MENEAME.NET

Meneame.net is a so called social news aggregator site. People can put stories they read somewhere else and rate them. Stories with very good ratings get to the front page. Meneame.net has currently a page rank in Spain of 309 and an average of 4.8 page views per user daily (www.alexa.com) . Both numbers are quite high – especially the second number, which means that users of this site are very faithful and active.
The most valuable asset a website can offer is user attention, as we can see with the google business model. As soon as you have the attention, there comes the money. If your website is able to create a lot of traffic, there will be companies willing to buy space on your site to put ads.
The site meneame.net started as a leisure project of a couple of friends, basically copying the code of the American example. The site hits different online trends: user created content, user moderation and social tagging.

If I were hired as a business development manager, I would do the following:
Before working on enlarging the business, I would minimize the risks of the failure of the site. This doesn’t sound spectacular, but I think there are some major risks, which could rapidly lower the page traffic and therefore threaten the business. Basically you have to make sure that your users trust you. If they start to think you manipulate the ratings and therefore the position of the articles, they will stop using your site. Digg suffered this criticism.
I wouldn’t change anything on the existing business model. Once users are familiar with basic functions, they hardly want to change their behavior.
On way of expanding could be into new markets. Today already over 6% of the page views of meneame.net com from Mexico (www.alexa.com).
The best way to get a higher return is through increased traffic. If we take a look at the site today, there are already banners and google ads integrated. We could increase the traffic through public relation activities for our own site.
Another, less obvious way came into my mind clicking on the links. The site takes you directly to the site of the information provider. Instead of going directly to this site, the site could open in a frame in the meneame site itself, so that we still have the attention on our site and we can show some google ads relating to the topic of the information. This evaluation would have to be well tested for consumer acceptance.
In the end we have valuable information of our registered users, including their interests. Using this information commercially is very risky. Do users fear we sell their profiles, they will stop using our site.