Six years ago, when Friendster became one of the first few social
networks to come up on the World Wide Web, allowing users to
do such mundane things like making friends, sharing ideas and
experiences, etc., not many people would have had much idea about their potential.
However, as the entry of MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, and latter, Twitter, has
demonstrated, they are a powerful tool and are now as inseparable from
netizens as fish is from water. According to a latest survey by market research
firm Nielsen, blogging on social networks is the fourth most favorite activity of
surfers online, ahead of e-mailing. Today, almost two-thirds of the surfers visit
a social network or blogging site, and the category now accounts for almost 10%
of all Internet time spent by them. In fact, according to comScore, Facebook
alone attracted a record number of 77,031 unique visitors in June 2009, which
also propelled it to the sixth position, its highest ranking so far, among the
top online social networks for the month. Twitter, another fast growing
social network, drew a little over 20 million new visitors during the period; the
number, though, was slightly disappointing, given its tremendous popularity,
which is still growing. MySpace, another top social network—while failing to
repeat its strong performance of April 2009 when it outdid archrival Facebook,
adding close to 71 million unique visitors (vs. Facebook's 67.4
million)—could still attract 68.4 million new users.
However, even as these web-based communities continue to grow at
a breakneck pace, they have struggled to figure out a profitable business
model. Nonetheless, efforts to monetize the popular Internet services
increasingly top the agenda of these sites whose main source of revenue generation
remains advertising.
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