Digg or Delicious

There are already millions of sites on the net, I suppose one more won't hurt. It would be interesting to know just how many sites there are in total on the net. Let us know when you get your site up so we can go check.

I guess it depends. If you have the skills to build the site yourself, perhaps alongside your regular job, then you should be able to get something up and running pretty cheaply. You can then start getting some people using it to see if it's actually a project that would be worth taking forward - that is does it look like something that could realisticaly make money. It's when things start growing that the costs will start rising and you might want to go out looking for funding. Though the current financial climate is probably not the greatest for finding that kind of investment (I'd recommend reading Tim Bray's series of "Tough Times" articles http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/10/11/Tough-Times) As for delicious I think I read some speculation a few years back that they'd received about 2 million dollars in venture capital. Digg received more than that. Not exactly small change!

If you are planning on outsourcing everything (just managing the project), you will be looking at spending thousands of dollars in design costs, development costs, server costs, etc. etc. Developing a website is not cheap. And once the website is developed, your website better have something unique to offer if you want to attract the amount of users DIGG and DELICIOUS pull in. I would say DIGG could have easily cost $50k or so to startup. Depending on how many people were on the project, how many worked for just a share of the profit, etc. etc. It could have also only cost a few grand if they played their cards right when they started it up. Either way, bandwidth and servers to host its popularity will still be a large recurring fee. - This, however, shouldn't be a problem for them anymore since they are both pulling in the big bucks now.