James Osborn

Affluence.org has been proclaimed ‘Facebook for rich people’. Every niche demographic seem to have their own social network and Affluence.org has been designed for rich people who like to talk to rich people… exclusively. It aims to bring ‘the members-only country club‘ mentality to the web but whilst this may sound like a good business model (think how much you could charge for ads that exclusively target rich people) I struggle to understand what these so called ’socially elite’ gain in return. Not making $300,000 a year or having a net worth exceeding $3 million I am (unfortunately) unable to join the site, and so this is a rather unbalanced review however I am interested in what we can learn from the business model.

Scarcity has always been a valued commodity and Affluence.org sells exclusivity.  No social network works if you’re on your own and the site is reportedly gaining about 400 to 500 new members each day. Although this is nothing  in comparison to Facebook’s 700,000 new users each day (as of Dec 2008) it is a fair rate of growth for such a site. From an advertisers point of view every member of Affluence.org  is worth far more than an ordinary user whose average salary (in the US) is $21,350 each year (a minimum of 14 times more in fact).

The site promises free access to a dedicated concierge, ‘invites to the most exclusive events and parties in the world’ and ‘priority access to the world’s most exclusive nightclubs, hotels, and restaurants’ as well as the usual social networking features. However many of these individuals will already have access to many of the above services.

The site really plays on a persons vanity. Everyone likes to feel like they belong to an exclusive club and this is what Affluence provides.This sort of scarcity creates the real value in a site and was something Google utilised in the growth of its GMail service, every member had to be invited and each of those members had 5 (and only 5) invites to pass on. Recipients of invites felt honoured and understood the scarcity which created a demand. The last thing the world needed was another webmail service but Google Mail utilised the value of scarcity to gain huge growth - and we can see this process being emulated by Affluence.org.

Tagged as Affluence.org, Business, Computers and Internet, Google, Job, Social network, Social network service, Web Design and Development, Website + Categorized as Business, Commentary, Reviews