Is ‘Paid for’ Social networking coming?

As many of you will already know, advertisers are finding it harder and harder to get sales via internet based social network advertising. This is mainly due to the generality of what is being sold, coupled with the ‘purple cow’ effect. This effect blinds us to advertising, because we see too much of it, and we are not really interested anyway!

For these social networks to survive how are they going to fund themselves? Will they rely on borrowing huge sums of money from investors? Will they borrow knowing hopefully that Google, Yahoo or Murdoch’s News Corporation will come along and put ‘big bucks’ in their pockets?

Well if they believe that then we are on our way to another dot.com bubble! These piranha type organisations only buy for a reason. It may be so they can market to the membership, it may be to boost their share price … or it may be because they …. don’t actually know why yet!

There seems little doubt that social networks is here to stay, at least for a while. If we consider the real reasons why people like to talk online then we can start to see ways to cater for them.

Is it because they believe it is ‘cool’ to be on these sites? Well may be, but what is ‘cool’ about being like everyone else!

Are they searching for something, like a partner for example? Well if my experience is anything to go by, the best thing about these types of sites is that you can pretend to be something that you are not!

Perhaps they are looking for long lost friends? But just how long does that take?

No, I think the real reason that social networks will flourish is simply because they enable people to communicate. If we called them “Interest Networks” instead it starts to make more sense! People communicate with people who share their interests.

Social Networks have to become more ’niche’ or ‘interest’ focused if they are to survive! But that in itself causes a problem. Most small ‘niche’ groups do not have the resources to create social network platforms! Well not until someone comes along and provides them with that resource.

What do you think?


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