• Step 1 is create tons of FREE web services.
• Of course don't be stupid enough to put ads on these things because people won't *start* using them if they see the ads!
• Step 2 is to market the hell out of these free services -- try to establish a monopoly and cross market your other sites -- the goal is to give everything away in order to capture market share -- profit doesn't matter at this point.
• Then once you have gathered enough users and established a userbase that has registered, etc., THEN you start flooding them with ads or fees, since they won't have an easy time migrating away once they are firmly entrenched.

If you're in the US, starting today you may notice something a bit different when you search Google News.  Last November, we announced plans to begin experimenting with ads on a number of Google properties, including news query refinements within Google search. Today, we're continuing a similar experience for users by introducing ads on Google News search-results pages in the US.

When we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic was around 1600 daily uniques. It's since grown to around 22,000. This growth rate is a bit higher than I'd like. I'd like the site to grow, since a site that isn't growing at least slowly is probably dead. But I wouldn't want it to grow as large as Digg or Reddit—mainly because that would dilute the character of the site, but also because I don't want to spend all my time dealing with scaling.