I’ve been around for a while. I’ve dabbled in many many markets. And by far the worst market I worked in was games (the one except being virtual items/currency).

Game sites pull some horrible CPM rates. The reality is that it is a perfect storm of crap-traffic - skews young, skews ADD, skews impatient, skews banner-blind. This translates into poor, tons of pageviews, little clicks. Branding may work best here - if they notice the ads.

The problem becomes simple - so much bandwidth is sucked up that the amount of revenue generated by ads doesn’t cut it.

So I shake my head when I see all these IM sites popping up. Not only are they piggy-backing (in a back way) on other networks, the ad market simply won’t support something so spastic as IM. I was recently at Kool IM and all I saw were Google Adsense ads (where do you get contextual relevance?) and annoying flash-banner ads.

You want a recipe for disaster? Start up a web-IM company that piggybacks on AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo/Google’s networks.