Not that my opinion matters much, but it’s my blog and I’ll voice my thoughts if I want.

When people as big as digg.com, who have huge contracts with Microsoft for their advertising, aren’t making money then you kinda have to realise that advertising can no longer fund services any more. I’m not an economist so I’ve no idea why people aren’t advertising as much,  but they aren’t.

cnet says that more services next year are going to be freemium, so some parts of the website will be free just like normal, but there’ll be options for premium stuff too. I’ve no idea what services someone like digg could offer as a paid feature though. In fact, a lot of websites I’ve no idea how they’ll monetise themselves without advertising being the focus.

Since the content is all user generated they couldn’t have any content that’s only for paying customers. digg already found out with revision3 that letting people pay to see the programs early never works – they just get leaked and then their viewing figures suffer. Doing that would be ridiculous anyway on digg.

Maybe it could remain exactly the same, but digg promote their API stuff more, and put a lot more work into it (I’ve no idea what type of stuff it can do at the moment, since I’ve never looked into it), and then charge developers for using it. Or allow 100,000 calls to the API per month for free, but if you use more than that you pay a monthly fee. After all, people using the API are benefiting largely from the traffic that they’re getting from digg. Matt Cutts gets a huge number of people to his website from digg, and if he were charging for advertising on his blog (he doesn’t) then the traffic from just digg would be worth a few hundred pounds per month at least. He’s not using the API to be fair (I’m just using him as an example of how much traffic from digg can increase your advertising possibilities), but I’m sure he could increase his page views even more if he were.

So, making data portable (with APIs) and then charging for extensive users, or access to more features within it is a way people could make money I suppose, but I can’t see Facebook or MySpace so willingly giving away their data on their users. Especially with the privacy factor too. Though, they both do have APIs for their applications and stuff, maybe paying developers could have access to more functions.

So far my only idea is that websites that have an API can charge for usage within it. But how will those developers make money? Obviously, they can’t release an API from the data they’re getting an API from, even if they could that’d end in a vicious cycle looking for more and more developers to use the API.

An obvious way for non-content based websites to make money is charging for their services. That’s what zamzar seems to be doing. Considering half the advertisements have dropped off their front page (it used to be flooded with flash ads) they must be making some money from that.

Gaming websites like Kongregate make money from game sponsors at the moment, which I don’t think is the same as advertising, and will probably still stay strong. But, like Neopets and Second Life, with their selling virtual items, I think Kongregate is starting to do the same, and pretty successfully.

Last.fm have already gone freemium I guess, you can listen to most tracks three times before it tells you you’ve reached your limit, but you can pay £1.50 and listen to them all you want [update 2008-12-30: apparently, you don't get onto the *public* beta just for paying :(, you still get some cool features for subscribing though]. That’s not a lot to be honest, and I’m happy paying that for unlimited, legal streaming. That’ll probably increase if they get another label to join, or even when it comes out of beta. So, they’re not going to have much trouble.

The only people I can see actually having trouble in that case is content people like news providers (who don’t really want to make their content portable) and bloggers. They could write books though! News providers like Wired could always bring out a news paper, or a monthly magazine. Bloggers could bring out books, like Darren Rowse did. They could even have premium online content for subscribers, but Britannica Encyclopedias have that model, and it looks like their finding that that’s not how the internet works.