This (last for today) NYT article carefully argues that there might be a revenue model for social software sites soon. As stated earlier social software is nice new piece in the landscape. Sure you can easily burn all the money without making any revenues with social software as you can with any other business model. But sites like Friendster (or the German variant Friendity) have close to 0 costs to acquire new users. These users produce page views (at least).

Say Friendster will never have a single converted customer (ie paying a fee directly) 1 mio users produce minimum 12 million page views (one per month) a year. Multiply it with revenue per 1000 page views of $7 you already have a basis revenue which could help the site to keep afloat without major investments besides new servers.

On the other hand it should not be too difficult to get 1-2% conversion of paying customers for platforms such as LinkedIn or OpenBC. They offer enough value to justify this amount. A membership of 1-2 social software tools will become an utility in 5 years from now I guess.

So let's see what the NYT says:

"I'm having a real problem finding a business model here," said Nate Elliott, an analyst with Jupiter Research. "It feels like the early days of the Internet, with sites like Globe.com saying they'll aggregate tens of millions of users, then find a way to monetize them. That's not the way to run a business."

The creators of such services strenuously disagree, arguing that in contrast to the hundreds of dot-coms that bombed, they have clear plans for generating revenue. But those plans could be short-circuited by Internet giants like Yahoo and Google, as well as by established players in the online jobs and dating categories, whose turf most social networking sites seek to occupy.

Among other services, Match.com allows users to view lists of their friends' friends without charge, then charges users $11 to $25 monthly, based on the length of commitment, for the ability to contact prospective friends and dates.

The new Internet sites say they believe that their services will command similar, if not higher, fees. LinkedIn's co-founder and marketing vice president, Konstantin Guericke, said he expected users to pay in the range of $10 to $15 for each meeting, or an annual fee of $100 to $200 when the site starts charging for subscriptions later this year. "