Paid for Popularity: Yuwie.com Pays Users for Their Social Networking "Skills"

How many of you MySpace and Facebook junkies would like to get paid every time some other equally-bored soul clicks on to your profile? How much would it change your attitude towards online social networking if you made more money based on how many friends you have, or how popular your photos and blogs are?

Is it even economically possible for a social networking website that pays its users to exist without eventually collapsing?

Yuwie (www.yuwie.com) and it's rapidly-growing user base are finding out. Yuwie is a new social networking site (read: another MySpace rip-off) with one important difference: users earn a commission for every time somebody else clicks onto one of their profile pages.

Money talks. Especially really, really easy money--money that users are making for time they'd otherwise be wasting on MySpace or Facebook anyway. The radical idea that fuels Yuwie.com has the potential to completely change the face of online social networking in several ways.

Best case scenario: people will strive to make their pages better so that they get more page views; users will begin to design their layouts more carefully (and less annoyingly)... who knows, people might even begin to spell-check their profile content. Wouldn't that be something?

Unfortunately, what is more likely to happen is the wholesale increase of "whoring." You'll receive myriad requests, invitations, and other communiqués from people you don't know--and don't want to know--in real life. Everybody and their brother is going to start promoting the hell out of their pointless, ranting blogs and their stupid pictures of their bad haircuts, just because they want your all-important page view. See, the problem with a system like this is that the content itself doesn't actually matter... once somebody convinces you to visit their profile, they get paid for it, regardless of how asinine that profile may actually be.