A frequently asked question of the times is ‘how do you make money from social networking?’ Russia’s biggest social net site Odnoklassniki.ru has opted for the obvious strategy: charge new users to stay in touch with their friends. As Yakov and WAN’s SFN blog note, new Odnoklassniki members now have to pay between 29 rubles (£0.66) and 35 rubles (£0.77) to send the site an activation SMS which will allow them to send messages, comment on photos and visit friends’ pages. Current members will not be affected.

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The site says the measure is simply to avoid spammers, who have posed a problem for its 22 million members and six million daily users. But if that’s the case, surely there are free anti-spam measures social net sites can take? Odnoklassniki already charges users about £3 to upload more than 100 photos a month, around £2.45 to appear offline while browsing the site and £2.45 to delete user ratings of your own photos. The site made $3.3 million (£2.02 million) revenue in Q108 and, according to Yakov, is expected to make $30 million (£18.4 million) in revenue this calendar year.