“How will they make money?” is the wrong question

Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger's... wait, the article's author is not named in the text, so I should not name him. The article argues that for large consumer networks, the central question is not how they will make money but whether they can become durable networks that establish new behaviors, since monetization at scale tends to follow. The author lists four tests: whether 100M+ people could adopt a new behavior, whether engagement deepens over time (citing Evernote and early Facebook), whether growth is sustainable, and whether the core behavior can be monetized. Ev Williams is quoted saying that having many users and being unable to monetize them is a non-existent problem, and the article applies this view to Snapchat.