The Social Networking Universe?

Not. I'm spending more time building profiles than I am being social on these sites. Ken at KenRadio.com provides these snazzy IQ media reports daily. A couple of days ago he distributed " Social Network Marketing, the Sky is the Limit" (Note: You may have to login to view it, Ken is building his own social network complete with yet another profile to fill out, his numbers say he has 15,000 folks).

He did an amazingly comprehensive chart of 90 social networking sites with a brief description of their type and their user number. I don't know where he got these numbers you will have to ask him. I sorted them by user number and excluded the "unknowns" and networking sites exclusively for specific geographic or demographic users. I took off any sites with less than 1,000,000 members since that seems to be the magic number for advertising viability.

That seems to be his focus, not membership premiums which I'd just like to give a shout out to Flickr on setting up an easy and "safe" pro service unlike other Yahoo services.

KenRadio.com reports that " in 2007 marketers will spend $900 million on advertising and marketing on social network sites in the US, mostly to create profile pages and sponsored promotions. MySpace, still the largest player by far, is estimated to generate $525 million in the US this year. Facebook is expected to generate $125 million and both should continue to see healthy revenue increases. Combined, the two account for 72% of US social network ad spending in 2007 and 75% in 2008."

I understand the non sophisticated aura that a banner ad on Myspace represents to most advertisers and they want to build involvement and a "personality" for their brand but I think it's a huge wasted opportunity because it seems, at least 85% of the time, based on my faulty human memory a banner ad pops up with the fake celebrity rip offs or offers for "free" things. I'd like to know how many people actually received one of those free items. It leads to a survey site which provides direct spammers with information about the users.

Maybe they should do some barter ads with content sites to provide fodder for healthy discussion on myspace or is that completely unrealistic? I know there is intelligent life on myspace, it's just got such a bad rap that many people stay away.