Ruckus
Estimated unique monthly visitors: 300,000 (from Ruckus.com)
Ruckus is a campus-based music and media-sharing community offering college students unlimited free downloads from a music library of more than 2.5 million tracks and more than 4,000 movies and television programs. Downloads are 100 percent legal, virus free and available to anyone who has a valid school (.edu) email address. Users can see what music their friends are playing (i.e., most played, recently played, top 10 tracks), recommend music to friends and publish their playlists.
With an upgrade, you can download Hollywood movies, TV shows and music videos. It's free while you attend college, but you have to start paying $8.99 after graduation. Ruckus makes no attempts to hide its corporate, authoritarian roots. It is clearly a college administrator's solution to the headaches of music piracy.
As for Ruckus, they will eventually have a youth market database to die for. They will have complete records of millions of college graduates’ taste in music and movies. They will have provided a useful service that many graduates will opt to continue paying for. And they will have cultivated an incredible brand relationship over the years with this educated, influential audience. Not bad at all.
Sconex
Sconex is a high school social networking site, like Facebook, but with an emphasis on inner city/urban high schools. The coolest feature is the crush facilitator: if you want to know if someone you like likes you back, add them to your "crushes" and they'll get an anonymous email that says someone likes them. If they add you to their "crushes," you'll both be notified that you like each other. Otherwise, no one will know.
Sconex shows us that social networking sites are as keyed into the shifting demographics of this nation as the rest of the marketing world by acknowledging that Latin youth represent a viable target market. People have a desire to socialize among people they can identify with based on culture, race or class background, and smart web developers take advantage of that insight.