updated
Friendster, the early social network that stumbled badly three years ago and gave up leadership status to MySpace, Facebook and others, continues to recover — and its 40 percent page view boost last month is remarkable.
The site had 24.7 million unique users last month, according to the latest Comscore data for global traffic just released. It lags behind leaders such as MySpace and Facebook (see chart below), but it is holding its own among the large pack of second-tier social networks of size, including Bebo and Piczo, as it grows in places like Malaysia and the Philippines.
The site’s page views, though, grew to 9 billion, a whopping 41 percent in May compared to April. At first glance, this suggests some mistake, or worse, a scam. We talked with David Jones, vice president of marketing, and he said the boost was coming in a number of ways, but assured us they are legitimate. The site has made a number of changes over the past two months. The biggest is that it has finally managed to fix the technology that had slowed its growth in 2004: Its “graph server” allows it to see how you are linked to your friends through three degrees (allows you to control relationships with your friends, their friends’ friends, etc.). The graph plagued Friendster at first by creating too many variables to track. It has been fixed to be able to manage four quadrillion possible configurations.
Aside from that, Friendster is driving page views in other ways. Just as on Facebook, when your friends change their status, such as add a friend, that information gets updated on your profile. The system also defaults to sending you an email with those changes weekly — prompting you to click through to Friendster, and creating still more page views. It has added a classmate function, to track people you may have gone to school with. It has added a classifieds section. When you sign up with Friendster, it will prompt you to add your contacts from your address books, and tell you who is not already in Friendster and prompt you to invite them. This, of course, drives still more page views as those friends click into to see your invite. And yet, while many of these features drive up page views, and may seem artificial, they have become pretty standard at other sites.
The company is still not profitable, but is poised to be soon, Jones said.
9 Comments
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Saad Khan said:
I think you meant “Facebook” in a couple of places where you said “Friendster”…
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MARK KLEIN MD said:
Wow, big deal, a bunch of people in the philippines like friendster. what’s next, orkut PR?
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Matt Marshall said:
Thanks, Saad, corrected!
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bean said:
>> Wow, big deal, a bunch of people in the philippines like friendster. what’s next, orkut PR?
dude, the Philippines is NOT abbreviated as PR *lol*
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amin said:
good..then help me,i cn’t upload my pic..hv problem 2 loading
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bloOdcrift said:
ilUv yOu
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sha said:
oh shit.. my Frnzter profile turn ugly.. its ruin…
Guyss.. can you help me turn back my pretty profile…????
plss.. porpabor…i felt veryvery sAD…
hey… do you know whats make it ugly????/ -
lance said:
It only shows that Friendster is thriving and I believe that most of the page views are coming from the Philippines…
18 Trackbacks
4:52 pm
HipMojo.com - Main Street Meets Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley » Social Networking: A Game of Risk? said:
[...] a time when once-upon-a-shining-star Friendster reports a 40% monthly gain in pageviews in May, 2007 (skippy: can you check to see if the population of the [...]
6:13 pm
Friendster back from the edge | TechWag said:
[...] Guess this will teach people to say “its dead jim” long before it really is dead. Friendster is back from the Web 2.0 graveyard and posts a 40% boost in traffic according to Comscore via Venture Beat. The site had 24.7 million unique users last month, according to the latest Comscore data for global traffic just released. It lags behind leaders such as MySpace and Facebook (see chart below), but it is holding its own among the large pack of second-tier social networks of size, including Bebo and Piczo, as it grows in places like Malaysia and the Philippines. Source: Venture Beat [...]
7:31 pm
Is Friendster coming back? Puh-leeze » mathewingram.com/work said:
[...] early social-networking success, followed by equally rapid failure — has had what he calls a “massive” 40-per-cent jump in page views in May, to 9 billion (Facebook gets about 11 billion a [...]
11:36 pm
Friendster Up 40%: More Web 2.0 Cake For Everyone said:
[...] Friendster experienced a 40% page view growth rate in May, according to the latest comScore traffic figures published at Venturebeat. [...]
1:20 am
zweinull.cc » Blog Archiv » Nach dem großen Coup - wie geht es weiter mit Facebook? said:
[...] waren es 67 Millionen, bei YouTube 43 Millionen. Nach den gestern von Comscore veröffentlichten Zahlen lag Facebook im Mai sogar bei 47 Millionen (Dezember 2006: 22 Millionen). Die Tendenz ist [...]
1:41 am
Friendster Up 40%: More Web 2.0 Cake For Everyone | moraaz.org - feed all tech! said:
[...] Friendster experienced a 40% page view growth rate in May, according to the latest comScore traffic figures published at Venturebeat. [...]
