As I surf to my various favorite websites, I've noticed two things:

Either:

A) They (the websites) are trying various new ways to make money (paypal, selling mugs, hats, etc.).

or

They're run by old "new economy" companies that are slowly going under (or fast in VA Linux's case).

Banner ads now bring in about $.15 per CPM for most sites. And it costs about a megabit of bandwidth to get a million page views. A megabit costs around $500 to $1000. So you can make $150 in banner revenue for ever $500 to $1000 you spend on bandwidth. So clearly that's not a good scenario.

So what's going to happen?

Some say that the net will go back to the hobbiests. But that really isn't possible. The problem is BANDWIDTH and then the admin costs. Joe hobbiest's website won't be able to handle 1 million page views because of the bandwidth costs.

Others say that bandwidth costs will go down. But the problem with that is that many of these companies that created all this piping did so thinking that new economy was going to keep going. Even at $500 to $1000 per megabit, they're losing massive amount. Anyone see the report on how much money Northern Telecom lost last quarter? Or that AT&T is considering letting @Home file for bankruptcy? It's a catch-22 for them.

So what's going to happen? Any predictions?