Montreal Tech Watch

TheBusinessPoster was lanched by Michael Nana, a 19 year old Computer Science student, who got bored of all the ads on myspace and other portals. Michael thought about setting up a website dedicated to ads — yes, nothing but ads shown on the website.

That means there is nothing of value whatsoever of visiting the website. That is shocking, especially for someone like me who thinks about user experience and application stickyness all the time. Concepts like frictionless signups, social design, data portability, site aesthetics, value proposition … there is nothing as such on ThebusinessPoster.

It’s highly probable that the idea won’t go far. Websites like TheBusinessPoster need massive traffic to be successful, a chicken and egg situation, solved only once by the MillionDollarHomepage and copied many times ever since. Even Michael comments on the site’s blog:

With a website full of ads, why then will people want to visit it? Beats me but we know how crazy the world is.

I like though the entrepreneur’s boldness, who goes against common ideas on how to design a web application. That’s how you discover new ideas, and that’s the way to go when you’re a CS freshman. It’s a website that only took him 2 days, and since there are already ads, I suppose it already paid back costs and more… which is much more than your average startup! I hope Michael continues to experiment and learn, and that other CS students will also follow suit