Digital Talent Agency

Friendster: Big In Southeast Asia

Social network Friendster has over 30 million monthly visitors worldwide, says Comscore. The problem (or perhaps the opportunity) is that just 1.7 million of those visitors are in the U.S. The vast majority, nearly 28 million, are in the Asia/Pacific region, reported today by TechCrunch.

_{Malaysian pop star Karen Kong is one of the most popular people on Friendster, with over 150,000 friends}

It's become Southeast Asia's top social networking site. Asia is home to three-quarters of Friendster's 58 million users, compared to 17% in the U.S., and it's the source of 89% of the site's traffic, compared to just 8% from North America. While its bigger rivals MySpace and Facebook are just discovering the land across the Pacific, Friendster is already the most-visited web site in the Philippines and Indonesia, and the second most-visited site in Malaysia and Singapore, according to rankings from web tracker Alexa.

Friendster's international reach has become a competitive advantage, for the company as well as for users. Five months after releasing her first album, Malaysian pop singer Karen Kong uploaded a video of a recent concert performance onto her Friendster page last summer, attracting two million viewers, mostly from Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines and Indonesia. Her manager, Fred Chong, says that even though the record label created an expensive web site for the artist, Kong's Friendster profile is "way more powerful than any official page," attracting up to 800,000 page views per month. With more than 150,000 friends linked to her page, Kong has the biggest following of any Friendster user. "Her profile just exploded," says Chong. "For us, it's been a miracle." Friendster's trying to pull off another miracle. It's reaching out to the 210 million Internet users in China, where the company's user base is already "in the hundreds of thousands," Lindstrom says. Last September, the company began rolling out foreign language capabilities: traditional Chinese for Hong Kong, Taiwan and other Chinese communities around the world, followed by simplified Chinese for mainland China, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Unlike MySpace, which has launched separate, localized sites for different countries, Friendster is keeping all of its worldwide users on one multilingual site.

taken from this article by Ling WooLiu and this post by Michael Arrington.

Latin Social Networks - Regional Players Vs. Facebook

Latin in America.

According to the most recent Census Bureau projections, about 60 percent of total U.S. growth will come from the Latino population — that's almost 100 million additional people. One in four Americans will be Latino.  Hispanics have accounted for more than half (50.5%) of the overall population growth in the United States in this decade, a significant new demographic milestone for the nation's largest minority group.  Latin Americans also voted 2:1 in favor of Obama, a major driver in the success of the campaign.

Latin American Social Networks.

Latin America is a growing online market, with monthly unique visitors in the region growing from 53.6 million users in June 2007 to 61.6 million users in April 2008.

More internet users means more opportunity for social networks. For example, a new social network, Sonico, claims to have gained 17 million registered users since it launched last July.

But Hi5 is the largest social network in the Spanish-speaking countries (except for Google’s Orkut, which dominates Brazil). San Francisco-based hi5 gained its position by doing things like introducing a Spanish version of its site a couple of years go, while market leaders Facebook and MySpace focused on US growth. This past April, hi5 had 12.8 million unique visitors, about a quarter of its 45 million monthly visitors around the world. That’s a 20 percent increase from two months ago, when the site had 10.7 million unique visitors in Latin America, according to Comscore. This is part of hi5’s worldwide growth trend: Hi5 has grown from 31.5 million last December, according to comScore.

But Facebook has shown the most shocking growth around the world over the past half year, and is also booming in Latin America, likely spurred by the introduction of its Spanish-language version last year.

So what’s driving some networks’ growth, besides shear numbers of new Latin American users? Maybe, for Facebook, the fact that it is largely comprised of real people providing factual information about themselves — not fake profiles like what you see on other social networks — makes the difference? It’s not clear what’s happening driving Sonico’s growth, and anyway, it doesn’t register as a top site with comscore. Hi5, meanwhile, has continued with its market-specific customizations. It has recently introduced two new versions for Argentinians and Castilians, with more dialect translations to come. It also launched a Brazilian Portuguese version in March to compete against Orkut. It has also introduced a Spanish-language help page. Maybe this will allow it to keep growing, and maintain its regional market leadership.

Facebook: The Global Mothership

 

MySpace reached only 121 unique visitors in November and grew a slow 16 percent over the previous year. Hi5 did pretty well, coming in at 58 million uniques with a 89 percent growth rate. Orkut also did pretty well, too, coming in at 46 million with 86 percent annual growth. Things were quieter for Friendster and Bebo: 31 million with a 10 percent growth rate and 24 million with a 20 percent growth rate, respectively.

Why is Facebook growing?

The site has differentiated itself as a place where you share real information with real friends in a secure setting — in spite of launching years after some of its rivals. It started on college campuses in early 2004, and only let you connect with people you knew on campus. It opened up over the years to new “networks” — high schools, companies, and eventually cities and countries — but it always retained this concept of privacy. While rivals like MySpace made your user profile public, Facebook even today only lets other see excerpts of your profile unless they’re friends with you or in the same network as you. The result is that Facebook has near-universally convinced its users to provide real information about themselves; on MySpace, for example, people often create and use fictional profiles.

