kivanmaharaj.com

With social networks being all the craze lately in our web 2.0 boom or bubble depending on which side of the fence you stand one has to wonder what plans the top social networks have to bring their revenue in line with user growth as there is only so much VC money out there that anyone of those guys can get.

In the next 24 months we should see alot of cleanup happening on the web as companies either die or consolidate their efforts to generate revenue and look at either becoming profitable or breaking even , especially VC backed companies as the VC crowd don’t do 10 or 20 year plans.

Google Adsense is definitely not a business model, as that will not generate the revenue you need to keep pace with high growth.

Alot of companies will need to seriously go to the drawing board and come up with some really clever ways to make their apps profitable. I think it will really be hard for the feature apps that only focus on one thing.

Seeing that I am in startup stealth mode I will as well need to be thinking around the same plan for generating constant revenue.

 This phenomenon as some would refer to it is a growing industry globally with literally hundreds of sites popping up every year which in this case would be the last seven years.

A lot of people joining these sites do so to reconnect with friends, school buddies, make new friends. They also upload photos and videos of themselves, which in some cases show the side of a person that should not be shown as recruiters are using these sites to search for background information on potential candidates. But overall most people join as it is a fun place to hang.

From a business perspective this has become serious business which I will constantly grow from a revenue point of view. It has excellent potential for marketers to sell their wares to that user base as well as track purchasing habits of users like Facebook has done.

But should advertising be the only way that these sites generate money. I think not as that is not a long term survival strategy. Partnering up with other companies is also good but in the long term the sites should look at creating products which the user base can constantly access like eBay has. Generate money for the business but also for the user. A lot of sites are working on this but in some cases it is not sustainable for the user. Just the other day Perez Hilton complained that he only received $5000 for 25000000 Youtube impressions. Now $5000 is a good chunk of change but the reality of it is that if he could monetize that video himself then may it could be $250 000 instead.

The reality is that if at some point the user is creating content, viewing content, distributing content, then they should make some cash off that content. Social networks have a great opportunity to this.

I will be watching this scene very intently this year, as I am also starting a social site.

So let see what the year brings us.