Social Networking site Tagged is going through explosive growth, and they have  an interesting growth and monetization strategy. Last week, a techcrunch profile mentioned that they are signing up 350,000 new users per day and generating 1 billion page views per month.  The site’s monthly revenue is $600k per month.

The first thing that sparked my interest was how on earth they could maintain such a rapid rate of new user acquisition.  During their signup process, they slyly ask users to import their address book to invite friends to the site. The friend invitations are some of the slickest that I have seen.  You can see some screenshots and a full writeup of the process here. I have read that they send out the invite multiple times. Apparently, this strategy has been very effective for them.

On the monetization side, they have done a good job of developing multiple revenue streams. They make money from:

• Email Marketing Opt-In at Registration (via postmasterdirect)
• Banners
• Search Agreement with Ask Jeeves. The techcrunch article says that most of their revenue is derived from the search agreement.
• Intellitxt. On all of their profile pages, certain keywords are highlighted and if a user hovers over them, they will be presented with ads from intellitext.
• Ringtones. They have some text links to ringtone CPA offers. With the size of their teen audience, they should make a killing on ringtones.
• Sale of Downloadable Games. They offer paid downloads of full versions of games such as bejeweled. Game downloads are probably not a huge revenue stream for them, but I like the diversification.
• They insert “targeted text ads” into the emails and site messages user s send. They are using a Adknowledge to provide the ads. I am curious how well the ads are actually targeted.

With their level of traffic, Tagged has a huge revenue opportunity. To further improve their monetization, I would pursue:

• Developing in the sponsorship/direct promotion area (think myspace). On their employment page, they are hiring some ad executives which should help with this.
• Promoting targeted CPA offers. Ringtones are a good start, but they could expand to education and other targeted offers.
• Market Research. Market researches would pay up ($4-$8/survey) for access to their userbase.

With such explosive growth, Tagged will be a good company to keep an eye on for the next few months.  In my next post, I will cover an aggressive monetizaton tactic of a site with a similar demographic.