With all the hype and “how-to” books about social media, it was about time for a scholarly investigation into the social media industries. The editor of this book states that the intention is “to consider social media as an evolving and unique communications-based industry […], one that has generated a number of interesting markets of activities.” The book presents a collection of broad-ranging essays by different authors with various viewpoints and insights loosely connected to emerging industries in social media.

Albarran, the editor and contributor of two chapters, provides a proven framework for analyzing the emerging social media industries in chapter 1, in the form of an industrial organization (IO) model that looks at structure, conduct, and performance. To analyze an industry, practitioners of the IO model typically investigate five variables: number of sellers, product differentiation, barriers to entry, cost structure, and vertical or horizontal integration. This investigation produces a comprehensive perspective on distinct social media industries. These industries have a hybrid structure that caters to both consumers and advertisers, presents low barriers to entry, and heavily depends on advertising; all are tied to mobile. The “currency” of consumers is privacy, which they, oftentimes unwittingly, compromise in exchange for extensive use of the social media platform.

The second chapter offers a “history of the social media industries” while discussing major social media activities, such as blogging, networking, collaboration, sharing, and gaming. After a thorough discussion of the major social media platforms, the author of this chapter concludes that networking sites are increasingly integrated with each other, mobile has become dominant, and privacy issues will have to be resolved.

In chapter 3, the author investigates “the paradoxes of social media,” including the contradiction of the user who wants very much to participate in social media but at the same time wants to enjoy a high level of privacy. Another paradox involves the desire to “disconnect to connect,” that is, to avoid becoming enslaved by the online world.

Chapter 4 investigates the business models of the most-visited social networking sites. Consumers have grown accustomed to having access to online information, leaving only two major options to monetize social media-related commerce: advertising and subscription. The author introduces a business model consisting of value creation, target market, sources of competencies, and revenue. She finds that Facebook and Google derive more revenue from smaller advertisers (“the long tail”) than from the larger ones. While all social networks derive revenue from advertising, some offer subscriptions (for example, LinkedIn) or sell virtual goods (for example, Facebook), and others syndicate their aggregated content (for example, Twitter).

According to the editor, these first four chapters provide the foundation for properly assessing the social media industries, while the remaining eight chapters deal with broader issues related to the marketing, content, morality, privacy, and demographics of social media use. A brief summary of the issues and findings from the book is found in the final chapter.

Edited books with multiple authors tend to have intrinsic shortcomings such as divergent definitions for the same concept, requiring the reader to follow the perspective of each author. For example, in chapter 1, the author notes that “social media represents the technologies or applications that people use in developing and maintaining their social networking sites”; however, the author of chapter 2 characterizes social media as a business model to “gain advantage from user-generated content.”

The book is geared toward academics, and furnishes these readers with a 40-page list of references. Each chapter is self-contained and very well written, with valuable pointers for further research. Chapters 10 to 12 are reports on research in progress on demographics and social media, with very tentative conclusions.

What is missing from the book is a discussion of the sociological aspects of social media and the fact that network theory (that is, graph theory) plays a vital role in social media. Along these lines, Brian Solis contends in an entry on his blog that “social media is about social science not technology” [1]. I share his view that the sociological aspects of society take precedence over rapidly changing technological innovations.

These criticisms aside, I recommend this book for its depth and thoroughly researched content. I wish that Albarran would find the time to dedicate an entire book to an investigation of the relationship of social media to industries such as music, entertainment, gaming, fashion, food, and recruitment, to name a few.