Gurley advises waiting until 10 million users before monetizing advertising-based products to preserve growth.
“If you're in an advertising oriented world, you should not try and monetize until you're north of 10,000,000 users.”
Gurley speculates LinkedIn's InMail monetization prevented it from capturing powerful conversations like Twitter DMs did.
“I've wondered over the years if LinkedIn hadn't polluted their InMail and made it monetize and they had done what Twitter did, how much of the most powerful conversations in the world would”
Gurley argues Google's search monetization is so superior that no Bing deal could match Apple's current economics.
“So there's no like Apple's not mad about this deal. They're very positively impacted by it.”
Gurley explains Google's revenue per visit will fall with completed transactions because advertisers pay less for white-label rails.
“Because someone is spending marketing dollars to take that customer to their website and run the transaction with the hopes that they'll come directly back to that website.”