The Internet is a powerful driver of viral marketing because ideas can spread quickly through email, instant messaging, blogs, and social messaging platforms. Internet communications are frictionless because they are free. Examples of successful viral marketing companies are Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Gilt, and Polyvore. In all of these cases, the business grew very quickly due to viral marketing. They also spent very little money on marketing and sales because their customers worked for them.
The best businesses are those that have figured out how to combine viral customer acquisition with a good plan for monetizing those customers.
In the case of several viral businesses such as australia mobile database Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, early monetization plans were not well understood. Perhaps the worst business model is YouTube, which has very high costs in terms of bandwidth and storage costs for uploading and viewing videos.
In some of these cases, traffic levels are high enough that advertising is a viable option. However, if you do some simple calculations on the traffic levels required to bring in $100 million in revenue via CPM advertising, you'll quickly realize that only sites at the highest levels of traffic are large enough to make this form of advertising an interesting business.