Why is it so hard for social media/networking sites to monetize their users?
aristus: That's not the whole story. Plentyoffish is highly profitable. Why not other social networks? Because they have a less-effective ad model but think they can spend like a search engine.A lot of people (whether or not they "get" Web2.0) have unreasonable expectations for demographic and behavioral targeting of ads. When you advertise on Google you are targeting not only a specific word, not only a specific person who is interested in that specific word, but right at the moment they are looking for it.For this reason I believe search advertising will always be an order of magnitude more effective than demo-targeting, and at least a few times better than the loftiest pipe-dreams of behavioral targeting.So. Your ad model is 0.1X as lucrative as search advertising, yet your infrastructure costs are comparable to a search engine. You lose. PoF wins because Markus doesn't have 100 employees.