trina1

Two part question:
1. How much more labor intesive and expensive is creating a social netwrking site?

2. What is the best way to profit from advertisements on such a site?

Thanks-
~trina~

bluearrow

I think there are Free Social networking site scripts which you can use easy to develop but there is a stiff complitition with all major sites like Facebook, Myspace, Hi5, Bebo.

You can use PPC ads on them as wel as affiliate programs.

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weblord

there's a free social networking site that allows you to create your own social networking site supported with ads, then you can purchase the premium membership to remove those ads.
http://ning.com/

Steve136

Hi,

If the social networking website becomes a huge hit, like many others out there then you will need sufficient resources to handle it, for example: facebook with over nine million registered users the bandwith costs alone for something like that is going to be huge and would require a large capacity disk for everything to be stored on - nevermind the connection required to handle all those users.

There is plenty of cheap hosts around that'll get you an average website for £5-£10 a month, but i'm sure if it's going to have thousands of users on it everyday they're going to be more expensive and it might actually be cheaper renting/buying a dedicated server and running the hosting yourself.

As for labor intensive, if you are using a free / commercial script then i asume they will be doing updates and constant optimizations to the code - saving money and time by not doing it yourself, however with that many users im sure moderation can take up a LOT of time, as larger the site gets more chances people want to exploit it, by un-approved advertising on profiles, exploiting code and malicious users.

I suppose it's your website so you can work out the best deals, anything from affiliates, pay-per-click or private advertising from different companies managed by yourself.

If it's going to be a very large website and have thousands of hits a day, im sure contacting companies directly about advertising wouldn't be a problem.

Enough of me rambling on.

Regards,

Steve

gaucho1976

1- From $10 to $100,000,000, everything in between. what kind of social networking site? is there streaming video? employees? (1, 2 100?) own offices? if so, for how many people? advertising budget? (yes/no) servers? (depends on many variables) custom programming? (yes/no) need to buy high profile domain? traffic feeding? marketing consultation? server mirrors? si this for an individual? a company? legal fees?

we'd go for hours with the information you provided, so the right answer is from $10 to $100,000,000. Now, I assume you're looking for a low cost solution, then still the broad is so wide that we can talk from 2 to 5 figures and still be correct


2- without #1 answered, it's impossible to answer #2. It's not the same to advertise something on a 1000 uniques a day network than 10,000,000 uniques. in the first case, unless you have some info, you think out of the box or you have some kind of private arrangement (a friend, a local company, whatever), you're stuck with adsense and the likes. That means like 1 dollar in a good day. Now, big companies have other kind of deals, even with Adsense, although most of the big sites deal directly with adv agencies. Hybrids aren't unusual, but we're talking about sites with millions of visits, which I guess you don't have, so back to the beginning, without any specifications you can't have any reasonable info, whatever thing anyone says to you could be right or extremely wrong

trina1

Thanks for all of the great information.
I'm still tossing around ideas on what to do with cakebeaters.com
It was suggested to develop it into a community or social networking site for bakers, or "extreme" cake designers.
I'm hoping to have a good plan for it executed within the next month or so.
btw, I am not a proffesional baker I am looking to generate supplemental income from advertising and or memberships as well as increase the value of the domain.
Thanks again-
~trina~

Ross

This was my suggestion, make a niche social networking site. We all know to break in to the social networking niche you have to compete with myspace and facebook which destroys any new comers in the field. Like i said a niche social network would be your best bet, like you have stated.

To pull something like this off will cost you quite a bit of money and to be 100% honest you will have to offer something unique to the users. This is what will set you apart from a group on myspace or facebook. Make it the premiere place for these professionals. To do that it will require mass amounts of advertisement to get the word out.

Also offering the service for free will benefit you in the long run. Putting a fee to sign up will hinder you from the start and only bring you down. Suggestions for this would be to offer it for free and as it gets more popular offer a premium service that lets users have more features. Also advertisements will prolly start on the affiliate level. Most companies will not advertise a brand new site unless you can prove a specific audience and traffic. Which in all reality is not there with a start-up.

Gotta spend money to make money is what they say.

Good Luck!

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