If you look at a site like FriendsReunited (http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk/ http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk/) in the UK, they used to charge an annual subscr

If you look at a site like FriendsReunited (http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk/ http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk/) in the UK, they used to charge an annual subscription (around GBP 5 from memory) for you to contact people that you found on the site. And that was pretty much all the site did. Along came facebook and friendsreunited quickly suffered a decline in users - even after they abandoned their subscription model. The site is, for me, next to useless as there are so few active users on there. And so a spiral of decline begins. You need users - lots of them - to make a social site work. To illustrate the decline in value of FriendsReunited, they went from a sale to ITV in 2005 for GBP 120 milion to a sale in 2009 for just GBP 25 million.