I jumped on the social networking bandwagon 6 months ago. I finished my site 3 months ago and launched it in early Jan. Three months later i have 10,023 members as of today. I'm couple years late but i still believe there is room for other social networks. Many people think that you can't compete because of myspace and facebook but thats not true. You don't need to have millions of users to be sucessful. You can make good money with sites with 100k to 500k users. A lot of money! Right now with 10k members i'm making just enough to pay for the server expenses so now major income coming yet. I'm getting 200 new members per day now.
Yes netpox , I have seen SocialSplash and I really like it! Hope it goes well and I cant wait until you reach 50k members
Thanks! I have learned so far that social networks really dont make as much money of ads like other sites. They are kind of like image hosting sites...take a lot of bandwidth and really don't make much. Hopefully it will get better in the future. There is always an option to sell the site one day. I actually might put the site out for sale afte 50k members just to see what kind of bids i get. The guy that used to own zooped.com sold his site for like $20k with 10,000 members.
Sounds like a nice niche that FUBAR is trying to bring to the social networking world. I remember when yougotbeer.com was making it big and everyone was trying to buy everyone else a round of beers for a great job done on a project.
I actually just registered on FUBAR, logged in and left the site in 10 seconds. It was a mess. I mean there tons of ads scrolling, black background just made it even worse...so much crap on one page it didnt even know what to do.
Don't worry even the big boys like myspace and facebook are having the same problem. Their income is pretty low for the amount of traffic they receive and the bandwidth is pretty heavy. The problem with social networking sites is that when people visit your site on a daily basis it doesn't take long for ad blindness to set in. It's the same thing with forums. Unless you can come up with a creative way to increase earnings, that no one else is doing. Then I think you're right to sell the site. Especially since social networking is such a big rage right now. You could definitely get a good price for it.
Raisin, someone wrote me a detailed article on making money with Facebook that I've just posted (shameless plug). It suggests that ads isn't the only way to make money in Facebook. There's a lot to me made in applications, the marketplace etc. Facebook even provides a great place to research customer opinion and make huge saving in market research costs. The social networks themselves work on a model where they have to build membership up to critical mass before they see any money. However, if anyone is making money on their platform the SN site will eventually cut itself a slice of that cake. meaghannf, if you have a link to that Fortune article, I'd appreciate it.
FRIENDS...CRAZE What your friends talking about in school?...bebo, alright I will join that! Loads of friends requests for my best mates, gf etc on facebook?....facebook, alright I will give that a go! GET THE IDEA, I am a teenager so I know how teens work with social networking quite a bit, those are just some samples!
Sorry, I took a quick look around and now can't seem to find the link. If it turns up again, I'll definitely link it in. However, while I was searching for it, I came across an interesting article addressing many of the concerns that are being discussed above re: monetizing traffic on social networks and I found it fairly interesting how people are combating that problem with widgets. I can't post in links (only a few days old here!) but if you go to the fortune page and search for widgets, the title of the article is Are these widgets worth half a billion? (03.24.2008).
What I look into a networking site is privacy. The ability to have conversation with your buddies and not having ANYONE look at your conversations. In other words, have different groups of friends. Acquaintances that just may view your profile nothing else, friends that have access to nearly everything...etc.
That is actually a great idea. Social Networking isn't just a place for friends anymore. Coworkers and family members are now signing up and sending you friend requests. It would be nice if I could section all these groups off without them even knowing it and limit what they can and can't see on my profile. Comments and pictures from last weekends wild party would simply not show up to anyone but those in the close friends group. Coworkers would see a professional looking profile and family members would only see pictures of vacations, holidays, birthdays, and other family events. People might be able to guess what group they're in, but wouldn't be able to know for sure.