Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Multiply is one of those social networks you don’t hear much about, drowned out by the loud buzz of MySpace and Facebook. But Multiply has slowly built a loyal and active user base, and is attempting to monetize by offering high-volume media storage that never expires and ad-free usage for $20 a year.

Attempting to be the “adult” alternative to the mega-sites out there, Multiply is drawing in a good number of users in their upper-20’s to mid-30’s. Assuming users of this age group are more likely to shell out for a premium service, Multiply’s answer to the monetization question is built on the back of this perceived loyalty and maturity.

Multiply boasts 9 million users who upload 2 million photos, 19,000 videos, and 55,000 blog entries a day (according to them, at least). The emphasis for Multiply, and what makes it more popular amongst older users, is “real-world” networking: actual close friends and family rather than a more causal approach one would find with MySpace or Facebook. Security is also accentuated, with sophisticated settings that allow different degrees of access for different contacts.

It will be interesting to see if this attracts any Flickr Pro users. The added blogging features and slightly lower price of Multiply, along with the promise of simple importing from Flickr to Multiply, may attract new users.

However, the gist of this move by Multiply seems to be to capitalize on the users they already have, gambling that many of them would like to store their media for longer than 30 days while also having it viewable by their network of friends.

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