Portal sites have high degrees of stickiness that are extremely attractive to advertisers. However, other social networking sites can draw large numbers of visitors as well. And smaller sites that have a more specialized appeal can draw enough visitors to generate significant amounts of advertising revenue, especially compared to the cost of running such a site. Fox example, software developer Eric NaKagawa posted a picture of a grinning fat cat on his Web site in 2007 with the caption "I can has cheezburger?" as a joke. He followed that with several more cat photos and funny captions over the next few weeks and added a blog so that people could post comments about the pictures. Within a few months, the site was getting more than 100,000 visitors a day. Nakagawa found that a site with that kind of traffic could charge between $100 and $600 per day for a single ad. Today, he spends his time fine-tuning the site to make it more attractive to visitors, who now submit their own photos and captions. Today I Can Has Cheezburger is generating a respectable income. Nakagawa has no illusions about expanding the site, hiring thousands of people, or selling stock to the public, but he has a comfortable living generated by a highly specialized social networking site.
One rough measure of stickiness is how long each user spends at the site. Figure 6-10 lists the most popular sites on the Web based on the number of users who accessed the sites from home during the month of February 2008, and Figure 6-11 shows the same information for users who accessed the sites that month using computers at work (Note: People who have broadband access at work and not at home often use their at-work computers for personal business during nonwork hours). The information in both figures is adapted from Nielsen Online reports and shows sites grouped by owner. For example, the numbers for Microsoft include activity on all sites operated by Microsoft, including people with Hotmail accounts checking their e-mail and MSN subscribers using that Web portal s services. NewsCorp Online is the owner of the MySpace social networking site.