Firetop

I’m just starting to recover having logged out of the ’social networking’ site Yuwie. I thought I’d take a look at how viable the site’s business model is - stickiness of content etc. so I created a new profile. In the process of doing so I had to click ’skip’ to fifteen concurrent pages offering me debt advice, mortgage advice and all manor of other rather suspicious looking offers before I could even edit my profile… many were repeated over and over again. Once on my profile page I managed to load up a photo of myself before the strobbing ‘PC error’ style leaderboard adverts made me feel positively sick (I kid you not). So stickiness this site definitely doesn’t have, it’s main attractor is the ‘revenue share’ deal offered to all members.

Revenue sharing in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if Facebook were to start doing that I wouldn’t have a problem with it or consider it a conflict of interest because I’m already a member of a useful website. However, where Yuwie goes wrong in my opinion is that the style and quality of the strobbing adverts is so hard to put up with. It’s difficult to see how anybody could happily be a regular user of the site without convulsing on the floor once an hour. I think Yuwie is much more of a ’social pyramid scheme‘ which may well see an increase in membership from friend to friend drawn by the lure of money, but in the long run its usage will plateau and then decline as people find that the non-advertising functions don’t compare well with what’s on offer elsewhere at Facebook and MySpace (even drawing a comparison with those sites is rather embarrasing).

Technorati Tags: yuwie, social networking, social pyramid scheme

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