You have to wonder:
Yahoo! gets most of its impressions in Y! Mail… and mail is notoriously hard to monetize.
Yet Google - who is printing money thanks to their search domination - invested heavily to get into email with Gmail. Is that smart management or allocation of capital? Not sure.
Of course, email is the biggest social networking platform out there (more here)… but then again, social networking inventory is really not monetizable… so what gives?
More on social networking’s woes with monetization here:
Related: Social Media
- Connecting the Dots: Why Social Media Fails at Generating Revenue
- Why Social Media and Advertising = Fail
- Dark Cloud, Meet Social Media. Social Media, Meet Dark Cloud
- Social Media Hype Train Continues
- When Will Social Media Get It?
- Why Social Media and Beacon Are Doomed to Fail and What Facebook Should Do
- Social Media Growing Pains
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July 3rd, 2008 at 6:33 pm
I thought that when you signed up for gmail you had to give google the rights to crawl your in and out boxes so that they could more effectively advertise to you with adsense, no? Also, as a brand, they have to seem all-inclusive. Since e-mail is the most known way of communicating on the web, newbies get initiated by getting their “screen name to the web” which is what google calls a G-mail account. Just my two cents. -Bobby J.
July 3rd, 2008 at 6:45 pm
hey Bobby, excellent point.
By the way: I love gmail crawling my messages. Whenever I am in a bind looking for a supplier or whatever and I email myself as a reminder, I find what I am looking for in gmail’s text results.
However, the problem is that the CTR’s are abysmal. I might click once in a million, whereas in search results I will click 1 or 30% of the time on a paid search. This is why the monetization of any kind of social media - including email, chat and message boards - are very low.