How do the owners of myspace,facebook etc make millions through the sites?

[Hazel]

I cant help but notice that having been on both of these sites I didn't have to pay to join them and neither did the other people. So how do these people become millionaires when their sites are free? affiliate marketing?
@ kristina, facebook might make a little profit from those games, but the makers earn most of the money from them.

[?]

By sitting on their arses

[Kristina Dickenson]

I think on facebook they have games like farmville where people can pay to get extra money or sometimes people just give them money

[Steve]

Advertising and marketing their product. Millions of people are on these sites so companies pay top dollar to have their add on the social networking site.

[para]

Advertisements, mostly. And the market's overrated expectations which make otherwise normal people to invest money into these sites with the vague promise that they will be able to sell their crap to the users.

However, did you notice that myspace has been producing losses in the past 5 years?

[xxcsai]

When you have a website that millions and billions of
people frequent, you can easily make money using
services like adbrite, adsense etc. Just by having a
few hundred people click on random ads that they see
on the right hand side of the screen can generate some
good extra cash for you and I. But can you imagine what
millions of page views DAILY would bring in for owners of
fb and myspace? If you can create a site that is popular
and exciting enough to keep people coming back, you can
easily retire early even if you don't charge a membership fee.

[cool guy]

THey secretly take your credit card info without you knowing.


But really, they have ads on their website, and I know Facebook has games that allow you to pay for ingame currency.

[Callum]

This magical thing called adverts.

[Smokies Hiker]

By selling advertising space.

[David H]

I think the wording is...'become billlionaires'.

Start with a great idea - build it up - and along come the money people who will/do pay 'billions' for the right social net-working site - because if its a worldwide appealing site ....millions of people use it every single hour of every single day.

They in turn 'swamp' the site with 'paid advertising' etc - all equalling 'millions+millions+millions' per year.!!

Have you got any 'good ideas' ? - because thats all it takes - just one.