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Social Networking and Social Commerce Offers a New Way for People and Businesses to Connect Delray Beach, Florida
The question had become where do adults go to socialize online when they feel too old for MySpace or Facebook but are too young for Eons? Despite marketing targeted at teens and twenty- something's, over half of the visitors to social networking websites like MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and Live Journal are now 35 and older, according to recent industry reports. With the popularity of these online communities growing with no end in site, the time is ripe for a social networking service -- which is what Vois.com (pronounced "Voice") a community for users age 30-to-50, is positioned to provide.
Networking communities -- no longer just teenagers
Today more than 56 percent of visitors to MySpace now are over 35, according to industry expert comScore and about 41 percent of visitors to the college-targeted Facebook are now over the age of 35. There's a similar demographic at youth-oriented networking sites Friendster and Xanga -- yet the common misconception that exists is that these services are predominantly used by just teenagers. In reality, these services are now immensely popular with Baby Boomers and so-called Gen X'ers, many of whom have been members of online communities since the bulletin board system (BBS) Internet forums that debuted in the 1980's, through the early years of AOL's instant messaging and Usenet discussion groups.
So what is a social network member really worth?
According to Internet information service comScore MediaMatrix, the largest growing area of online activity is currently social networking sites. Figures provided by Nielsen/NetRatings placed the number of MySpace users at just 19 million when News Corp. paid $580 million to acquire MySpace members and a network of sites with the price paid per current MySpace user coming to around $30 each. In retrospect News Corp. has gotten a great deal as MySpace has grown almost ten-fold since then and currently has over 183 million members. In an investors meeting in Australia on November 14th 2006, Rupert Murdoch said that MySpace could now be sold for $6 billion -- about a 10x return on the original $580 million that News Corp. paid for it just two years ago.
More recently, Yahoo was rumored to have approached Facebook with an offer exceeding $1 billion dollars for Facebook's then 8.8 million users, which would have come to approximately $110 per user. Past July, Sony paid $114 per user to acquire the video-sharing website Grouper, which then boasted just 570,000 registered users. Since the acquisition of MySpace by News Corp., there has been only a few other publicly traded social networking sites -- for example Japan's Mixi, now trades on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Valued then at $1.5 billion with 5 million registered users, it was the most impressive regarding member value at $315 per user.
Unlike private companies Vois.com is the first Social Network/sCommerce (Social Commerce) service to enter the public markets in the United States as a publicly traded company. Unlike other Social Networks, such as Facebook or Friendster, members of Vois.com may directly impact the value of their investment by spreading the word about the service. Vois members and shareholders, themselves, can help the company grow by encouraging friends and family to join Vois.com -- with each new member adding potential value to the company and this value could possibly be monitored daily by its shareholders.