See this article: http://mashable.com/2009/05/04/asthma-alerts-social-networks/

What % of revenue do Nigerians on FB contribute to FB? And if you built a site that attracts all Nigerians on FB, can you monetize that traffic or will you be getting traffic simply for traffic sake. And what of the cost of providing services to these “users”, your costs could easily outgrow your revenues, worse with the exchange rate.

Monetizing social networks is extremely hard and monetizing in developing nations is thousand times harder. Check the stats for FBs revenue per user and think about how possibel it is to replicate it in Nigeria.

The trick I believe is to understand the limitations in your environment and create solutions that take advantage of the opportunities that these limitations create, then you can ride on the back of FB for awareness. How many FB widgets make money?

The true total available market in Nigeria is not 63million by any stretch and even if it is half of that, how would you monetize that audience withe a mobile social website? nI think it would be better to have a less popular site that can be managed and grown to profitability easily.

This article that has been making the rounds on the net explains challenges faced by Social networks.

The New York Times has an interesting piece about big online companies struggling to make profits in countries other than the USA and those of Western Europe……Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results. ….Facebook social network is also considering lowering the quality of videos and photographs delivered to some regions in an effort to reduce expenses.

See article here
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/technology/start-ups/27global.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Already, FB has ventured into mobile (m.facebook.com), and thus I predict that Facebook Mobile will likely get more attention from Nigeria than any other African country. The question now is: Is FB tapping into a huge market that other social networks are not seeing?

My answer is YES.

To conclude, if only Nigerian social networks are smarter enough, they’d have tapped into this mobile terrain and become mobile startups that even Facebook can copy. Not the other way around.

So @Raymond, what’s wrong with Facebook parasiting from Nigerian social networks if the above has already happened? And like I asked in my previous comment: “If there was nothing like Facebook, wouldn’t social networks leverage on ‘their own’ initial success?”

@Loy Talking about parasiting (if there’s a word like that)? Yes, thats what it is…..most major businesses today is a spin off of something else…the idea is to add value and the rest will come.