[jmtai]

I think this is both true and false. True for the social media startups that do not capture user intent in any meaningful way, but false for those that do.

It's very hard to make money off of people posting pictures of cats on a general forum (e.g. Reddit), but maybe not as hard to make money off of people looking specifically for pictures of cats (e.g. CHEEZburger). The latter captures user intent much more powerfully than the former, and the value to advertisers is thus much higher.

My startup (https://www.zupstream.com) is focused around making it easier to discover and organize real-world activities with your friends. We believe that targeted advertising can work in this case, since users are specifically looking for things to do, and then making plans with friends to actually do them. If someone creates an activity asking, "Anyone up for dinner tonight?", presenting an ad for local restaurants right then will be much more effective than displaying an unrelated banner ad.

[Domenic_S]

Maybe I'm just boring, but I don't see the TAM being that big for something like zupstream. The people who use it must have friends in the same locale, who are free tonight, who want to do something tonight, and have the money to do something tonight.

I think the challenge with social is that you need people who have the spending power of 25-30-somethings, combined with the social lives of tweens.

[jmtai]

Definitely true if the only use case is for spontaneous activities. We're targeting the stuff that falls in-between spur of the moment activities and major planned events. These are the things that make up the bulk of most people's social lives (at least, for those of us no longer in our tweens)... things like getting a group of friends together for dinner, a movie, or whatever.

These are the activities that most people tend to fall back on email, texting, and phone calls to coordinate, which becomes a pain when more than two people are involved.

Instead of "Anyone up for dinner tonight?", imagine broadcasting to your friends "Let's do dinner this weekend". For me, there's rarely a destination determined up front. There's usually a bunch of back and forth with everyone before a place is agreed upon. It's during this period that targeted advertising could work really well, because something as simple as a "Get a free appetizer with your meal" offer could easily sway the decision towards a particular restaurant.