Facebook has also introduced a tool for users to translate its site into 35 languages so far, with 60 more in development. More than 70 percent of of users are now outside of the U.S.

parts taken from an article by Eric Eldon for VentureBeat and this post by Paul Glazowski for Mashable.

Top Social Media Sites of 2008 (Facebook Still Rising)

ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well.

Here's the complete article.

by Erick Schinfeld for TechCrunch

It's a Social World: With Women and China Pushing the Medium Forward.

from Netpop Research

With 40 million active users in the US, social networking has grown 93% since 2006 and is poised to play a vital role in the current economic downturn and also predicts a related increase in social media advertising opportunities.

The report, “Social Networkers US: Who they are and what they mean for next generation advertising,” draws from a projectable sample of 4,384 broadband users to pinpoint the specific demographics, online behaviors, preferences and “passions” of online contributors and social networkers.

Netpop finds that 76% of US broadband users (105 million) are active contributors to the web via social media (including uploading photos, blogging, rating products and other Web 2.0 activities). Moreover, approximately 29%, or 40 million broadband users are regular contributors to the web specifically through social networking sites and are spending increasing amounts of their online time communicating with each other, both one-to-one and one-to-many.

This, Netpop said, is signaling a shift in the content people consume and how they are entertained and is turning everyday users into natural connectors, promoters and influencers.

Key findings about US social networkers:

• Social networkers in the US are most likely to be single, employed women, age 18-39 and living somewhere between Indiana and the Atlantic Ocean, or along the west coast.
• A typical social networker connects weekly with an average of 18 people one-to-one, and 110 people one-to-many.



• Social networkers spend an average of 36% of their online time talking and sharing. This compares with 29% for non-contributors to social networks.
• Social networkers use multiple modes to communicate and stay in touch. These include IM, texts, blogs and microblogs.



• The top two social networks in the US are Facebook and MySpace. Currently, 60% of social networkers use Facebook, 63% use MySpace and 34% use both. However, Facebook has grown 500% between 2006 and 2008, catching up to MySpace in regular users in the past year. 



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• • Other social networking sites are popular among subsets of US users with broadband, including employed networkers (who use LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo); students (who use IMeem, LastFM, and Veoh) and retirees (who use reunion, Groups.Google and Classmates.com).

  Social Networkers and Consumer Behavior

  Social networkers also are much more likely to shop and spend more online than their non-contributing peers. Social networkers buy a variety of products and services and spend an average of $101 online per month, the study found. This compares with non-contributors to social networks, who spend $80 per month.  



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• The top sources used by social networkers when making shopping decisions are search engines, brand or manufacturer sites, online-only retail sales and auction sites. Some 6% also use social networking sites to decide what to buy.

  This propensity, Netpop says, will only deepen as more people will spend increasing amounts of time turning “inward” online to discuss their own personal situations as the recession deepens.

  “Social media will play the same role in this recession that movies played in the Depression,” said Cate Riegner, VP of Research, Netpop Research, LLC. “The growth of social networking is still accelerating and the bonds consumers are developing with friends and groups of like-minded people are just beginning to shape behaviors. Companies need to be there, talking to both their existing and potential ‘fans.’ Brands that experiment in social advertising now will be in the best position to leverage these important media channels when the economy turns the corner.”

  “CMOs have been discouraged, understandably, by the poor performance of standard online ad formats in social media spaces,” said Josh Crandall, President at Netpop. “But current attempts at advertising in social networking environments have been limited to traditional, display advertising. Facebook’s new “engagement ad” unit is a new development, but there is a long way to go. Understanding those environments, and working on new approaches to advertising, will become increasingly important as social media consumption grows.

  Social Networkers in China

  Related Netpop research among broadband users in China also shows that social networking is taking off there, with 46% participating regularly - 15% more than in the US.

  Today, 24% of all Chinese broadband users regularly participate in social networking - an increase of nine percent since 2007 -and social networking sites were influential in 20% of users purchase decisions, Netpop said.

  The report also reveals a complex social networking market in China: Fierce competition exists between many local (Chinese) sites and global leaders Facebook and MySpace.

  “Unlike the United States, where Facebook and MySpace dominate, China’s is a crowded market with many competing brands,” said Riegner. “Fortunately, Chinese social networkers are enthusiastic participants in social media who use many of these sites regularly - 6 sites on average.” 
•   Here's the complete article

The Burden of Interactivity: Jimmy Fallon uses the latest 2.0 tools.

"For nonreviewing viewers, interactivity is an opportunity for fun, creativity, intimacy with the talent, exposure to advertising and giveaways and community. For talent — for writers, actors, journalists and directors — interactivity often seems like a nightmare: ceding the artistic control (to hordes, no less) that is the whole reason they like this work in the first place. Still, it makes perfect sense that NBC right now would put aside qualms about interactivity to build a better viewertrap."

Here's the complete article.

by Virginia Hefferman for the NY Times.