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?

(more…)

—
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Google Checkout Free for Non-Profits
Steal This Film 2: Nets Bigger Donations Than First Attempt
MalariaEngage Aims To Increase Awareness Through Social Networking
FundRace2008: Prying Private Political Picks
PayPal’s New Year’s Resolution: Help Non-Profits
YouTube Launches Channels for Non-Profits
Tipit.to: Digg for Cash Tips?

Visit the News Source, Mashable

If you liked this, You might also like:

1. AOL’s Platform-A Expands to Europe
2. Platform-A has announced its European expansion today, aligning with the AOL advertising operations that are already in existence in...
3. List of Great IT Tools!
4. I found this great collection of tools for a variety of venues like flickr and your blogs. 40+ Tools For...
5. Poprl Tracks Clicks to Create Twitter News
6. In the world of Internet social news there are hundreds of sites that attempt to aggregate all of the...
7. OPEN SOURCE GOD: 480+ Open Source Applications
8. Open source software is booming: here we round up over 480 open source applications for you to use or build...
9. Web 2.0 Bootcamp Commences in London
10. For the very first time in the UK, the Web 2.0 University is running a one day Executive Bootcamp...
11. Twitter Is Working on Groups
12. You love using Twitter, but would prefer a way to better catalogue and segregate that out of control set...
13. FriendFeed Adds Summaries
14. For all you FriendFeed junkies out there that simply don’t have enough hours in the day to get the...
15. 50+ Places to Buy Groceries Online
16. Grocery shopping can be tedious, but as with almost everything else under the sun, the web offers solutions to help...
17. Web App And Widget Engine Zembly Launches
18. Developing Web applications to be used within social networks and numerous other cloud-based structures is becoming more and more...
19. Revision3 Halts Production Of Social Brew
20. Revision3 has been in the news more than usual the past two week, mostly due to its falling victim...