Ah, Engrish. There’s a whole world of funny translations out there to laugh at.
Cyworld, the massive Korean based virtual world, is shutting down its U.S. site, which draws all of 112,000 monthly visitors according to Comscore. And while the shutdown is sort of sad, the message they sent to users more than makes up for it. The translation is bad. Not Matrix DVD cover in Korean bad, but bad.
Yes, I know Americans and others butcher other languages in reverse all the time. But that doesn’t mean I can’t laugh a little at this, too.
CyWorld first launched in the U.S. in 2006, and we estimate that they are the twelfth most valuable social network in the world overall. Email is below: → Read More
A year ago we modeled out the true value of various social networks based on the idea that users in high-value online advertising markets like Japan, the UK and the U.S. were worth more (financially speaking) than those in lower value online advertising markets. Facebook had recently become the largest worldwide social network in terms of users, but based on our model MySpace was still by far the most valuable social network.
We’ve now remodeled social network valuations based on current user numbers and Facebook’s most recent $10 billion valuation. The results are dramatically different.
Based on the original year-old model, if Facebook was worth $15 billion (their then-current valuation), MySpace, with far more U.S. users, was worth nearly $20 billion:
Our model takes Comscore data for available countries and regions. We’ve graphed each of 26 well known social networks with the data we have been able to collect. We’ve then calculated the average advertising spend (estimated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a recent report) for each person online in each of those countries. For example, in the U.S., the total 2008 estimated Internet advertising spend is $25.2 billion. We’ve divided that by the number of people online in the U.S. according to Comscore (191 million), to get an average Internet spend per person of $132. View the raw data and calculations here.
The U.S., by the way, is only the 4th most valuable market per Internet user, trailing The UK ($213), Australia ($148) and Denmark ($144).
Those of us in the US can finally get our very own minihompies in the newly launched US version of the South Korean social network CyWorld. Minihompies are now called MiniHomes in the US version and they are these strange little spaces for user avatars (MiniMe) and cartoon charms that people apparently spend real money on. Most of the charms appear to cost 5 acorns – the CyWorld currency (around 50 cents?) though purchasing more acorns with cash will not be enabled on the US site until next month. So spend your acorns carefully when souping up your hompie. The new US site is experiencing some technical problems on its first day, account creation is a little messy but you can go in and look around the site. According to a report by Katie Fehrenbacher, CyWorld parent company SK Communications has set up a 30 person office in San Francisco, spent around $10 million to the US version and pledges to spend whatever it takes to be succesful in the new market. Still to come are a mobile play and music sales through CyWorld. The company already has localized versions in Japan, China and Taiwan. Localization for most of the rest of the world is in the works. Up to 90% of South Koreans under the age of 20 are reported to be registered on CyWorld, a market share even MySpace must be envious of. Whether CyWorld can translate its success in one country elsewhere is a great test case concerning the challenges of localization in the social networking space. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the vast majority of US users will prefer the wide open space and clumsy code of MySpace to the minihompies, acorns and silly cartoon avatars of CyWorld. I suppose the employment screening perils of MySpace could be averted if you were able to say “that wasn’t me – that was my MiniMe!” Whatever. If MySpace and Facebook are struggling to define themselves as places that include young adults with money, how hard is that going to be for CyWorld? Perhaps in other parts of the world very young children make frequent micro-payment online purchases online (see Finland’s Habbo Hotel – $30m in twenty cent transactions), but I don’t think that’s common practice in the US. Perhaps they are targetting the demographic of adults who love HelloKitty, perhaps I’m → Read More
