Follow the dollars to Piczo

The Australian has a great article on the astonishing growth being experienced by social networking sites – Piczo has grown in just over a year from about 1 million to over 10 million monthly unique visitors and they are getting 2.5 billion monthly page views.

The San Francisco firm which targets teens and early adults is following in the footsteps of sites like MySpace in terms of user growth, but there is another key point to their success…the degree of engagement by their community of users. Millions of people spend hours working on their profiles: designing the page, describing their interests, writing web blogs and uploading photos.

Piczo’s CEO, Jeremy Verba, who was at AOL previously is quoted as saying, “There’s this massive thing happening, 10-to-22 year olds are coming on to the web and claiming it for themselves. This generation is grabbing on to this medium and making it their own.”

Go for your life.

We have seen with MySpace that where this demographic goes, others follow.

It’s also interesting to note that according to Jeremy they are generating revenue from promotional mini-sites — this is a great idea and a way to monetise community while still being useful to the community.