This article (March 2007) by Constance Loizos from Mercury News addresses an interesting problem I never thought about before- too many customers.
Think big; assume after you finished iteration three of your mashups in this course you want to make your mashup available to many users and to make it kind of commercial. You sign up for a domain, rent some server space, put up your project and make it known to the web community. After studying in the US you are motivated by profit, so you decide to put advertisements on your page. You get some cents for each click of your visitors and you will also need that money to cover your costs which are the webspace, the domain, the traffic and probably the providers of the APIs you are using would also be interested in a piece of the pie (and don’t forget the costs for being sued because of “borrowing” some layouts :-D). You would sign up at some banner advertising companies or would actually talk to some companies in your area on which you might start an advertisement campaign for your site. This would all work fine but don’t forget that your service can be accessed all around the world. People from other parts of the world could be interested in your service but not on the advertisements you’ve put up, so they won’t click them and you don’t get money out of them. Because they still produce traffic and computing resources you have a problem. As a small company you cannot contract with companies all over the world and if your advertisements are not mainly of big international companies you’ve got a big problem and must eventually stop the service. If you are smart and fast enough, you better start a company to solve the problem I have just described and get into the international banner advertisement business.
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