Big Money in Big Networks

Ever growing social networks are not only attracting millions of people every day but are also reaping big money for their owners.

Many of the top 20 websites on the planet are social networks. Presently 20% of the internet population is present on one or more of these social networks and this number is expected to grow to 50 – 60% says CEO of Friendster; Kent Lindstrom. Refer the article.

And he is not the only one to have this opinion; you can see this happening all around you. Compete announces its list of top 20 social networks and it clearly shows the new players with focused approached are gaining popularity very fast. Notably, Fubar.com had an increment of 3272217% in total visits in last one year.

Very popular business networking site Linkedin has almost doubled its members from last year and reached a mark of 18 million subscribers. More than 1 million people are joining the site each month giving the business networking giant revenue of $75 million to $ 100 million. With its all new look and feel Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman is all set to launch an IPO for the company before 2010.

Facebook; another social networking site boasting of $15 billion market value with 60 million users is also not thinking any differently and might come up with its IPO around the same time frame of 2009-10.

IPO is not the only way to make big bucks if you are armed with a very popular social network; buy out is another option. In the past some very popular social networks has opted for the second option and made fortune by finding suitable buyers for them. The best examples are Google buying out YouTube for whopping $1.76 billion and Yahoo! acquiring Flickr for $ 40 million.

Sell it off or make it open for the market; if you are able to make your social networking site popular; loads and loads of moolahs are waiting for you.