This is huge – especially since many social networks in the United States aren’t nearly as profitable. According to the article, MySpace brought in $800 million and Facebook made $250-$300 million last year; a majority of those earnings came from online advertising. But in my opinion, there’s only so much you can do with online advertising. There are only so many places on a page that you can place an ad (without overwhelming the user), and there’s only so much you can charge for those advertisements. On top of that, you have to think about your audience and if your advertisers want to target that group.
Because of those issues, I think it’s extraordinary that MySpace and Facebook have done as well as they have. But it’s encouraging to learn about Tencent’s business model.
So how does the site make money? Not solely through online advertising, but another avenue: Virtual goods and “Internet value-added services,” or IVAS.
IVAS, which includes avatars and memberships, accounts for more than $700 million of the site’s profits. That’s huge.
It’s also a great business model. Users may simply glance over online advertisements, but they’ll actually participate when it comes to online goods. It’s another way to engage the community.
It appears that countries like the United States are just learning about the potential of virtual goods. However, IVAS may not be the saving grace of all social sites. The article brings up a good point – maybe Chinese users are more likely to purchase goods than users from other countries.
Either way, Tencent has proven to the world that social sites don’t need to depend on advertising; they can be successful simply by being creative.
A year or two ago – on April Fool’s Day – the Gmail Blog announced a new feature that would allow you to change the time on your sent e-mails. If you were late e-mailing something to your boss, you could change the time on the message so it would appear it popped into the recipient’s mailbox on time.
I couldn’t believe what I was reading then; and I can’t quite believe it now. Or, at least I’m skeptical.
The new Gmail option gives you 5 extra seconds to “undo send” an e-mail for whatever reason. I’m sure Gmail users could find a million reasons to use it, and I’m sure it could come in handy. I’m not saying that the new, optional feature is a bad thing, but I know I’d rather rely on my good sense than those 5 seconds.
But since we all have our moments, maybe a few seconds to review our actions may come in handy.
Ever since I signed up for Qwitter it hasn’t worked for me (I’ve already chatted with someone over there and he was delightful, so now I’m being patient) – but I just found a site I may use in the meantime.
I don’t know if I entirely trust it, but I like the idea of it. Tweeteffect is essentially Qwitter in that it shows you how many friends you lost or gained during your past 200 Tweets. It has a great color code that simply shows you if you had an increase or decrease in followers after a Tweet. It also bolds certain Tweets if the increase or decrease in followers happened in less than five minutes.
The only thing I don’t like about it is that there seems be a 5-hour delay (for me at least). But I guess that’s not a huge problem.
While I don’t want this to impact my Tweets, I do think it shows me which ones work best in the community. For example, I’ve now learned that people don’t like hearing about local weather. Done. People love knowing quirky stories. Good to know.
In other news, a good friend from work showed me couchobjects.com today. – I love the “nom” necklace. If I had three, it’d be “nom nom nom.” Hilarious.
It was an overnight sensation. And now it looks like it may come to an end as quickly as it became popular.
Tweepme is a site that promises to get you followers fast. How is this done? Every person who joins the Tweepme community automatically friends everyone else in the community. Soon users have thousands of “friends” all following one another.
I said it yesterday, and I agree with this Mashable Tweet: @mashable TweepMe seems to totally misunderstand the point of Twitter. Not recommended.
In my opinion, Twitter’s usefulness comes from growing quality communities naturally. The point is not simply to make friends – but to friend users who will listen and participate. That’s not to say Tweepme followers wouldn’t also contribute, but there’s that underlying knowledge that other users were forced to follow you – and you them.
If that’s not enough of a strike against Tweepme, how about this: Twitter’s cracking down on script users. There are several scripts out there that allow you to friend your friends’ friends with one click – and then unfollow those who don’t friend you back. Not surprisingly, Twitter is now taking action against those scripts, and now this.
