By Jessi Hempel
Fortune Magazine

Financially speaking, Web 2.0 has been a total bust.

Social-networking companies such as MySpace and Facebook have loyal fan bases, but they’re not exactly minting money. MySpace’s projected $600 million revenue in 2008 falls far short of parent News Corp.’s (NWS, Fortune 500) billion-dollar sales target for the site. Messaging service Twitter has no business model. Video-sharing site YouTube was the only big sale; Google paid $1.65 billion for it two years ago but still hasn’t figured out how to make much money off it.

Social media’s champions hoped 2008 would be a watershed year for Web 2.0. (That’s the term tech publisher Tim O’Reilly coined four years ago to describe a new wave of Internet innovation that let users publish and share content.) Instead, the past 12 months have been a disappointment.

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