Andrew Paulson, President, SUP (Livejournal): “advertising is great, but not a renewable resource - it’s not infinite. Everyone seemed to think that a social network will solve everyones problems. I’ve met a lot of people from TV and other media in India, and everyone says yes, yes, social media, but unless you’re really in it, I don’t think you really don’t know what you’re dealing with. We don’t really know what people on social networks are doing, and many times we don’t even want to know. In Russia we have to worry about neo-nazi propaganda, but not in the US, in the US, we have to worry about pedophilia.

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What differentiates social networks is the way the community decides to use it. MySpace is about showing off, facebook is not about content, but about finding people you know, and making friends with friends-of-friends. In the same way that there are different kinds of magazines and newspapers, there are different kinds of social networks. Social networks can just take off on their own - Google (NSDQ: GOOG) didn’t do anything to make Orkut successful in India and Brazil, and Friendster did nothing to make a success in Indonesia, but it happened and it spread. Livejournal is about arguments and about community. This is a platform which allows people to create content and share with friends and friends-of-friends. People who come on to Livejournal are interested in finding people who have the same interests.

We have an agreement with media organizations - in Russia, with BBC, NYT. NYT wrote a controversial article on Russia, and posted a translated version on the NYT community on LiveJournal, and allowed users to respond. There were thousands of responses, which the NYT translated back into English and then published them.”

One interesting warning from Paulson: “The CFOs of media companies right now allow content on the website to be put up for free, but in time, as other revenue streams (particularly print advertising) dry up, they will look at the websites in a completely different manner, and the readers might have to pay for content online.”