Strategy for starting a social network?
 

Starting a social network and am currently buying a profile feed to populate the site with members. Would you make the site 100% free until a reasonably sufficient membership base is established, and then introduce a subscription fee? Or, would you charge a monthly subscription fee from day one and keep buying the feed as long as is necessary? Btw, only males are charged, girls' memberships are free.

Sorry, but I think that business model is dead. Your best bet would to make membership 100% free, and drive it's revenue with advertising. Geo targeted ads, gender specific, age specific, sexual preference specif, ethnicity specific, etc.

AKA, the market that facebook got cornered?

Depends if its adult based or mainstream but either way you need to corner a social niche and not just another run of the mill social network

It's adult and specifically-oriented toward the femdom fetish...

So just have a woman on the front page ordering the men to get their fucking credit card out NOWWWWWWW!!

We have done this, not yet fully launched, but operational is Meet Profiles. It's 100% free for use. Will be supported only by advertising. Bugs are still being ironed out. We will support it with our ad network and will not add fake profiles.

People don't want to pay to use an adult version of facebook. Our site has a points system where 1 point = 1 cent, these can be exchanged for products or cash. We have some other cool things planned, but starting a new social network is not an instant key to success and isn't the kind of thing you will run on shared hosting or a VPS.

Very classy looking site. Hope its launch goes well for you. Are you going out to the world with this... or regionalizing it to Australia? I think making a site work for you by being 100%advertising supported is a tough proposition. Unless you have a ton of traffic... and what new site gets tons of traffic... I'm adverse to going with the advertising-only revenue model.

We're worldwide. At the moment it's testing but open for anyone who wants to join and put up with a couple of minor bugs. It's available in both PC or Mobile format. It's pretty much empty at the moment, but a few people have started using it.

In October we will be releasing a 3D Virtual World which will fit inside the site, where members can interact with eachother much like on Second Life but without the need for a special client.

You're right, it's a huge bet making a free site, however we think we have the ability to make it work.