Web companies are primarily media companies. Their job is to assemble audiences and then sell ads to their captive audiences. This is what the newspaper, television and magazine industries did before them but for some reason Web companies like Google love to claim that they aren’t media companies.  The irony is that Google stumbled on the most lucrative media property of all time (Web search results) as well as the most lucrative way of monetizing it (auction based keyword sales).

Web 1.0 was about gathering a bunch of eyeballs and then entertaining them with a bunch of content you created. Web 2.0 is all about gathering a bunch of eyeballs then having them entertain themselves with content they’ve created (also known as UGC). The most important thing hasn’t changed, it’s about gathering eyeballs.

This takes us to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook which have taken the act of gathering eyeballs and then having your users entertain themselves with the help of random developers and elevated it to a fine art.  Things get interesting when you realize that a lot of these “random developers” have built compelling experiences and have gathered a significant audience in their own right on the backs of these social networking sites.

In a blog post entitled Scrabulous Jason Antonelli writes

I've become addicted to Scrabulous on Facebook…I'm on my 3rd game of Scrabble with my mom (yes I won two games so far) - and it usually starts with a phone call where we play for a bit and chat about various mom/son things.  My mom lives 3000+ miles away -- she's in Wilmington, NC and I'm in Seattle.  After a while when one of us needs to go do something else - we'll go ahead and play it throughout the day - maybe each making a 1-2 moves a day.

This is so much fun (though I wonder how much it would be if I didn't have a 100% win rate) and it clearly is bringing social networks into the mainstream.  The fact that this game is hosted on the Facebook platform (although it does look like it has a standalone site as well) gave two major wins to Facebook.  First I actually convinced by mom (I'm 33 so you can only guess her age!) to signup for Facebook - the first person I got to sign up to any social networking application even including the one I've worked on.  And second, both my mom and I log in to Facebook multiple times a day.

I’m similarly hooked on Scrabulous on Facebook and estimate that 75% of my page views to *.facebook.com are actually to the Scrabulous application page. I’m definitely see more ads hosted within Scrabulous than I see those hosted within Facebook*. Which leads me to wonder especially when I notice that Scrabulous now sports an ads by Google logo. I specifically wondered about the reach of the most popular widget makers and was surprised when I took a look at the Slide.com About Page which informed me that  

Slide is the largest personal media network in the world, reaching more than 134 million unique global viewers each month and 30 percent of the U.S. Internet audience. We help people express themselves and tell stories through personalized photos and videos created on Slide.com and viewed anywhere on the web or desktop.

Slide widgets — including Slideshows, Guestbooks, SkinFlix and FunPix — are popular on top social networking and blog platforms, including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Tagged, Piczo and Blogger. Slide is also the leading application developer on Facebook with more than 63 million applications installed, including SuperPoke and Top Friends, the most active application by more than four times that of any other 3rd party developer.

Whoa. I suspect that once MySpace ships their platform which relaxes the rules on advertising within widgets, companies like Slide will start to look like very interesting acquisition targets. Or maybe there’s enough money to be made generating the majority of the page views on the most popular social networking sites in the world, that there’ll be no incentive to cash out. Interesting times ahead.

* I do think I’ve clicked more on Facebook hosted ads than those hosted within Scrabulous so that may not be a useful metric.

Now playing: Fabolous - This Is My Party