Making money with a social network?

I'm attempting to brainstorm non-conventional means of making money off of a social network site. Obviously there's conventional advertising, but does anyone else have other ideas?

I've thought of offering a premium service of some sorts, but what kinds of services are people willing to pay for?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

I would say forget of the social network idea all together. It is a VERY saturated market and you would have to come up with something beyond great in order to succeed.

 

What would you pay for??
Social networking people want to make money as does the site owner!!!
You need to guarantee an increase return on funds taken without any tricks or scams!!! It's simple as that. I use yuwie as it's simple but also it's hard work getting those referrals!!!
Can you see an idea in my above statement?? My yuwie is below if interested.

 

I think it's hard to make money off social networking sites. If you do start one a niche one would be better than a general type.

 

I suggest getting traffic off social networking sites and then making the money on your own site. I don't think you'll have much luck making money out of social networking sites.

 

I used to run a social networking site that targeted exchange students around the world (mainly in Europe & USA). Google AdSense brought in almost nothing, but here are some tricks that did bring in a considerable amount of $$

1. skype affiliate - put up a banner, and get paid anytime a user buys a paid skype service (skype out, etc). this is pretty good as exchange students tend to make tons of international phone calls. and skype provides awesome rates so everybody's happy with this one.

2. travel insurance affiliate - same idea as above. exchange students tend to travel to nearby countries. we got some good $$s from this too.

3. travel site affiliate - surprisingly quite a lot of ppl bought plane tickets via our site's affiliate.

4. amazon affiliate - sell dictionaries and language books for best results

I think that's about it. It took us forever to find out that Adsense was crap....and by the time we got all these affiliates working and on track, we did make money and reached break point and beyond, but running a social networking site was way too much effort. Ended up selling the site.

You have to really love running the site for it to be successfull imho

Hope this helps

 

social networking doesn't get you much money. it does look attractive but in reality its not that great anymore.

 

social networking is very hard, you need thousands of members just to keep your traffic at a decent level daily, and with any form of advertising, its slim to none!

 

It well definitely be a niche site, and it's a niche that I know will attract people and isn't taken yet.

 

As some ppl here say, it's not as lucrative as it seems, but I personally had a lot of fun doing it. I think the key is to have a lot of members at startup. We were lucky b/c we had a pretty large network of international students who signed up in the earlier weeks. Another key factor is your technical knowledge. We used phpfox to do our site and it required a lot work. My team members had to fix and spice up the site while learning php, so that was pretty challenging for them.

In any case, I think it's worth a try if you're ready to put in a lot of time and effort. I once calculated my hourly wage from the total amount of money we made and it was pretty depressing lol.

If you're considering phpfox, I have a valid license for sale. PM me if you're interested - I'll give you the details so that you can verify the validity of the license with phpfox before purchasing.

 

Well I guess social networking can be a vital source of expanding your network and be a tool for announcing business related news or events that would interest your network from these social sites... But for the owner... Hmm... I guess advertising links are their primary income generator...

Just giving some thoughts....

 

I'll be basing it around a heavily modified template for vBulletin 3.7 now that it has started moving in a social networking direction. I'm doing it in part in an attempt to make money, but primarily because it's a niche that I know a lot about, enjoy, and can easily market to.

 

if your social networking traffic is high you can get more money from it. just try to specific niche. traffic is the point key