1:57 am
Ajax Girl » Blog Archive » Friendster Up 40%: More Web 2.0 Cake For Everyone said:
[...] Friendster experienced a 40% page view growth rate in May, according to the latest comScore traffic figures published at Venturebeat. [...]
6:14 am
» Friendster page views up 40% | The Social Web | ZDNet.com said:
[...] VentureBeat provides some good analysis, with a few key takeaways: [...]
11:24 am
Just a random blog ! said:
[...] Friendster experienced a 40% page view growth rate in May, according to the latest comScore traffic figures published at Venturebeat. [...]
1:33 pm
Facebook, Friendster Signal Changing Tide - Internet Insider Report said:
[...] that’s less than the others in terms of visitors, the site, and VentureBeat, point to the page views, spiking by 40 percent just last month to 9 billion. The company [...]
1:57 pm
Netzökonom : Der StudiVZ-Killer ... said:
[...] gemessen. Zum Vergleich: Myspace ist in diesem Zeitraum nur um 2,6 Millionen Nutzer gewachsen, Friendster und Bebo haben jeweils 3,5 Millionen Nutzer [...]
7:33 am
All Facebook - The Unofficial Facebook Blog said:
[...] According to VentureBeat, Friendster experienced a 40 percent page view boost in May resulting in a whopping 9 billion page views. This is pretty impressive given the massive competition created by Facebook. This provides a little bit of support to any argument suggesting that Facebook will not be the sole social graph of the future. Do all social networks need to open their platform to become competitive in the current environment? Maybe not. Personally I think so but given the growth of last month it may not be necessary. I will be interested in seeing what takes place in coming months. According to the VentureBeat article, Friendster is still not profitable. That is pretty pathetic given the amount of time that they have been around. I guess in the world of social networking it is a first mover disadvantage. Below are the traffic statistics for the top social-networks on the web: [...]
10:28 am
links for 2007-06-27 « Rost in de branding said:
[...] VentureBeat » Friendster sees massive 40 percent page view boost in May (tags: socialnetwork facebook) [...]
1:44 am
Facegook, Fiendster Signal Changing Tide » WNW Design - Web Design & SEO said:
[...] that’s less than the others in terms of visitors, the site, and VentureBeat, point to the page views, spiking by 40 percent just last month to 9 billion. The company [...]
3:56 am
voofox » 一線部落客與三線網站之間的「顧問計畫」，猶勝AP？ said:
[...] 菲律賓最近在全球互聯網界傳出一條大新聞：這個位於東亞小島國的網友，竟然能讓只剩一口氣的老社群網站Friendster妙手回春，重新起飛。這件事也提醒全球，菲律賓在陷入貪汙旋渦前，曾經是亞洲最受囑目的新興國家；就算它一度成為全亞洲電話鋪設率最低的地區，但畢竟它的大宗人口以英語為主要語言，和全球互聯網可以緊緊相扣。而且菲律賓目前的網路使用狀況也有進展，在它的8700萬人口中，目前已有大約1400萬的人口上網，佔總人口16%，是去年同期的二倍。這個比例雖仍低，但數字來講已經超過台灣；而它的線上遊戲人口也有可能於2008年超過630萬，這數字也可能超過台灣。以目前Friedster已經跳為全菲律賓Alexa排名第一的網站來看，它的1400萬上網人口應還可以支撐Friendster繼續一陣子的「少康中興」。 [...]
6:31 pm
VentureBeat » Multiply, social networking for 30-somethings, raises $16.6 million said:
[...] larger social networks, like Myspace, Facebook, Hi5, etc., competitors include Friendster (which is also growing fast), which claims to have already nailed the 30-something market, TeeBeeDee for people over 40 and [...]
10:03 pm
Pageview's are a misleading metric at Liako.Biz said:
[...] Friendster’s surprising growth in May was due to some clever techniques of using e-mail, to drive pageviews. And it worked. E-mail notifications, when done tactfully, can drive a huge amount of activity. Of the what seems like hundreds of web services I have joined, e-mail at times is the only way for me to remember I even subscribed to it once upon a time. Combine e-mail with information I want to be updated with, and you’ve got a great recipe for using e-mail as a tool to drive page views. [...]
6:30 am
VentureBeat » Founders Fund raises new fund, aims for more VC disruption said:
[...] servers, caused by the expanding number of calculations it was performing, was tremendous (see our discussion of the company’s graph server problem). That company’s venture backers couldn’t imagine a Silicon Valley tech company having [...]