Friendster, the No. 1 social networking site in Asia, recently made its debut in Thailand aiming to tap into the growing popularity of social networking with the hope of attracting one to two million active users over the next year.
Although a newcomer to Thailand, Friendster was leading social networking site in Asia and in the top 10 global web sites based on traffic. It had 85 million registered users and 61 million monthly unique users globally, according to Friendster marketing and PR director Jeff Roberto.
He noted that Friendster was exploring opportunities in Thailand and the region by setting up a sales business development team here.
"We are pursuing opportunities and negotiating with some local partners here, both media companies and advertisers," he said, noting that the media companies would be content providers. Content and mobile companies are the two big partners for Friendster.
Thailand represented a big opportunity for Friendster because of the large population, more people getting online and lots of online activities. More people also had Internet-enabled devices. "Even if Thailand is a new market for Friendster, we are big in neighbouring countries," he said.
The social networking community in Thailand today was dominated by Hi5 and it was challenging for other sites, he said.
Users worldwide can stay connected on the go via a new mobile site, m.friendster.com, and can subscribe to SMS text alerts in selected countries and get Friendster network alerts sent directly to their mobile device. In the past year, Friendster launched in nine new languages, he said.
While other social networks built separate sites for each country, all languages are supported on a single domain, http://www.friendster.com.
"We are the first global online social network to employ this single platform approach with Asian languages, allowing and encouraging multi-cultural exchange and communications among users around the world," said Roberto.The Friendster Developer Programme is the open platform and open revenue model, and any monetisation model works on Friendster. Ads are allowed anywhere in an app, developers can even place them on the profile page for dramatic in-page views and advertising revenues.
Citing comScore Media Metrix, he said users spent on average of 185 minutes per month on Friendster, compared to Facebook at 179, MySpace with 164, and Hi5 with 96 minutes.
In Asia, Friendster was the No. 1 social network with over 62 million registered users and 45 million monthly unique visitors.
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