs and 5 million posts. Changing the interface to make it an international project that’s available in several languages, or switching to English (solely), would not be challenging in the least (they used to run a Spanish version as well, for example, but decided to discontinue it so as to focus on the Italian one).
BlogBabel has been featured in the mainstream Italian media and has had a noticeable influence on the Italian blogosphere. One could argue that it has been the yellow pages of the Italian blogosphere. Because of this, Ludovico Magnocavallo (the site’s creator) received substantial offers to buy BlogBabel in the past, but he turned them down because he wanted to continue building this site. Now however, due to personal circumstances and lack of time/resources, he’s willing to sell this application for what may amount to far less than its true value. And here’s the real bargain, the starting price, without a reserve, is 4,999 Euros. This is of course, a ridiculously low price for the value being offered. But Ludovico believes in letting the market decide.
If I had the funds lying around, I would buy it myself and gear it towards the English speaking world (in conjunction with the pre-existing Italian version). It’s a prepackaged, virtually ready-made startup with a great deal of potential both in its current state and in terms of what it could grow to become.
To recap, the auction includes:
- The domain name blogbabel.com (it.blogbabel.com has a pagerank of 6);
- The full codebase (almost 30,000 lines of code);
- A database containing 3 years worth of data relating to the Italian blogosphere (more than 30 GB, lots of data-mining opportunities);
- 4 hours of work to help you with setting up the site on your own servers.
BlogBabel has been running smoothly for three years, and is currently under-marketed. Optimizing ads, affiliates, and similar sources of revenue wouldn’t be hard at all, especially if one were to aim this site at the English speaking world.
Also, Ludovico has already implemented most of the code that’s necessary to allow users to have accounts (through OpenID), but since these “social features” are not fully implemented yet, they have not been deployed in production. A buyer could decide to disregard them or finish implementing them and roll out a technorati-like service. The winner of this auction could decide to implement support for Twitter, comments on social networks, sentiment analysis, etc, on their own. The possibilities are really limitless when you start with a solid engine and crawler, and already have a great deal of data at your fingertips.
I know Ludovico and he’s a stand-up guy. If you are interested in this great deal, you can bid here. If you have technical questions about this auction, please feel free to contact him directly through eBay.
UPDATE (September 8, 2009): Ludovico received an undisclosed offer for the site and a few years of maintenance work, so the auction for the site alone was suspended.
Jul
21
In defense of ad-based business models
Filed Under General, Startup | 3 Comments
In the past I have been a strong advocate of web business models a la 37Signals, where you get to charge your users for a product or service that is provided. I still believe deeply in the viability of such an approach when it comes to making money online (in fact ThinkCode.TV will essentially do just this) – after all it’s the Internet equivalent of what we’ve been doing for thousands of years offline.
Recently however I’ve been reflecting on the ad-based alternatives that I’ve tended to dislike in the past, as a sentence in John Gruber’s recent article really stroke a cord with me:
Undeniably, there is money to be made in digital publishing with free reader access, but whether that revenue leads to profits depends upon the scale and scope of the organization. The potential revenue does not appear to be of the magnitude that will support the massive operations of existing news organizations. What works in today’s web landscape are lean and mean organizations with little or no management bureaucracy — operations where nearly every employee is working on producing actual content.
He is right. Ad-based models are generally not going to make huge amounts of money and therefore be able to satisfy your grandiose dreams of wealth. You’ll have to keep your team “lean and mean”, and cut down on expenses as much as you can. This is true for any business, but there is little margin for spending extravaganzas in this particular arena.
So long as you are not kidding yourself into believing that you’ll make it big, free sites that sustain themselves through sponsors, ads, and reputable affiliate programs like Amazon, are still an option that’s worth keeping on the table. And this business model doesn’t have to be exclusive, it could easily be mixed with others, like some bloggers/writers do when they promote an e-book they’re selling to their audience.
Last year, without trying to become a new media “conglomerate”, I saw several sites of mine generate a bit of revenue on the side. I ran these sites entirely as a hobby. Yet, come tax time, I figured that last year I made $4000+ from these sites, which happen to be three or four relatively unknown blogs, that get updated sporadically whenever I have the time.
These are small, somewhat uncultivated online “properties” that are fairly under-optimized. I know I’m leaving money on the table. What would happen if I were to have a more business-minded approach in terms of managing them? For example, I could optimize them for SEO/SEM, strategically position and A/B test ads, actively pursue new sponsors, post on a regular basis every other day, invite external writers or pay for some highly sought types of articles, and so on.
My guess is that I wouldn’t get rich even if I took these steps, but I could generate a fair amount of extra income every month. I’ll confess that this idea is tempting me, not just for the extra money, but also for the hidden benefit of having several distinct audiences that I could reach. Not to mention, the thrill of watching those online “properties” of mine, and any new ones that come along, slowly grow and become more useful to my readers. Pulling this off would require hard work in my limited spare time, but it could be done.
DHH recommends building a “small Italian restaurant on the web”. And I agree, but I’m starting to believe that building a “small publishing company” of one’s own on the web is a valid alternative.
May
25
Ten days ago I mentioned ThinkCode.TV, my startup on the side, the aim of which will be to produce high quality screencasts about programming, both in English and Italian. My two co-founders and I are relatively well known in Italy, so I was expecting the announcement to generate some buzz in my home country. What surprised me though was finding out that my informal pre-announcement generated quite a bit of interest in the English-speaking world as well.
In fact, over the past few days I have been contacted by several people who were curious about ThinkCode, some of whom asked me to send them an email when we release English content. Meanwhile, we found our second native English speaker (who’s a very solid programmer) who agreed to work with us to narrate and create original English videos.
It’s clear that things are moving fast and we realized that the presence of two distinct product lines, one in English and one in Italian, generally appeals to two different audiences. As such having a single (Italian) newsletter just won’t cut it. So today, we are pleased to announce our English newsletter, which I invite you to join if you want to stay in the loop. We haven’t decided yet if we are going the “private beta” route or not, but joining today will guarantee you early access if we do.
This way, English speakers can join our English newsletter (where only English content will be announced or discussed), and Italians on the other hand can continue to join our Italian newsletter (in which both Italian and English content will be announced in Italian; this to account for the fact that some Italians may be interested in purchasing products that are available in English only).
We’re really excited by positive responses we’ve already received and are really looking forward to providing you with amazing educational material. If you are interested in becoming an author, are a company who would like to strike up a partnership with us so that we can adapt and sell your videos in Italian, or simply would like to get in touch, please drop us a line at info@thinkcode.tv.