Making Money With Social Media

It’s long been my theory that social media are a great fun tool, can even be used for marketing and promotion, but it still hasn’t figured out how to reliably make money. Actually, only eCommerce and porn are the two reliable moneymakers on the web ;-) That inspite of the fact that social web sites have actually accounted for more traffic than porn on the internet this year so far — first time ever.

Business Week writes a rather interesting article about The Trouble With Twitter:

Twitter’s business model is starting to show. An early sign came in April, when the popular microblogging service launched in Japan and the home page for every Japanese user included a big banner ad in the top right corner.

Then, on Aug. 7, Twitter made another change, this time in the U.S., by limiting the number of people a single user could connect with, or “follow,” to about 2,000. Most recently, on Aug. 14, Twitter made the biggest move yet to slash costs. It killed outbound message delivery to mobile phones via short message, or SMS, in all countries except the U.S., Canada, and India.

Taken together, these moves point to the trouble with Twitter. Investors and marketers have been agog over the potential for Twitter—unlike other social media properties, such as Facebook and MySpace (NWS)—to crack the code, finally, on wringing revenue from millions of users. But the optimists better brace for disappointment.

>> See the Busineess Week site for the full article.

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