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Social Media Gorges to Extinction
Social media experts have warned that social sites are getting too big to be sustainable.
Online writer Kerri Breen wrote in her blog: “In the perverse, mirror-like world of online finance, bigness isn’t necessarily a good thing.” Much like those infamous American fatties that show up on Jerry Springer, if social media continues to grow at its current exponential rate without finding some equilibrium, then it could die a very premature death.
Whilst Corporate News from the popular social media outlets is extremely positive in terms of the size of these social websites, without the balance of a revenue stream social media will make itself extinct. YouTube is currently too successful for Google to handle and could be an online victim of its own success unless it can quickly become financially viable.
YouTube is the third most visited website in the world. In the US, the video streaming site accounts for over 42 per cent of all videos watched online and has over 6 billion videos viewed every month. The recent Susan Boyle phenomenon is testament to the popularity of YouTube, attracting over 100 million views in a matter of three weeks. However maintaining such a monster is a hosting nightmare for Google which is likely to make a loss of $470 million this year.
It’s no wonder that the likes of YouTube and Facebook have turned to Online Advertising as a source of revenue in order to keep themselves alive. However, with Facebook showing no signs of slowing as it passed the 200 million users benchmark, much more Internet Advertising will be required in order for these behemoths to break even, let alone be profitable.
The YouTubes, Twitters and Facebooks of the online world are cash hungry, and unless they can be adequately balanced with a secure source of revenue, then users may be condemning their favourite websites to an internet grave.
Social Media news posted by Benny Henson on 30 April 2009
