Social Networking,now a money making tool

Are you one of those still stuck on Orkut? Studies with a group of 2000 Orkuters showed that on average, they spent 2 hrs a day on orkut. It also showed that they spent more time trying to find new people. On average, most users visit friends's profiles atleast once in a month. So in our point of view, I would simply say that all these people are wasting serious time and money(Power bill, Internet charges etc). Orkut still being one of the most popular Social networking site, can be taken as a bench mark.

So, with the entry of many new players into this niche market, it seems that plainly offering facilities to share video, photos and offering an array of communication tools are not enough to lure people into the newly opened services. So what are they doing? They are giving out money to use their services. OK, now that would be like yahoo offering to give you money if you receive or send a mail or Google giving you money for searching. OK this is not a new phenomenon when email was still young and new free email firms were coming up everyday, some of them had tried this.

What all are on offer?
mylot.com will give you money for being active on their site. That is, when you post something that gets good response from other users, you get paid. They are not specific about how much. You can get a part of your friend's income by inviting them to join mylot and then encouraging them to be active. The down side of this is that they only have Paypal or eGold payment options.

Desimartini.com OK, the site is not good to look at and has only standard social networking features and most features are copied from other places. Very little serious work has gone into it but, never the less they have an option to let you place your AdSense code on thier pages. The simplicity of this deal is what makes it attractive. One thing that you might need to be careful about is that your friends (who would be visiting pages belonging to you the most) are going to see these ads the most and cant say whether Google might think the clicks on your ads are fraudulent. They have very efficient methods to find this. So be careful about this.

Yaari.com was offering an ipod for the 50 most popular users. The offer has expired but might just come back because they are still lacking a huge user base that any social networking site needs.

bharatstudent.com belonging to Axil group (which is behind the" call any phone free" Globe7 site) is offering to give money to campus reps and ambassadors for their site. Their campus reporter offer seems more real. It offers 2 $ for 1000 views of a video that you upload, simple as that. They have not specified how they are going to pay you. Mostly moneybookers and paypal should be available because those are the methods Axil usually supports.

Another method that has existed for a long time is using AdSense or the like on your profile on services like myspace etc. But the problem with this is again fraudulent click detection and ethics of making your profile a billboard.

Now these are not the only ones available. A search on Google gets you lots of returns and most probably the other new entrants might come up with such schemes soon.

So, is it actually time to leave Orkut ?