Social Networks & Monetization

March 25th, 2008 | Social Web

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Nice article by Anupreeta Das on Gaurdian on Social Networks & Monetization. Social Networks are now entering into a maturing phase and monetization can no longer be treated as future promise. Not just social networks, but the viral widgets providers have started making money (for themselves). Investors who would put money without realizing the roadmap and monetization strategy would be the victims of SNS gold rush and I really hope it doesn’t become yet another bubble.

Social Networks are the future gateways of the web, like we had directories and search in the past. Social Networks can also be about communication, engagement and content, it may not necessarily be the gateway for the more useful or day to day stuff in life - booking airline tickets and all. SNS like Facebook are already bombarded with Apps & Widgets and having too much on a Social Network is not a good thing. People are enjoying the novelty today but some are already experiencing the social network fatigue also.

The semantic web may be the answer going forward for Social Network too. The intelligence and discovery tools are the most important factor for any social networks. What we have right now is that I do a certain patchwork and spam my friends through Widgets and other playful stuff. Sometimes it is fun and sometime its not.

Coming to Monetization - Monetization in the current scenario is mainly limited to context and the behaviour. The content and the behaviour is very tough to analyse in the present scenario . The information from profile, relationships and conversation is very limited. On any social network the most difficult task is to find out the profile information of the user (and the right profile information). If you don’t get that right you do not get any click throughs. Behaviour again is challenging if people are just spamming each other and doing random stuff. The last but no the least - Conversation - well it has gone really really micro and super super random (see twitter).

Ultimately it comes to analytical study of your users - how to make sense from 100 widgets, 1000 friends and 10,000 scraps/guest books or Twitts. Signal Vs Noise