facebook clone on low budget possible?

lightspeed

Hey im considering setting up a social network similar to facebook but i hope to have some added features such as a blog or forum. Now im aware of the difficulties in such a website succeeding, but lets say i was to gather a lot of traffic, would it actually be financially possible to maintain the site through advertising to bring revenue to the site? I figure the revenue achieved from advertising would compensate the running costs and that both should grow proportionally to each other.

So would i be a bit mad for thinking this or would it be possible although difficult to achieve.

Procrastastudy

I think a discussion site - possibly with a site where you could advertise stuff and maybe another one again for property would be the best way to go.



Joking aside live the dream OP, you won't know until you try.

Maybe call it Flabook?

yoyo

Joomla and JoomSocial may work. Joom Social is not free but powerful. Joomla is free (open source)

Nick

cookie1977

We used http://www.ezportal.com/ to create http://allthingsios.net/ It's simple enough to use and it's features aren't too bad. It's free.

Capt'n Midnight

Google are have sunk a Brazilian dollars in to their facebook clone
they have oodles of advertising, and a half decent search engine
and the network effect of a locked in audience of 425 million gmail users



so we can safely say you need to offer something special or niche to stand out amongst the "me too" sites to make it work


how are AOL doing these days ?


how would you support the site to critical mass ?

what would happen if you were slashdotted ?

there should be some info on how much boards makes from advertising to give you something to compare against.

Procrastastudy

I suppose its worth pointing out - just to add to the doom and gloom - that you'd probably end up defending the odd defamation claim here and there. At the very least engaging a solicitor to answer a number of spurious claims.

testicle

The infrastrure required to run such a site would cost a fortune.

lightspeed

Hi all, thanks for the help.
Im thinking of using phpfox or social engine and i already a short 5 lettered domain. Some of the questions asked are my main concerns that i need to clarify/

Im aware that the costs of maintaining the site will grow as it popularity grows. But the question is will revenue from advertising likely be proportionate to cost?

Im also thinking of having an iphone/ Android app and although facebook has not managed to perfect it, surely there can be some sort solution devised to allow for advertising within the apps themselves.

Ive been reading about cloud computing as a hosting solution. Is it possible with cloud hosting to have a large social network at an affordable level?

ED E

OP, sorry, but from the questions you're asking you have no idea of the tech involved. Get a nerd partner in crime, you do the ideas/advertising and let him sort the tech.

yoyo

Security and privacy will be another major thing (data protection/all that jazz). You'll need to make sure the website/script you use is secure and also if items should be hidden (i.e: peoples personal details) that the site wouldn't have any glitches/vulnerabilities whereby they could be accesed. Same goes for making sure to use a decent webhost, database host and even (if the site grows popular) have support for heavy loads, ddos attacks etc. Hosting a major site is not as easy as you think, I have made plenty of websites/some which receive 100s of hits some days and I would not be comfortable doing such a site alone, your best off teaming up with someoone who knows the tech side of things as ED_E suggests

Nick

lightspeed

No argument there. Setting the website up would be the easy part though. There are a lot of solutions out there that can make a fairly decent looking site to compete against the likes of facebook. Again the ultimate question comes down to being able to make enough revenue to compensate for the cost of maintanence.

lightspeed

yoyo wrote: »

Security and privacy will be another major thing (data protection/all that jazz). You'll need to make sure the website/script you use is secure and also if items should be hidden (i.e: peoples personal details) that the site wouldn't have any glitches/vulnerabilities whereby they could be accesed. Same goes for making sure to use a decent webhost, database host and even (if the site grows popular) have support for heavy loads, ddos attacks etc. Hosting a major site is not as easy as you think, I have made plenty of websites/some which receive 100s of hits some days and I would not be comfortable doing such a site alone, your best off teaming up with someoone who knows the tech side of things as ED_E suggests

Nick

Thanks for the advise. Whilst i may not know of anybody in the meantime that I could team up with, can you advise how much it would cost even at start up stages to maintain such security?

Would there be a reliable and affordable hosting solution that could provide for my security and hosting demands?

areyawell

lightspeed wrote: »

Thanks for the advise. Whilst i may not know of anybody in the meantime that I could team up with, can you advise how much it would cost even at start up stages to maintain such security?

Would there be a reliable and affordable hosting solution that could provide for my security and hosting demands?

There are millions of sites like the one you are thinking about. What is going to make yours stand out from the rest. You would be lucky to get 10 people using the site in a year and most of these would be spambots. To get hosting for your site just use <SNIP> or a cheaper alternative to host the site for you. Would be around 50 quid for the year. Also the cost of advertising would be unreal to get people to use your site. You would need to spend 10's of thousands to get advertising to promote your site.

areyawell

If the site did manage to take off with million of users and high volume of traffic, it would cost millions of euro a year to mantain with servers, data backup, spam measures etc, especially for a social media site, not so much a normal information site.

yoyo

lightspeed wrote: »

Thanks for the advise. Whilst i may not know of anybody in the meantime that I could team up with, can you advise how much it would cost even at start up stages to maintain such security?

Would there be a reliable and affordable hosting solution that could provide for my security and hosting demands?

You would need to know if the script you choose is reliable first (if there is any SQLi/XSS vulnerabilities in that no web host will help). Number two is choosing a host with plenty of space/bandwidth allowance (photo uploads even compressed get big if people upload hundreds in one go). Same with bandwidth.
You'd probably want to host the database with a company specialising in db hosting if there are going to be many queries going every second. Your best bet is to email around hosting companies (We can't discuss or reccomend any here). They should be able to tell you if they would be suitable or not.

