FIGURE 6-4 Popularity and stickines

FIGURE 6-4 Popularity and stickiness of leading Web sites

Leading sites often have more than 200 million unique visitors per month. The figure also shows the average amount of time each visitor spends on the site each month (an estimate of stickincss). The information in the figure is adapted from Nielsen reports and shows sites grouped by owner (for example, the Apple Computer listing includes its iTunes store; the Google listing includes YouTube; the Microsoft listing includes Microsoft software support sites and the Bing search engine; and IntcractivcCorp includes Ask.com, Citysearch, Match.com, and Newsweek). Web sites that arc social networking sites (such as AOL and Facebook) or that include social networking elements (such as eBay, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!) appear regularly on these lists.

Mixed-Revenue and Fee-lor-Service Social Networking Sites

Although most social networking sites use advertising to support their operations, some do chargc a fee for some services. For example, the Yahoo! Web portal offers most of its services free (supported by advertising), but it docs sell some of its social networking features, such as its Games All-Star Central packagc. Yahoo! also sells other features, such as more space to store messages and attached files, as part of its premium e-mail service.
Some advertising-supported social networking sites have followed the lead of Yahoo! in a strategy called monetizing eyeballs or monetizing visitors. Monetizing refers to the conversion of existing regular site visitors seeking free information or services into fee- paying subscribers or purchasers of services. Sites that monetize visitors by charging them always worry about visitor backlash. They can never be sure how many existing visitors will pay for services that have been offered in some form at no cost. Most sites do not
monetize their visitors by charging fees. For example, leading social networking sites Faccbook and Twitter sell advertising only and do not chargc any user fees.