Mediaboss Marketing

As much as Silicon Valley's ethos is the constant pursuit of creating value, eventually the byproduct of this process (and the stakeholders involved) will also require the creation of revenue.

In the past year, we have seen these dynamics play out in the social networking sector across a variety of companies at different stages of growth, maturity, and monetization.

While the early phases of social media success tend to focus on metrics around user growth and engagement, every social media company must eventually figure out some sort of revenue stream (unless they prefer to go the acquisition route).

Most social networking companies eventually monetize through advertising, and more specifically through "native advertising" or non-standard ad units that are specific to the platform and are organically integrated into the content experience.

Facebook and Twitter, both mature, publicly traded companies with well-established revenue streams, have been the pace-setters in social by effectively monetizing their respective native ad units, Sponsored Stories for Facebook and Promoted Tweets for Twitter.

Linkedin also introduced their Sponsored Content ads, and while its advertising business has not yet monetized to the same degree as Facebook and Twitter, it also has a strong value proposition to advertisers given the quality of its business-oriented audience.

Other established players like Tumblr and Pinterest are in the earlier days of monetizing through advertising, but they too have native ad units that integrate into their content experience.

But all of these networks are children of the desktop web. True, they are all in various phases of transition towards mobile as the dominant medium for consumption, but their networks were all built around a fixed Internet experience.

Fast forward to today, and we've seen another evolution in the social networking space that centers around mobile-first networks. Social brands such as Instagram, SnapChat, and Vine are all recent examples of mobile-first success stories, which represent an evolution in social media by focusing on the single core utility of capturing and disseminating interesting content captured through mobile phone cameras.

Link:
Social Media Monetization in a 'Mobile First' World