[andrewhillman]

Digg, Myspace, BitTorrent, etc... at varying degrees were all able to monetize users and made millions upon millions of dollars while doing so. In fact, this answer from the founder of BitTorrent is to my point.

http://www.quora.com/How-profitable-is-BitTorrent-Inc

"Our main source of revenue is off the toolbars we push out, which isn't a great source of monetization, but it's something. You can do the math on how many installs we have and what the monetization of toolbars is, and subtract out the costs of having 50 employees, and you'll get a reasonable ballpark of how profitable we are, although the short answer is very. Even lousy monetization works well when you have more users than Twitter."