A Social Think Tank For Creative Types.

As many of you know, I have many passions in life - including poetry writing, disco dancing, and the curing of otherwise incurable diseases.

These all pale in comparison however, to the sheer joy and slight sexual arousal I get from coming up with creative ideas.

Seriously, I am literally full of brilliant ideas, and can easily rattle off some recent innovative thoughts. I remember a few years back I was chatting to The Gupster about mixing brandy and coke together in a 340m soda can, I wonder what ever came of that? Then there was the time I envisioned a social network where you could find old friends and lovers, send them Friend Requests, and poke them or throw them with sheep if you felt the need, but had my doubts on whether something like that would ever catch on. So yes, these are just some of the crazy thoughts which regularly pop up in my head.

Most of the time I would just end up blabbing about it at a local bar or drinking hole, before forgetting all about it the next morning after a heavy hangover. Now, thanks to Ideabounty, I can actually earn some cash for my ideas.

Idea Bounty is a website which puts clients in touch with a large pool of creatives. Basically it works like this:

1) The client approaches Idea Bounty with a brief.
2) The brief is posted, and the creatives (that’s you and me) are encouraged to come up with cool ideas that would fit the description of the client’s brief.
3) If the client accepts your idea, you get paid - simple as that. You’re not even required to put the idea together, all you need to do is come up with a concept that they like, and they will pay you for it.

How easy is that?

F**king easy, that’s how.

There is currently a brief up for First National Bank (FNB), and if they like your idea, there is $2500 waiting to greet you. $2500 just for an idea, with the current exchange rate, that’s like R768 000. I’ve already submitted two staggeringly brilliant concepts, and I suggest you all do the same.

Just register by clicking here, and in 3 minutes you can be on your way to earning some serious geld for your brilliant idea.

Go, do it now quickly. I’ll wait for you.

More info at www.ideabounty.com.

Well, Maybe.

So apparently Facebook is spending money faster than that time we ended up at House of Rasputin, and discovered our credit card had no limit. The problem here though is that that just like us, Facebook is not making enough money to cover the costs of that little adventure, and although the site is massively popular, it’s not earning the shitloads of cash people thought it would be making. Investors are getting nervous, and they are now struggling to get additional funding.

eMarketer estimates $265 million in revenue for Facebook in 2008. That’s great, right? Well, not really. The company is still losing money - lots of it - at current revenues. And it’s not clear that revenue will grow as robustly as costs. Most of Facebook’s growth is outside of the U.S. A year ago, according to Comscore, Facebook had 31 million U.S. visitors, about 42% of the total. Today, U.S. visitors have grown to just 41 million. 19 million live in Africa and the Middle East. 26 million are in Asia. Europe, with 48 million Facebook users, has a larger share than the U.S. Another 16 million are in Latin America. Just one in four Facebook users come from the U.S. today. As we wrote last summer, most of these international users can’t be monetized today. And to make things worse, bandwidth costs in those countries is generally much higher than the U.S. So the users cost more, and they don’t bring in any revenue. That international growth might be ok if U.S. growth remained strong. But the U.S. market just seems to be tapped at this point, and gaining market share from MySpace is a battle. As we wrote in August, at current growth rates it will take Facebook 18 years to overtake MySpace in the U.S. [via Techcrunch]

So is this the beginning of the end for Facebook? Maybe next time you’re online, you should click on a few of those shitty adverts they have running down the side.