G'day!

WIIFM: What's In It For Me?

I've been following a few social media sites for a couple of months and the questions arise:

1)  What do the site owners get out of it?

2)  How are these sites funded?

It must cost money to develop and maintain these sites and yet there's not so much as a Google ad in to be seen.

What's the go? "It is more blessed to give than to receive," perhaps?

Thanks,
Laurie.

1) advertising revenues- there's a ton of articles out there you can look up such as http://www.forbes.com/2007/01/24/murdoc … rdoch.html


2) initially in most cases venture capital and when the advertising kicks in that

Yeah, it cost quite a sum to run these social media sites. But i guess the WIIFM factor is attained over a period of time spent consistently building a brand and working to provide valuable content that'll drive visits and guarantee leads.

What do the site owners get out of it? Satisfaction. It's great working on what you believe in.

How are these sites funded? i guess the webmaster funds his project, i would do the same for what i love and believe in.

As stated earlier... venture capital carries the day until they find ways to monetize in other ways... generally speaking...

I second (or third, maybe fourth ) what was already said...

Venture Capital, build the brand, monetize with advertising.

I've seen some high-traffic sites charge thousands (in one instance ~$30K) for top-placement. That was a while ago, before I was transitioned from marketing to IT.

Enough traffic, and the money will come from placing ads. Anyone use MySpace before it got as large as it is now? If so, you'd see the difference in the number/placement of ads on their site.

Hi,

One of example is social bookmarking sites, isn't it? In my opinion, it's required for the next generation data mining and or search engines. They would get quality sites only that would be categorized, rated, etc already. So many big company would buy that sites someday as yahoo did for del.icio.us.

There are many company that would to fund them esp from research based companies.

CMIIW.