Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook will bring in charges in 2009
Social networking sites, such as favourites Facebook and MySpace, are set to jump on the greedy-train as news has surfaced that the sites are planning to charge good money to their users to partake in activities that they are currently taking for granted, such as uploading videos.
Director of research for technology and telecommunications for Deloitte, Paul Lee, claims that, “The book value of some social networks may be written down and some companies may fail altogether if funding dries up. Average revenue per user for some of the largest new media sites is measured in just pennies per month, not pounds. This compares with a typical average revenue per user of tens of dollars for a cable subscriber, a regular newspaper reader or a movie fan.”
Websites that provide their users with networking privileges such as poking your mates rely heavily on advertising to bring in the money to help pay for the domain, the employees and the Porsche’s. However, apparently advertising is seemingly drying up and sites such as Bebo are apparently not turning out to be the lucrative business paths they originally were planned on being.
The sad fact is that, although you and I are more than happy to fill our MySpace page with our pictures and small thumbnails depicting our “friends”, we aren’t paying for the rights to use the site, and the advertising is clearly proving not to be enough for the sites to survive on. In fact, Twitter is making such little money it doesn’t generate any revenues at all. Not really the aim of any business.
However, there is no denying the website’s successes – in user numbers, not pound signs. These social networking sites, and in particular Facebook, have been appearing more and more on mobile telecommunication networks, such as Orange. A study by Orange discovered that 640,000 of its UK users would use their mobile handset to connect to the Internet to check their social networking accounts.
The Director of Products for Orange UK, Paul Jevons, claims that the high usage of social networking sites on the Orange network is incredibly substantial, saying, “We are seeing massive numbers of unique users and traffic in social networking and we expect that to continue. A number of things have come together such as the tariffs and the handsets that really have kickstarted social networking on mobile phones.”
Facebook, however, can breathe a sigh of relief as it is bringing in SOME revenues due to a lucrative advertising deal made when Facebook was in its prime in 2007.
The months between June 2008 and October 2008 saw numbers of users of mobile handsets access these social networking sites raise by 277 per cent and a reason for this has been said to be the introduction of such tariffs as Dolphin which allow unlimited access to these social networking sites. The recent success of the iPhone has also brought strong attraction to Facebook and other similar sites as the iPhone provides continually wireless Internet.
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