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.

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.

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