These sites — YouTube, Bebo, Myspace, LastFM and iLike — are a corporate market researcher’s dream. Instead of putting ads on Craigslist in search of test market volunteers and paying them $100 for their time, all one has to do now is search a social networking web site that lives and breathes off the number of eyeballs hitting their URLs.

Just watch these videos and you’ll see. Gen X isn’t so angsty anymore as it exploits Gen Y. It’s fascinating stuff, and it makes one wonder: what’s next????

Alas, this is the fact of building a business online. How does one make money? The answer since the beginning of the dot.com boom has been ADVERTISING, ADVERTISING, ADVERTISING.


Is it all a bad thing? Who knows. People have mortgages to pay and kids to feed. It’s not the worst thing a business could do. But…

There are alternatives.

Shapeshifters.net, based in Vienna, Austria, has no intention to sell advertising on its web site where creative professionals can network with each other. Why? The founder, Eric Poettschacher, is a creative person himself — a writer and filmmaker — and has used his creativity to figure out other ways besides advertising to support his Internet-based company, i.e., spin-off products: a magazine, a movie and an investment consulting service that is not happening online.

So, if you want to be part of the social networking thing without becoming Big Brother’s marketing guinea pig, check out Shapeshifters.net.