Steven Hodson is the cranky old fart as well as respected Web 2.0 and social media pundit behind WinExtra.com. His guest post today kicks off a short series of articles that examine alternatives for the very advertising-dependent world of Web 2.0 and social networks.

It doesn’t matter where you turn within the blogosphere at some point you’ll hear someone complaining about the lack of a business model for all these Web 2.0 social media type sites. After all there comes a point where the piper is going to need to be paid and employees need to be able to pay their bills. At this point the most common solution is to slap a set of Google AdSense ads on the service or some such ad network depending on how smart they are about the Web 2.0 space.

The thing is that many of the big Web 2.0 services like Twitter and FriendFeed have launched without any apparent business model and neither have they gone the route of having ads in place to help support themselves. At one point there was a running joke that Twitter had found the best business model of all - VC funding but as funny as that might seem it sure appears that this is pretty much the case as Twitter just closed a $15 million round of funding. The problem is that at some point the angels behind all these rounds of financing that is keeping the majority of Web 2.0 afloat will want to be paid back.

Along with this, a large number of folks have suggested that Twitter consider charging the super users like Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis and Dave Winer a subscription fee as a way to monetize the business. My question is why stop there?

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