Pownce Closing Down

So Pownce.com announced that they are closing on December 15th. I actually went to sign up yesterday, so it's not really going to affect me going forward. But it makes me wonder if the lack of a revenue model for all of these social media sites we keep hearing about and using will mean that they too will end up eventually going the same way.

For the big 2 or 3 (Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn?) probably not. After all, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 Billion (yes, with a B) before it had any true revenue model. Chances are before these go under they will be bought by someone. Ning probably has a chance, although I'm not sure how they're earning their $$. But for a site that had an Alexa rank of 177 yesterday, I sure hope they are figuring out how to monetize all that traffic. By comparison, Twitter was ranked at 511 yesterday, Facebook was at 5, and Linkedin was at 131. A little suprising that Twitter isn't a little bit higher, but I'm guessing Alexa probably doesn't count all of the widgets and desktop apps that access the TwitStream.

Thinking about it, though, I wish I had the problem of having a site with that much traffic and trying to figure out how to make some $$ out of it. With all the problems that are out there these days, this one seems like it should be solvable by the much smarter than me people who came up with these great sites.

I'm hoping.