MappingTheWeb //

No, this isn’t a flashback to grade 2 recess. It’s a new business strategy that has become more and more popular.

The idea is this: why build an existing user base from scratch when you can leverage a pre-existing one? Seems rather straight-forward, but many companies fail to take advantage of this.

Given that there are already many social networks and established online communities, why not milk these for all they’re worth? Several hundreds, if not thousands, of business models have been built off eBay, Amazon, MySpace, Craigslist, Yahoo, Google, and so on. Though these diverse tier 1 players may not provide a really well targeted, segmented group, you may want to look at some of the tier 2 or 3 players, which may still garner millions of users and heavy traffic.

A large part of YouTube’s success can be attributed to MySpace. The embeddable video player provided branded exposure and access to a new distribution channel for the video start-up.

As a general rule, widgets are a great way to take advantage of an existing user base and provide viral distribution. And in this case, the network may come in the form of a blog’s readership.

Though this is simply one strategy a start-up may choose to follow, it is definitely one that all should at least consider.