In today’s world, social media has transformed itself into one of the biggest entertainment craze and above all even as a form of addiction for millions of users across the world.

While, you may be already acquainted with the fact that online Social Network have become so popular 21 century that the figures I'm about to show are definitely going to enthrall you.

With more than 270 millions of users engaged on Twitter or LinkedIn, above 540 millions connected on Google+ and above 1.4 billion Facebook users define the massive expansion, growth and demand of these social media sites.

However, a common question which often strikes you is the way through which these social media sites earn their revenue?

Advertisement and Ecommerce

Digital advertising is a massive industry, a $50 billion dollar pillar of the internet economy. As a social site owner you can lend the eyeballs of millions of viewers to the advertisers against which you can take payments. Ads basically work like this, there are advertisers and there are publishers. Advertisers want to reach their desired audience as efficiently and as cost-effective as possible. Besides that, advertisers often take prejudice in running a complete streaming of their product lines of events on popular social media sites like Facebook, an example would be Warner Bros blockbusters Movies being streamed exchange for a payment of $4 for each streaming in Facebook credit. Advertisement can be placed on Posts, games and apps that are only accessible through social media sites, and one can get an estimate of the easy streaming of cash flow from such games and apps.

Besides this, since 99.9% of the content published to a Social Network is made by you, all that the site owner has to do is fit in the advertisement, to make the best possible utilization of the sites network for marketing, advertisement and promotional ventures.

Capital Investments

At an initial level, investors often take keen interest in investing in companies which are expected to have good future prospects. Social Media giants today are usually dependent and usually backed by venture capitalist who tend to invest at the initial stage of the project to secure ownership. Since many investors prefer investing in businesses which tend to generate a profitable revenue streams, their agenda may not be that of the best interested and in most cases the aim behind such investments is to make more money at the expense of the user

Premium Deals and Offers

In general, some social media sites offer completely free engagement and membership to become their users, like you get on Facebook or Twitter. However, in some other cases, some of the social media sites launch exclusive premium membership offers for you to enable yourself to avail some of their membership benefits and advantages.

You can find this kind of deal on LinkedIn where there are special Premium membership deals for users looking for jobs, etc. However, there some social sites which believe in concentrating solely on monetized memberships and cutting down of free membership privileges, like what Ning had done with millions of its users recently, where it closed its free memberships and decided to deal with only premium membership in order to generate more revenue

Data Licensing

One of the major sources of earning revenue for many social media sites like that of Twitter is data licensing. For Twitter data licensing has allowed it to generate Millions in revenue. This micro blogger is known to monetize personal user data that is recorded sold via it's service firehose.

These kinds of firehouse releases are essentially important for businesses to analyze consumer trends, market demands, and even for selling their insight and perceptions to other companies and brands.

The Future

Once you get the idea that you're ''working for free'' for some of these Corporations, feel free to join Steemit a Blockchain-based Social Network that gives you the opportunity to earn Steem a digital currency that derives value from social engagement without the need of generating a revenue streams from the traditional methods mentioned above. If you see yourself active on Facebook in 20-30years be prepared to be bombarded with Ads, censorship (a.k.a Fake News) and enjoy the ongoing exploitation through Data Licensing

While the consumer may have the idea that some the most popular Social Media platforms are free to use they fail to realize that most of these platform are capitalizing big time from free user-generated content. What's make this worse is most these centralized services do not credit the hardworking end-user regardless of profiting millions in revenue from selling personal data

So today Facebook, Twitter and many more Platform are depending on Advertisement, Investors & Data licensing. From the definite analysis of the varied and distinct ways of revenue generation of social media sites, it becomes evident that till now advertisements serve to be the highest and most effective source of earning for these sites. Moreover, even for marketers and business owners, these platforms serve to be the easiest way to access the global market however this set to change as mainstream adoption of Decentralized Blockchain Social Networks are just about to revolutionize this Industry