Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Monetizing Social Media

I came across this article the other day that talked asked people who they thought would be the first social media site to monetize. From looking at the poll and reading the comments, the results were rather varied. But one result did surprise me: the fact that the post, the poll, nor the comments even once mentioned that these sites shouldn't monetize. It seems there's an underlying assumption within the social media sphere, that to be a successful social media hub one must turn massive user participation into money. Even while writing this blog I look up and there's a tab called "monetize." This sits uneasy with me. Firstly, I tend to lean towards a utopic cyberculture perspective in which the internet is run free from corporate control. I think this is especially important because corporate control can lead to censorship. Have we not learned anything from the concentration of corporate control in the traditional mass media? Secondly, I feel that even if these sites do monetize, there will always exist a free alternative for people who don’t feel they need to pay for such services. The open -source movement has always been about internet with control; it’s likely that they would immediately start creating free alternatives. So I ask you, would you pay to use Facebook? Twitter? MySpace?

1 comment:

  1. I feel as though if people are promted to pay for these social networking sites, they would no longer be as popular as they are today.
    I'm not saying that no one would pay for them (although I know that I wouldn't), they just would not get the traffic that they recieve today.
    I think that if these sites were to ask for money then new FREE social networking sites would pop up over night.
    Social networking should never be monetized!

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