Real People Real Stuff

"Wlll Web 3.0 be in the green?" asked ZDNet's Donna Bogatin recently.

What if CraigsList and YouTube had a baby? That's RealPeopleRealStuff - the world's first Web 3.0 site.

It leverages all the features of Web 2.0 including media-rich content, adds the social networking and commerce of CraigsList, then it goes a step further than YouTube by incorporating a proven revenue model – making it the world's first Web 3.0 site.

According to the April 1, 2007, story in The New York Times, "YouTube, of course, has very little revenue right now." ZDNet's Bogatin asked, "If Yahoo has the “largest community in social media, including Flicr, ” why is it not yet really monetized?"

YouTube, MySpace and most other MSM sites depend upon display advertising to generate revenue. In contrast, RealPeopleRealStuff taps into the existing $20 billion that realtors, employers, car dealers – and real people – spend every year with newspapers on local classified advertising. Like CraigsList, RealPeopleRealStuff plans to charge in selected categories in selected markets. But for now, all ads are free to all advertisers.

RealPeopleRealStuff.com is the next generation in the evolution of online advertising – classified advertising in video form built on a proven revenue model. It's a May-December marriage: Web 2.0 (young) and classified advertising (old).

MSM has struggled for years to monetize Web. 2.0 in a significant way. Its page views continue to increase but online revenue remains a single-digit proportion of total revenue for most MSM, especially newspapers.

According to a story by Frank Ahrens in the April 20th edition of The Washington Post, "The New York Times Co. has reduced its 2007 online revenue expectations." This forecast is reflected in statistics from Borrell & Associates, which show that newspapers' portion of local online advertising has fallen 8 percent in past two years. Furthermore, Borrell projects that online video advertising will jump 500 percent in the next five years. RealPeopleRealStuff is poised to capitalize on this projected growth in online video advertising.

National aggregators of classified advertising, such as CraigList, have cut into newspaper revenue. Monster.com has hurt newspapers in the recruitment category – once the most profitable advertising category for newspapers.

But RealPeopleRealStuff does more than add videos to online classifieds. It replaces the onerous, text-based UIs of CraigsList and eBay with an intuitive, Web 2.0-style, visually driven UI.

Here are the other key features of RealPeopleRealStuff:

• Media-rich content in the form of videos

• User-supplied content, in the form of classified ads
• Folksonony, in the form of user-suggested and user-defined
• Open-source code, in the form of MySQL and Drupal

• Online community, in the form of user comments and ratings
• Intuitive user interface virtually devoid of confusing, text-based instructions

To discourage copycats, RealPeopleRealStuff has U.S. and international patents pending for its unique way of bringing buyers and sellers together. Similarly, Amazon holds a patent for it's "One-click" way of doing business, while Ebay's "Buy it now" feature is the subject of suit headed to the Supreme Court because MercExchange holds the patent on this business method that eBay depends upon. To date, MercExchange has prevailed over eBay, demonstrating the importance of business method patents in the emerging online marketplace.

RealPeopleRealStuff is poised to be immensely profitable for three reasons:
1. It taps into an existing multi-billion-dollar pool of advertising dollars
2. It pays nothing for its content
3. If uses an inexpensive means for serving up bandwidth-hogging videos

MSM continues to depend upon editorial content to drive page views because it stills sees the world of content as black or white – editorial or advertising. But online users see the Internet as a world of information, valuing adverting as much – and sometimes more – than editorial content.

RealPeopleRealStuff proves that sites can be immensely popular – and profitable – without costly-to-produce editorial content.
User-supplied content is merely one way RealPeopleRealStuff keeps its costs down. It also has patents pending for the technology it uses to reduce the often-prohibitive cost of online video.

YouTube is estimated to spend $1 million a month to serve up its bandwidth-consuming videos. This remarkable expense has kept many players out of the video space, so much so that a top advertising consultancy has told its newspaper clients to host their advertising videos on YouTube to eliminate video costs – a dubious strategy at best – particularly because YouTube's Terms of Service prohibit advertising.

In contrast, RealPeopleRealStuff has developed a remarkable, inexpensive and efficient means for storing and serving up multi-megabyte videos. The details are contained within the RealPeopleRealStuff's patent application.

With low-cost technology and no-cost content, RealPeolpeRealStuff is poised to be immensely popular and profitable very quickly – even more so than YouTube.