Orkut

Today, I have completed 18 months and 18 days on orkut, with more than 1450 scraps, 28 fans , and more than 200 people in my friend list.

I was thinking for past few days about how does orkut earns? I asked many people about it but didn't got any reply except for :

This is the mastermind behind Orkut community.
Some facts about Orkut:
1)Orkut Buyukkokten(the creator of Orkut) gets $12 when every person registers to this website.
2)He also gets $10 when you add somebody as a friend.
3)He gets $8 when your friend's friend adds you as a friend & gets $6 if anybody adds you as a friend in the resulting chain.
4)He gets $5 when you scrap somebody & $4 when somebody scraps you.
5)He also gets $200 for each photograph you upload on Orkut.
6)He gets $2.5 when you add your friend in the crush-list or in the hot-list.
7)He gets $2 when you become somebody's fan.
8)He gets $1.5 when somebody else becomes your fan.
9)He even gets $1 every time you logout of Orkut.
10)He gets $0.5 every time you just change your profile-photograph.
11)He also gets $0.5 every time you read your friend's scrap-book & $0.5every time you view your friend's friend-list.
12)Many Global Financial Consultants think this person might become the richest-person in the world by the end of 2009.

But an obvious question is : Who pays him this money? Google ??? Why ???

Other question that came to my mind were :

1) How does Orkut earns?
2) Google still earns no revenues on Orkut. Why ???
3) Nearly two in three registered Orkut users hail from Brazil. Why would Orkut be so popular in Brazil?
4) What problems might Orkut solve that Google would otherwise find significantly more challenging?

Just think about it for a few minutes. If you've been thru the Orkut registration process, you know that it attempts to collect a ton of data about you.

This is a pretty good insight into some of the dangers of social networking and website customisation -- marketing and loss of privacy. When marketeers know who your friends are and what you are all into, it makes their advertising a lot more effective. Why is MySpace worth over half a billion dollars without a proper revenue model? Why is Digg allegedly pitched at over $20m (at the last count) without any idea of where money is going to be pulled from? The answer is - data. Information. Marketing. Every detail about you and me. That is where the money is.

What will happen if tomorrow we get something as orkut.google.com API for marketers ??

Your comments and suggestions are welcome.
Please reply to me on mitanshu.garg[at]googlemail.com

Update : Visit a nice post at http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-06-12-n85.html