With no shortage of traffic on Social Networking sites everyone and their brother are trying to figure out a way to monetize it social media.  In this article by the MIT Technology Review they go in depth with facts and figures of sites and pundants with projections.  I tend to look at social media more like a giant fishing net with big holes.  A lot of the fish swim into the net but get away.

So if they are going to swim into the big fishing net you want to have a second fishing net to catch the fish.  This net is your web site.  If your web site is SEO optimized you stand a chance of converting some of the social media traffic.  What I mean by this is a well optimized SEO site has landing pages that CONVERT.  They convert users to take action and leave their contact info or make a transaction.  So if we can get this part to work chances are we stand to get better results from social media.

On the other hand, the fact that MySpace missed their bumbers by a mere $800 Million is just a mere detail.

Exerpts from the article:

Lookery, an advertising network that buys ad space on Facebook in bulk, has been reselling that space at 13 cents per thousand times an ad is served, or in ad industry jargon, at a $0.13 cost per mille (CPM). Facebook sets a minimum CPM of $0.15 for its "social ads," which allow advertisers to target ads to Facebook users and groups according to characteristics like location and age. And over the last year, MySpace has lowered its banner-ad rate from a CPM of $3.25 to one of less than $2. By way of comparison, a banner on ­Mashable, a blog covering the world of social networking, has a CPM of $7 to $33, depending on its size. Websites with clearly defined audiences of executives and technologists who purchase corporate products and services, such as TechnologyReview.com, do best of all. Technology Review’s site boasts a CPM of $70. "

"Perhaps most optimistic of all is venture capitalist Ron ­Conway, the subject of the book The Godfather of Silicon Valley, who has invested in Google, PayPal, and dozens of Web 2.0 companies. "MySpace projected it would do a billion dollars’ worth of reve­nue this year. They came up short and did $800 million," he says. "Rupert Murdoch only paid $570 million for the whole thing. It’s been called the best acquisition of all time. I think Facebook is a couple of years behind MySpace but on the same trajectory. It’s a hugely monetizable business. I think it’s a slam dunk."