Here is an interesting article in Businessweek harping on the lack of revenues of the big social media sites.
As the Internet grows it has spawned many different uses, one of which is community or "social networking" where people can share ideas. Social networking happens to deliver massive amounts of traffic. Who ever said that this traffic has to be monetized? Part of innovation is learning how this social media sector is going to develop since there aren’t many people with the chrystal ball who will tell us. Testing, testing and more testing will deliver us some answers on how to provide value to the traffic enough so that they leave behind their contact information and permission to market to them. In the meantime lead generation is in my opinion the best avenue to approach in social media for advertisers who want to play in the space.
It is interesting to see that there appear to be very few products or services that MySpace or Facebook charge for i.e. premium services or information products. Time will tell.
