Two of the big sales points with Web 2.0 are brand-awareness and stiff competition amongst the major players.
In the article Brandbuilding and Web 2.0 the authors mention that some companies are even willing to take a loss on their investment (ROI) in order to build their brand. Companies such as Google and Yahoo are willing to pay for brand awareness because they want web users to use their tools instead of their competitors. This is one of the reasons why some Web 2.0 companies such as "Flickr, Delicious , WebJay , Konfabulator , and Upcoming, for instance, have all been acquired by Yahoo" (Roush, 2006). It is also well known that one of the other big social Web 2.0 sites, YouTube.com was purchased for "$1.65 Billion in Stock." Of specific interest is that some blogs such as gottaquirk report that Youtube.com was "previously making less than 20 million in revenues" (Stokes, n.d) and TheNewYorkTimes.com suggests that "the price tag Google paid may simply have been the cost of beating its rivals — Yahoo , Viacom and the News Corporation" (Sorkin, 2006).
According to Mark Anderson and David Vogt what is happening in terms of Web 2.0 companies is that “many/all of today's Web 2.0 companies don't make any money … they're hoping to accumulate eyeballs” so that a larger company such as Google will buy them out (Anderson, 2007). Another interesting way to make money on the Web 2.0 wave is to cash in on lucrative grants such as FaceBooks 10 million dollar grant fund available for companies to develop applications for the Facebook platform. In the education world it would be interesting to develop a piece of educational software that runs on Facebook that would connect Vista with Facebook to allow learners to take courses within the Facebook software.
In the Web 2.0 world the customer base appears to be very limited to a selected group of big name companies that have a ton of cash and are looking to expand their reach further to capture the market share of existing internet users
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