Nick

Capt'n Midnight

check with google adsense to find out how many clicks you need

look at this forum
https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=985

unless you are getting millions of hits you won't be able to give up the day job

https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=80079397&postcount=17

I closed down a forum only two weeks ago that I'd built and helped run for 3 years. We shut it down because the moderation got to be too time consuming, and fights were breaking out too often. It got to be a pain in the ass to run.

At the time, the forum was getting 600K page loads a month. It had 30K posts, with 160K comments and 2,500 members. It was the most active forum in its niche in Ireland.

We ran Google ads on the site - 3 spots on each page, and it only brought in €150 a month.

lightspeed

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

check with google adsense to find out how many clicks you need

look at this forum
https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=985

unless you are getting millions of hits you won't be able to give up the day job

https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=80079397&postcount=17

Thanks for sharing that. it does help me to further investigate if having a social network with a forum could be even possible in the beginning.

I thought forums would have been a bit easier to generate revenue.As far as im aware, digital point makes a decent revenue. Althoughnothing like the major players like facebook.

How is it that successful blogs have managed to maintainprofitability? Is it because they require much less moderation andsecurity monitoring and such?

Blowfish

To put this whole thing into perspective, Facebook's first investment was $500,000, with another $12 million or so during the next year and then higher figures after that.

Despite having plenty of investment money to build up an infrastructure/business model, it didn't see it's first actual profitable year until 5 years later in 2009 at which point it had already had several hundred million sunk into it.

Making a social network is hard from a technical standpoint due to the volume of data involved. Making it profitable too is damn near impossible.

Capt'n Midnight

Blowfish wrote: »

Despite having plenty of investment money to build up an infrastructure/business model, it didn't see it's first actual profitable year until 5 years later in 2009 at which point it had already had several hundred million sunk into it.

To put that in perspective

Facebook shares are half what they were worth when the floated

Capt'n Midnight

lightspeed wrote: »

I thought forums would have been a bit easier to generate revenue.As far as im aware, digital point makes a decent revenue. Althoughnothing like the major players like facebook.

How is it that successful blogs have managed to maintainprofitability? Is it because they require much less moderation andsecurity monitoring and such?

http://www.freewebsitereport.org/www.digitalpoint.com Daily Page Views 3.4 Million Views

according to that boards.ie gets Daily Page Views 233,794 Views


Blogs work if they have good content and are known and a long history of excellence.
Huffington Post came from TimeWarner Aol. It didn't just come out of nowhere.

anyway /me hugs noscript , adblock and bugmenot

areyawell

Are you even a programmer? To get a nice looking site programmed like facebook or twitter it could take 20 years. These sites have hundreds of the top programmers in the world. What will make yours stand out? Even if you advertise your site you would be lucky to have 10 users in a year.

RUCKING FETARD

areyawell wrote: »

Are you even a programmer? To get a nice looking site programmed like facebook or twitter it could take 20 years. These sites have hundreds of the top programmers in the world. What will make yours stand out? Even if you advertise your site you would be lucky to have 10 users in a year.

Boards had 2 (mostly 1) up till a year or so ago.

Look at 'em go!!

Looked grand.

That Facebook program that was on BBC2 a few months back had some programmer/designer lad that worked there on, in that particular day all he'd done was change some font somewhere to a slightly different one!

May have 100s but def doesn't need them.

Probably just pulling an RTE and stopping some other company getting a good Tech guy.:pac:

yoyo

RUCKING FETARD wrote: »

Boards had 2 (mostly 1) up till a year or so ago.

Look at 'em go!!

Looked grand.

That Facebook program that was on BBC2 a few months back had some programmer/designer lad that worked there on, in that particular day all he'd done was change some font somewhere to a slightly different one!

May have 100s but def doesn't need them.

Probably just pulling an RTE and stopping some other company getting a good Tech guy.:pac:

Boards uses Vbulletin, big difference between that and setting up a unique social network. There are social network scripts out there but not much is known about relyability/robustness especially with thousands of members. Vbulletin is a well mature solution in the forum world, and it only does one thing, a social network is a totally different kettle of fish :P

Nick

RUCKING FETARD

yoyo wrote: »

Boards uses Vbulletin, big difference between that and setting up a unique social network. There are social network scripts out there but not much is known about relyability/robustness especially with thousands of members. Vbulletin is a well mature solution in the forum world, and it only does one thing, a social network is a totally different kettle of fish :P

Nick

Isin't half of Boards running on it's own....UI now...or if it's not it's near ready, thread about it in Feedback...or FeedForward or somewhere, would that not count?

ED E

RUCKING FETARD wrote: »

Isin't half of Boards running on it's own....UI now...or if it's not it's near ready, thread about it in Feedback...or FeedForward or somewhere, would that not count?

Its just skinned is all.

RUCKING FETARD

ED E wrote: »

Its just skinned is all.

What ya mean?

ED E

They havent re-imagined vbulletin, just changed the display. Most of the code is the functions of managing the forum, the UI is just the last little bit, and boards have just tweaked that.

Also, IMO, the new layout is terrible compared to the old "Beta" layout thats been going for ages, I'm back to that myself. But this is getting way OT.

RUCKING FETARD

yoyo wrote: »

Boards uses Vbulletin, big difference between that and setting up a unique social network. There are social network scripts out there but not much is known about relyability/robustness especially with thousands of members. Vbulletin is a well mature solution in the forum world, and it only does one thing, a social network is a totally different kettle of fish :P

Nick

ED E wrote: »

They havent re-imagined vbulletin, just changed the display. Most of the code is the functions of managing the forum, the UI is just the last little bit, and boards have just tweaked that.

Also, IMO, the new layout is terrible compared to the old "Beta" layout thats been going for ages, I'm back to that myself. But this is getting way OT.

Whats changed in Boards, for anyone wondering.