Exclusive - TechCrunch has learned that an alleged violation of Facebook’s policies has resulted in a relatively high-profile casualty: Netlog, a sizable European social network, got banned from the Facebook platform earlier this week.
Netlog isn’t widely known in the United States, but has been around for more than a decade and claims 80 million users, most of them in Europe and the Middle East. According to parent company Massive Media, Facebook provided no explanation of which specific rule they broke, or in what way. → Read More
European social networking site Netlog is to become part of a newly established social media company dubbed Massive Media, the company announced yesterday.
The Ghent, Belgium-based company says its product portfolio will soon be expanded to new markets but declined to disclose any further information on future projects at this point.
Co-founder and CEO Lorenz Bogaert did reveal that the company recently hired 25 new employees to work on new endeavors inside Massive Media. → Read More
European social networking site Netlog is to become part of a newly established social media company dubbed Massive Media, the company announced yesterday.
The Ghent, Belgium-based company says its product portfolio will soon be expanded to new markets but declined to disclose any further information on future projects at this point.
Co-founder and CEO Lorenz Bogaert did reveal that the company recently hired 25 new employees to work on new endeavors inside Massive Media. → Read More
Netlog, the company that sagely changed its name from Facebox in 2007, is taking this gaming thing pretty seriously.
While the bread and butter of the Belgium-based operation is still social— with 69 million members on its youth-centric social network— gaming is now nearly 20% of revenues and climbing, according to Netlog founder, Lorenz Bogaert.
Twenty percent is fairly significant when you consider that its gaming operation, Gatcha!, launched just 8 months ago. At its core, Gatcha! is a gaming distribution platform.
The service creates its own in-house games but the bulk of its business is helping other developers add social layers to their games and achieve distribution across the major social networks such as Facebook and Netlog. Gatcha! gets a cut of the developer’s advertising deals and those highly lucrative micro-transactions, the developers get Gatcha!’s support and easy entry into Europe’s market— Bogaert says they can get a developer in front of a large European audience within 24 hours. → Read More
I’m currently blogging from a boat, rented by Belgian social network operator Netlog to host about a hundred of their closest business partners for a presentation about their freshly redesigned website and a roadmap of what’s in store for the future.
In their presentation, co-founders Toon Coppens and Lorenz Bogaert introduced something other than the newly revamped site. The company has also been developing a separately branded social gaming platform called Gatcha! which was talked about publicly for the first time today. → Read More
Today, Netlog – the ‘European MySpace’ as they’re often referred to – is hosting a Partner Day at and around their global headquarters in Ghent, Belgium. The most important thing the company will be sharing is a look at their redesigned website, which has been in the works for about a year and is today being rolled out to a number of key countries. I got an exclusive preview of the revamped website from co-founder Toon Coppens, so here’s an impression of what it will look like and where they’re going with the social network.
Netlog currently sees about 250 million visits from 56 million unique visitors on a monthly basis and is handling half a million new sign-ups every week. Its main target has historically been young people (65% of its user base is between 14 and 24 years old) and with the redesign the company is clearly catering to that particular demographic, making the homepage much more visual and far less cluttered. You can see some screenshots of the impending new version below, along with a screen capture of the ‘old’ homepage. → Read More
I’m currently blogging from a boat, rented by Belgian social network operator Netlog to host about a hundred of their closest business partners for a presentation about their freshly redesigned website and a roadmap of what’s in store for the future.
In their presentation, co-founders Toon Coppens and Lorenz Bogaert introduced something other than the newly revamped site. The company has also been developing a separately branded social gaming platform called Gatcha! which was talked about publicly for the first time today. → Read More
Today, Netlog – the ‘European MySpace’ as they’re often referred to – is hosting a Partner Day at and around their global headquarters in Ghent, Belgium. The most important thing the company will be sharing is a look at their redesigned website, which has been in the works for about a year and is today being rolled out to a number of key countries. I got an exclusive preview of the revamped website from co-founder Toon Coppens, so here’s an impression of what it will look like and where they’re going with the social network.
Netlog currently sees about 250 million visits from 56 million unique visitors on a monthly basis and is handling half a million new sign-ups every week. Its main target has historically been young people (65% of its user base is between 14 and 24 years old) and with the redesign the company is clearly catering to that particular demographic, making the homepage much more visual and far less cluttered. You can see some screenshots of the impending new version below, along with a screen capture of the ‘old’ homepage. → Read More
Not entirely unexpected, but still weird to see it confirmed and acknowledged: the federal tax administration in Belgium, my home country, is keeping tabs on citizens (article in Dutch) via their Facebook and Netlog profiles and their activities on eBay and other social networking sites.
Accountants are quick to point out the watchdogs can’t actually use any of the public status updates, photos and videos from users as proof in case of a dispute, but apparently your lifestyle as you depict it online can prompt an investigation when it doesn’t seem to add up to what your official income is. → 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).
Google Friend Connect is now integrated with one of Europe’s fastest growing social networks, Netlog. Netlog, which has more than 45 million users worldwide, just implemented Google’s alternative to Facebook Connect, which allows users to sign in using any ID supported by Google Friend Connect (including Gmail, Yahoo, and OpenID) and share their activities with their existing contacts.
Google’s integration with Netlog lets users sign into sites and blogs using Friend Connect with their Netlog ID and password. Users can use their Netlog profiles on the site, invite other Netlog users to join Friend Connect, and also share their Friend Connect activity with friends on Netlog. On the back end, Google uses standards like OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial technologies to enable Netlog and other social networks and sites to plug into Friend Connect. → Read More
AOL’s People Networks division has today announced the launch of social networking site Bebo, which it acquired almost exactly one year ago, in several key European countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.
