Paid Social Networks Set To Earn $1.4 Billion in 2013
By Anna Johnson on November 8th, 2009eMarketer reports that social networks are on track to make more money from non-advertising income streams in the next few years.
In July 2009, Piper Jaffray forecast that in the U.S. paid social networking sites would earn $627 million in non-advertising revenues in 2009 and more than $1.4 billion in 2013. Piper Jaffray expected most of the revenue growth to come from new and existing networks, as well as greater usage of the premium services offered by established players such as LinkedIn and Classmates.com.
Meanwhile, eMarketer expects ‘free’ social networks to migrate to more of a ‘freemium’ payment model, where users can get basic features for free but pay for premium services. LinkedIn, for example, offers both free and premium accounts.
This is based on, among other things, research by Abrams Research in February 2009 which found that around 45 percent of social media leaders considered freemiums the best way to monetize social media.
Source: eMarketer, “Paid Social Network Opportunities—Alive and Well,” eMarketer, November 2, 2009
