Someone who I don’t talk about often on this blog but that I do have a lot of respect for is Mark Pincus. Mark is the CEO of the company that makes virtually games, specifically Farmville…yea you’ve probably played it. The game has 20 million active users as of last week. Mark is one of the most forward thinkers when it comes to the web and where it’s going. He also has some very strong beliefs that there are particular ways to monetize things on the web and his track record and performance proves that he knows what he’s talking about. His company, Zynga has 50 million active users and is currently contemplating going public. Wouldn’t it be wild if a Facebook app company went public before Facebook did?

There’s been a lot of talk recently on TechCrunch and others about Web 3.0 and what the next era of startups, specifically web startups will look like. Mark said this about monetizing in Web 3.0:

We have entered the third business plan of the web….

Web 3.0 is about monetizing this massive web audience through users paying for mostly digital goods and services. The product will be a service or at least ongoing relationship. Distribution could be through Apps or even daily emails. The currency will be DAUs (daily active users). This will be higher margin and fuel an exponentially greater number of companies.

Web 3.0 businesses will be measured in $$/pixel/minute. This is a throw back to hsn and qvc. These home shopping services proliferated because they could better monetize local cable screen time which couldn’t be sold as it wasn’t measurable.

After reading Mark’s bio and reading more about what Zynga has been able to do, he’s become of of those guys that I won’t miss a word of what he says. I’d be foolish not to pay attention to people who are not only forward thinkers but are at the forefront of building the future. Mark was the founder of Tribe.net, one of the first social networks back in 2003, well before Facebook or even Friendster.

I encourage you to follow Mark.

http://twitter.com/markpinc

http://markpincus.typepad.com/markpincus/