How to Monetize Facebook

Dear Monetization News Daily,

I run a fairly popular social media site with 175 million registered users, a large percentage of who visit at least once a day. My users have filled out profiles, so I know who they are, demographically, and what they are interested in. But, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to monetize this site. Any ideas?

FB en masse

Dear FB en masse,
Holy crap. Pardon our Arabic, but if we at Monetization News Daily had 175 million users, we’d be too busy peeing ourselves in delight to worry about much of anything else. But, we appreciate you taking the time to write, and we do have some ideas that might help put a buck or seven in your pocket.

Ads

We have one word for you – ads.

Advertising has been a money-maker for a great many sites over the last few years. If you’re not running ads on your site, you probably should. You may have considered running contextual-based ads, like Google Adsense, but worry that your content is not focused enough to display relevant ads.

If we had 175 million users, we would approach Google and ask if they would set us up in a special “social media” channel that would display the most popular ads from around their network. This sort of channel does not exist today, that we know of, but you have a large user base, and should have enough pull to put something like this together. You need to start thinking like a business, and not like a website.

One thing to avoid is to try to build your own advertising system. For instance, another social media site, Facebook, built their own advertising system where they sell blocks of space to regular Joe’s trying to make a buck. The trouble with this set up is multi-fold

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