Every so often you’ll watch someone get up on their soapbox and talk about how Digg is controlled by X number of sites. While that’s true, I think the authors of those types of posts could really delve deeper into WHY these sites are the most popular.
Thanks to di66.net, users can see the most popular submitted sites, words (from descriptions), Diggers, topics and more. It’s true that certain users and topics tend to be more successful than others. When it comes to users (who ultimately decide on the sources they submit), there are some who are known as “power users” – those who have mastered the system, and stay on top because they submit quality content.
And that’s the key: Quality content.
I’m certainly not saying that everything submitted by a power user is a quality story, photo or video. But these users do know where to find the best of the Web – how to find it quickly – and how to submit it properly.
So when it comes to which sites dominate Digg, I think it’s important to keep the big picture in mind.
Yes, certain domains are popular. 1) Again, because they have great content. 2) These sites are generally popular. Ask a friend (probably someone more “techie”) where they find cool stuff. They’ll list these sites. Since these are more popular sites, it’s more likely that more people are visiting them and submitting from them. Hence, you experience “domain domination.”
It was a question posed today that took me off guard. You see, Digg’s been going through a number of changes during the past year, so I was curious what this author had to say.
In the post the author highlights several changes (mass bannings, Digg limits) along with what he says is the most recent: Digg has removed personal links from user profiles. Since I haven’t seen that happen on my profile (or on my friends’), I’m skeptical. (This inconsistency also made me wonder if the author simply wrote a controversial piece to get traffic, but that’s another issue.) I feel like I should also note here that the only time I haven’t seen personal links on a user’s profile is if I’m not logged in.
Either way, I think it’s an interesting concept. Many users contact one another through these personal IMs or sites, which encourages private interaction–or interaction Digg can’t control.
By deleting these links, it would cut back on the ease of accessing another user’s contact information. I can understand Digg doing this as an effort to prevent people from asking for votes online, thereby somewhat “gaming the system,” but I think any damage that could be done, has been done. Besides, users can easily connect with one another on other social sites and communicate through those.
So we’ll see what happens, but if you’re looking for “personal links,” just head to mine.
Every social media site takes some sort of strategy, and, of course, Digg is no different. And, since Digg is (arguably) one of the largest/most popular social news sites and has the ability to send a high volume of visitors to a site, there’s no question some people out to game it.
Well, if you’ve ever wondered what that means, or how they do it, atomicpoet has revealed several “Evil Digg techniques.”
My first reaction is a combination of “The first rule of fight club is…’” and “Why on earth would you share that?” But I agree with atomicpoet in that Digg users have the right to know what’s going on. These methods to game Digg are certainly wrong, and Digg has taken steps to ban users who have violated the site’s TOS by using some of these techniques.
What do you think? Should this information be shared? What do you think of the techniques? Which are the most clever and which spell disaster?
One of the best — and worst — aspects of a URL shortener is that it hides the identity of the original link. Because of this, it was nearly impossible to find out who was Tweeting a Chicago Tribune (or any site) link unless “Chicago Tribune” was mentioned in the Tweet.
Well, that’s no longer an issue.
Backtweets provides a simple, but brilliant function: It allows you to search users who have Tweeted your URL on Twitter — even if it was transformed into a shortened URL. I don’t know if it can search ALL shortened links, but I have seen it list is.gd, tinyurl.com, bit.ly, ff.im, tr.im and others.
The past year has brought about many changes -- one, I'm no longer at the Chicago Tribune. After a great two years there, I've moved on to Creative Director at Consumer Media Network. I'm also no longer "acmaurer" technically, since I married my best friend in June '11. I'm now Amanda Woodhead, but between you, me and the Internet, I'll always be acmaurer. So thanks again for stopping by, and here's to some great conversations.
Want to find me on the Web? I'm acmaurer on most social news and networking sites.
PS, I doubt I have to say this, but this is my personal blog and doesn't reflect the opinion of my employer.
