MENEAME.NET Case - Third question

Menéame is a popular Spanish website with a lot of users interested in reading and voting stories posted by registered members of the website. The stories of this members accumulate “karma” points and comments, and get promotion to the front page of the website according to their ranking. Registration and vote are currently for free.

Apart from getting money from possible advertisement in the website, the feasibility of turning Menéame into an economically sounding project could depend on whether the users would pay in order to accumulate “karma” by submitting their stories (in the case of a charge fee for registered members) and/ or whether simple readers would pay in order to get information and vote the stories they’re interested in (in the case of a charge fee for users). Having been offered so far as a free service, I think it would be difficult to suddenly charge people without offering new attractive services. Under this assumption (that is finding additional services which could be enough useful for the users to ask them to pay) I think it could be possible to identify some sources of revenue for Menéame.

Another way of turning Menéame into an economically sounding project could be to lightly modify or enlarge the concept of the website as it has been defined so far, in order to develop its potentiality in terms of number of users and information stored. For instance, outside the community of Menéame, other business parties might be interested in getting information regarding preferences or behavior of a large number of users dealing with the specific topics posted on the website. If I was hired by Menéame.net as Business Development Manager, I think that the type of proposals that they could expect from me would be oriented to find such a way of exploiting the gold mine on which they were seated on.