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When was the last time that you looked at your financial situation? Hopefully, when you did, it showed that you were making a profit from all your endeavors. You do know what a profit is don't you? That's when you're income exceeds your outgoings.

Now if you are making a profit what would you say the value of your business was? What would somebody pay for it if you chose to sell and were able to find a buyer?

Realistically speaking most of us haven't been able to build a business that's worth very much at all even though we may be making a very nice profit each year. Because of what we do and how do it we may have a few assets and we might have some sites that are getting nice amounts of traffic but that doesn't amount to very much if you were to sell your business.

Yet hopefully you're still making a profit.

If you are then you're doing a whole lot better than Facebook. You see Facebook has yet to make a profit despite the fact that a heck of a lot of money has been poured into it. Now doesn't that sound crazy ... a company that's valued at $15 billion still has not made a profit. Of course according to the CEO of Facebook 'they're close to breaking even' but they haven't done that yet.

Maybe I just don't understand high finance but where is the value in something that's not making a profit? It's no wonder that people like Warren Buffet don't want to buy into businesses like Facebook.

AOL also has to make you wonder. They're not exactly experiencing the best of times right now and they're cutting loose some important marketing staff so are they trimming their staff in some areas so that they can move into more profitable areas?

Ah ... well ... no. They're actually buying Bebo, another social networking site, for $850 million and it seems that Bebo is no closer to turning a profit than Facebook. However with that purchase AOL now has a social network that reaches around 80 million people around the world. The sad thing is though that like everyone else who is into social networking, AOL, isn't quite sure how to turn that huge social network into money.

Despite the hype that you see around the Net and in marketing circles social networks are becoming seen as notoriously difficult places to make money and advertisers are getting burned. They're being lured into advertising on those networks with the bait of exposure to millions of users but then they're finding that all those millions aren't buying.

Even Google has struggled to make money out of MySpace despite spending $900 million to advertise there.

So don't feel bad if your profits aren't quite what you had hoped they would be. At least you're still making a profit and that's more than can be said for all these big-time companies that are dumping heaps of dollars on the bottomless pit of social networking.

Perhaps they could all do better if they just employed someone from adult to show them how to turn traffic into cash. Of course if they did that then social networking wouldn't ever be the same again and all those beautiful traffic numbers they have might shrink but at least they'd be making a profit which is more than what they're doing now.

Actually companies like Bebo will definitely be worth watching over the next few years. The big buzz in mainstream marketing is still behavioral ad targeting and Bebo is one social networking site that is starting to get very serious about launching behavioral ad targeting. It will be interesting to see if this technology really does have as great an impact on the bottom line of companies like Bebo as the hype suggests.

The question of whether visitors to social networking sites really respond to ads that are specifically targeted at them as individuals or will it be just another interesting idea that's never going to work may soon be answered and the answer may be interesting.

Sooner or later you're going to see some attempt at behavioral targeting here in adult so perhaps there will be some lessons for us to learn as it's introduced on sites like Bebo, MySpace and Facebook. You would have to wonder though whether it would work here in adult where surfers are almost conditioned not to see any advertising at all but I'm sure someone will try it.

And that's about it for my week. I hope you guys can get away from your computers and enjoy the early spring or early autumn weather wherever you live. We're going to have a really disrupted week ahead of us so I think I'm going to spend a whole lot more time at my desk in the next two days than I'd really like to but if you want to take care of business then working on the weekend is something even I have to do from time to time.