I have been trying my best to figure out a way to monetize a social networking site I started a while back. I've moved between platforms, from Drupal to Pligg and I hate both of them. The site is doing well, but I am considering letting it go because its users are all people trying to promote their or their client's websites. IT gets hundreds of posting every day, and is at about 20,000 in Alexa. Is there anyone out there that has any experience in something like this that could offer some advice? The only thing the site is good for is gleaning what others are trying to promote and possibly sparking an idea of a niche site of your own. The site is www.therealpassport.com. Don't check it if you don't want to. This post is not to promote the site, but to improve it. Ideas about platforms or advertising methods would be great. Popunder/over ads maybe? Adsense did very little when I used it, but there is some sketchy stuff being added, like escort and sex ads, even a bunsh in other languages. I would violate their TOS so I dropped it. Thanks in advance for any help. Happy gleaning.
I don't have experiance in this feild so I don't know whether this will help but GoTo.com pioneered the idea of buying really cheap ads and then having high value ads that users click out on. Maybe this could work for you?
A social networking service is an online service, platform, or website that focuses on building and reflecting of social relations among people. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provide means for users to interact over the internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging. The main types of social networking services are those which contain category places (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with Facebook and Twitter widely used worldwide. MySpace and LinkedIn being the most widely used in North America. Nexopia (mostly in Canada), Bebo, Hi5, Hyves (mostly in The Netherlands), StudiVZ (mostly in Germany), iWiW (mostly in Hungary), Tuenti (mostly in Spain), Nasza-Klasa (mostly in Poland), Decayenne, Tagged, XING, Badoo and Skyrock in parts of Europe. Orkut and Hi5 in South America, India and Central America, and Friendster, Mixi, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch, renren and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands and Twitter, Orkut and Facebook in India.
Unless you are not doing it right then it will fail. Social networking has generated much traffic for me and it is still working till date.
For this question you choose wrong category, I think you should choose website design category. All the best......