Fred Stutzman with an excellent post on monetising social networks.
Obviously whilst there are problems with old advertising and economic models being applied directly to social networking applications, there are many new opportunities here - MySpace branching out into selling songs is a good way of them utilising content, for example.
This is timely given the warnings over advertising.
Our first attempt at a social networking application was in 2001 when we built the now defunct Soundbyte. Soundbyte was a site for students and teenagers to create and share music that they had made in class. The revenue model was based on the site acting as an attractor for physical visitation to the museum’s Soundhouse lab - where visitors can learn computer music production. The site was quite successful although hampered by government limitations - its greatest success was in greatly increasing the profile of the Soundhouse lab.
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2 responses so far ↓
So at that time was this initiative seen as successful in driving people to the museum’s soundlab?
I am curious since this is often cited as a goal of many web initiative in museums, where our main revenue stream is ticket sales.
Hi Bryan
Yes it was enormously successful at driving people to the labs. Visitation went up enormously, it was a great profile raiser and generated considerable interest online and in the real world.
But in retrospect as a community site it was not a great success. There were just too many limitations on what we could do - and the actual ONLINE ‘needs’ of the audience were able to be satisfied elsewhere. Whereas the labs continue to service the REAL WORLD needs of the audience.