Clicking and Screaming

New Year is a prolific time for the internet’s great predictors. Bloggers have a field day with their predictions for what will or won’t happen in the year ahead and their thoughts on who will be hot and who will be not.

Analysts get to work in early January too, and Deloitte’s Paul Lee’s research has painted a bleak picture of 2009 for the online social networking sector.

Lee predicts that 2009 will be particularly tough for online social networks such as Facebook because of poor advertising sales and the troublesome global economy:

“Average revenue per user for some of the largest new media sites are measured in just pennies per month, not pounds. This compares with a typical average revenue per user of tens of dollars for a cable subscriber, a regular newspaper reader or a movie fan. Social networks may need at least 100 users to generate the equivalent revenues of every traditional media customer they compete with.”

The problem of monetization is one which has been either ignored or avoided by many companies, so Lee’s prediction could mean that it’s time to stare this issue in the face and work out what to do about it. But resolving to tackle the problem is the easy part.

There’s no such trouble for Wikipedia. The collaborative online encyclopedia, which is now home to 11 million articles in 265 languages (PDA), should be covered until the end of its financial year in June thanks to donations amounting to $6m from its users.

Founder Jimmy Wales had appealed for funding, and his target was met. In a thank you to Wikipedia users, Wales said:

“You have proven that Wikipedia matters to you, and that you support our mission: to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising.”

That’s the Wikipedia model, but for Facebook et al, things won’t be so easy.