Before, Bebo was only available in English and for some reason also Polish, but now it will use IP-based geo-targetting to cater services in users’ mother tongues. It launched a latino site for U.S.-based users just last week.
Successfully rolling out social services across Europe is never an easy feat to accomplish, and Netlog and Facebook have a pretty strong foothold here, as does MySpace, although the latter appears to be struggling with their expansion strategy lately. Bebo is doing it the smart way – which is of course no guarantee for success – by teaming up with local media partners. → Read More
Don’t count out Joost just yet. We recently wrote it still has a heartbeat despite the fact they made the wrong bet years ago by underestimating the power of the web for watching videos. They finally switched to Flash late last year, giving up on P2P, and introduced some social networking features around the video viewing experience to battle established players like Hulu, TV.com and YouTube.
Now it’s taking a step beyond that by forming an alliance with Europe’s leading social networking service, Belgium-based Netlog, theoretically expanding its reach to 40 million people. The deal will allow Netlog’s audience to access Joost’s video library straight from its starting page, where they’ll be able to view, share and comment on 57,000+ music videos, TV shows, etc. Activity will be pushed to users’ news feed, a feature Netlog copied from Facebook like many other community services did after its enormous success became obvious. → Read More
What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. Wordpress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques.
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. Below are the top 20 sites on comScore’s social networking list. → Read More
European social network Netlog has announced a deal with game developers Jadestone (Sweden) and Bigpoint (Germany) to start integrating multiplayer games into the community website. Users will be able to play games directly on Netlog without having to create extra accounts, which is a direct results of the social network’s use of the Google OpenSocial API.
The integration is currently still under development but the games (Scarab Solitaire and 3-D adventure game Seafight), which will be playable on a 740-pixel application canvas, will be made available from January 2009. → Read More
Is MySpace worth $3 billion, or $20 billion? It depends on how you value a user. It’s time to start comparing the big global social networks on something other than unique visitors and page views. I believe an effective way to value a particular user is based on the average Internet advertising spend per person in the country they live in. The higher the spend, the more value the social network can get out of the user by serving them advertising and other products. That means that, for now, users in a handful of key countries are worth far more in terms of revenue potential than those in the rest of the world. We’ve begun to build out a model that looks at social network usage by country/region and compares that to available data on total Internet advertising spend in each of those countries. The model is then able to turn an apples-to-oranges comparison into an apples-to-apples comparison. The early results are surprising. The ultimate financial value of any asset is, ultimately, what the market will pay for it. We have only a few data points to help us: Facebook, Bebo and LinkedIn are worth $15 billion, $850 million and $1 billion, respectively, based on relatively recent valuations (although only Bebo was actually sold completely; Facebook and LinkedIn raised investments at those valuations). The last valuation of MySpace was just $580 million, back in 2005 when it was acquired by News Corp. Which valuation is most “correct?” It’s hard to say based on the data that’s been available to date, which is mostly just aggregate page view and unique visitor numbers from Comscore and other services. Based on worldwide unique visitors, for example, Facebook recently overtook MySpace to become the “largest” social network. According to raw worldwide user number, the biggest social networks are Facebook, Myspace, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut and Bebo, in that order. But when you apply the model that we’ve created below, which takes into account where users live, the rankings change substantially. MySpace is by far the most valuable social network based on available data. A competitor like Orkut is worth only 1/20th of MySpace, even though it has nearly 1/4 the number of users. Properly Ranking Social Networks 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. → Read More
Over the past few days at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to hang out with about 700 Internet entrepreneurs from all over Europe. The startup scene in Europe reminds me of Silicon Valley four or five years ago—hungry startups building Web companies on the cheap and products that scratch a personal itch. Swedish startup Twingly, for instance, wants to come up with spam-free blog search by starting with the best 450,000 blogs and letting users share blog posts with each other. ParisBrussels-based Zilok is creating an eBay for renting things such as drills and digital projectors. London’s Fav.or.it makes a feed reader with extra powers—you can leave comments on blogs within the reader, it ranks posts based on how much they are actually read, and it lets you filter posts by tag, rank, or category. In Munich, andUnite has created a service that allows you to collect your search terms and share them with others. And a handful of companies are even gaining substantial traction. I was surprised to learn that the social network Netlog claims 30 million unique visitors and four billion page views per month (comScore counts 11 million visitors, but five billion page views). Netlog operates in 15 different languages, and 20 countries. Then there is eBuddy, the Meebo of Europe, which boasts 12 million Web users and 1.6 million mobile users of its Web-based instant-messaging service. Most of the startups I encountered, however, are still operating under the radar—in Romania, Sweden, Holland, Ireland, France. But a cross-border Web 2.0 culture is definitely gaining steam across Europe. Technology itself is helping to break down borders. A VC showed me the landing page on his mobile phone. It wasn’t his e-mail. It was Twitter. Another startup founder told me that Twitter helps him keep a dialogue going with other entrepreneurs and VCs across Europe, and even with contacts in the U.S. Europe is still a mosaic of employment law, tax regulations, and cultural habits that can influence where it makes the most sense to locate different parts of a business. One Dutch CEO, for instance, told me that it costs you need a minimum of 18,000 Euros in starting capital just to incorporate in the Netherlands. And that is just the government’s fee. When I asked which region was most likely to emerge as Europe’s Silicon Valley, the answers were all over the → Read More
San Francisco, CA
