How Will Yahoo "Monetize" Their Social Networks?

Thomas Hawk writes "One of the most interesting things to come out of Yahoo's earnings call with analysts yesterday was a statement by Yahoo's COO, Daniel L. Rosenweig on Yahoo's plans to 'monetize' their various social network properties. Flickr was mentioned five times on the conference call and their de.lic.io.us property was as well, after neither were mentioned in last quarter's call. Rosenweig characterized these services as being largely unmonetized and talked about leveraging these "assets" and targeting and profiling a large growing registered audience base. It will be interesting to see how some of Yahoo's popular web properties change through the monetization process."

Comments

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation: Now that we have this expensive and popular site, we want to fuck the users for as much as possible :P

quote me as saying i was misquoted

[joe_bruin]

How Will Yahoo "Monetize" Their Social Networks? ...and talked about leveraging these "assets" and targeting and profiling a large growing registered audience base

Yes, how "will" Yahoo "monetize" these "assets"? Inquiring "minds" want to "know".

Submitter

[Anonymous Coward]

From the submitter's site: Thomas Hawk is the Chief Evangelist for the Photo Sharing Site Zooomr.

Not that he would be biased or anything, but if any Flickr users want to drop their accounts seeing how Flickr is doomed and your baby photos will have Lower Your Bills flash ads all over them, there're (hint, hint) other sites out there.

Social networking sites have a life cycle

[Animats]

Take a look at Alexa traffic rankings for "social networking" sites. Many, if not most, of them have already peaked.

EZboard peaked mid 2003. Nerve peaked early 2002. Bondage.com peaked mid-2003. Tribe peaked early 2006. Xianz (the "Christian Myspace") peaked in spring 2006. Friendster peaked twice, once in late 2005 and again in mid-2006, but that's an unusual pattern. Usually, once they peak, it's downhill after that. Myspace has flattened and looks like it's about to peak. This works just like nightclubs; they become hot, they grow, they get too popular, they get overrun, they decline, they hang on, but nobody cares.

If you try to "monetize" the users, they leave sooner.

The real winner in this space seems to be AdultFriendFinder.com. 57th most popular site on the web, 35th in the US, steady traffic for two years, and it's a pay site. Run by Friendfinder, Inc., the notorious spammers. They seem to have figured out how to "monetize the user base". However, Friendfinder may be inflating their statistics.

Re:I think the blurb summed it up

[RLiegh]

>And by email, I hope you mean the old email, not the new oddpost+SOAP+WS* monstrosity

Ugh. I had just managed to forget about that. The minute they take away the option to use the old yahoo mail, is the minute I permanantly switching over to gmail.

Monetize Everything

[spun]

Let's just get it over with. Monetize everything. Every social interaction should be monetized. How many times have you had a conversation where the other party just wasn't holding up their end? Charge 'em! Sex? Whoever has the most fun, charge 'em! Air, water? Monetize the crap out of those! Let's put a fence around every goddamn thing in the universe and make money off of it. It was free before? Who cares! Tragedy of the commons, man, tragedy of the commons. Everything should be owned. Every possible combination of letters, numbers, muscial notes, symbols, everything. Put a meter in everyone's head, when they even think about your intellectual property, charge 'em!

Want to slit your wrists from living in a disconnected, hollow, completely monetized world? As in life, so in death: charge 'em! Charge 'em to live, charge 'em to die, charge 'em for every goddamn second in between.

Bow down to the almighty dollar, oops, I mean charge 'em to bow down to the almighty dollar.