As one of the few ‚web dinosaurs’ Vasco Sommer-Nunes started his first internet business, an online dating company called Omandu, in 1997. Fascinated by blogging as it evolved, he picked up on it and now runs mokono.com, Germany’s blog portal with the largest reach. „Lots of energy, persistence and determination is needed for funding a business in Germany“ says Vasco „if you are trying to do new stuff and want to break some rules, there’s a lot of criticism and this attitude ‚everything works - why should we do anything new in the first place?’“

With regard to online advertising, Vasco points out that „ they sell a lot of ads, since monoko operates in market blog communities.“ Still he concedes that „if you are extremely dependent on advertisement and you have a large overhead, you’ll probably face circumstances which are pretty dim at the moment.“ But Vasco also stresses that „bloggers probably embody the most progressive part of our society in these days and a lot of brands cannot afford not to talk to them.“ He adds: „We are trying to develop new forms of advertising which cater to social media as a whole, for instance we look at volume of mentions for brands and thereby can depict that regular campaigns can increase it.“ He finds that „ ad still works, but you have to be able to add a lot of momentum in gaining reach. Reach and getting unique users is absolutely vital to generate premium ad revenue!“

Vasco encourages „any entrepreneurial soul to open up the window of opportunity that is open now for him even in this climate of crisis and change. The point is to build a good application, to have a good product and to develop reach.“ And last but not least: „If you start up something, have in mind that you are going to build the world’s greatest and biggest whatever – don’t build Germany’s, Sweden’s or India’s greatest whatever. If you have a good idea, don’t ask for 500.000k– be bold and ask for the money that’s going to take you there!“

For more interviews from Online Marketing Lounge Berlin, please visit www.tiburon-tv.com

More than 250 people attended the 13th Online Marketing Lounge Berlin on March 5, 2009. Christian Boris Schmidt organizes the quarterly events since 2006: „Since Berlin is a capital for startups and online marketing, it makes no sense to have these kind of events only in Cologne or Munich.“ He finds online marketing „ a great business model, especially for startups.“ Besides organizing the omlb, Christian co-founded Ecato.com in May 2005: „Ecato is a marketplace network - we enable websites to create an own marketplace with products they like and pay them for clicks to online shops. By now we have more than 3000 website partners and list more than 1000 online shops.“ Ecato had angels with Ron Hillmann and Arend Iven in order to start the company. According to Christian, Ecato will now be starting in Great Britain with its strategic partner Shopping.com: „We also want to reach more and more websites in Germany and work on our product“, adds 27-year-old Christian. Although Ecato „feels the recession a little bit“, he is optimistic „because e-commerce is growing and customers who want to save money go online and compare prizes.“ Christian finds it important for founders „not to do too much conference hopping, too much looking for investors and pitching“. For him, „Web 2.0 was a trend“ and „all these events are focussed on it“. He advises to „concentrate on your product and your revenues first, then – if you are successful – there will be options to grow and to have capital.“ In any case, he is positive that „the recession will show us the real future stars...“ Hopefully, Ecato will be one of them ;) More interviews from omlb can be found @ www.tiburon-tv.com

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