The Vardi Paradox

THE VARDI PARADOX

Who is Yossi Vardi? and what do you know about Mirabilis?

You will find the answer here where
Thomas Friedman writes about the Vardi paradox:

"The Vardi paradox states: 'The value of any Web site is in inverse relation to what it costs to attract new users.' The biggest cost for most e-commerce sites is ads, so the more people come for free the more valuable your site."

By that standard, blogging - which thus far is "for free" - has a great future. It is steadily attracting increasing numbers of users and readers, most of them without yet being paying customers and by word-of-mouth, i.e. without advertising.

There thus is sound financial reason that Google has recently purchased Pyra Labs, the owners of Blogger - who host their blogs at blogspot.com, the most popular of the blog hosters.

As a sign of the times, difficult-to-install but free Movable Type has launched its easy-to-operate fledgling "pay to blog" Typepad blogging system.

I imagine that Blogger will be coming soom with substantial changes and improvements (RSS, Trackback, etc.) in its program to counteract the emerging competition.