According to the Brazilian news magazine Exame, Google has made Brazil the center of its Latin American operations, placing former country director Alexandre Hohagen at the helm. Google is understood to have chosen Brazil for its superior regional performance. While the Mountain View, California-based search giant doesn’t comment on regional numbers, the article claims that Brazil is Google’s fastest growing market (hard to verify, but it’s certainly one of the fastest growing), generating an estimated $500 million per year in revenues. This is all the more impressive considering the Brazilian office was opened just three years ago and has only 200 employees. The decision to run Latin American operations from Brazil comes soon after another decision to move all development and management of Orkut to that country, with most of the engineering in the city of Belo Horizonte. Orkut is Google’s social network, which enjoys most of its popularity in Brazil and India. Brazil is also said to have the second largest number of Gmail accounts, perhaps because of the popularity of Orkut. Google’s biggest white labeled Gmail customer may also be in Brazil: iG, a portal with over 9 million accounts. Google is still in the process of replacing Hohagen with a new country director for Brazil. CrunchBase Information Orkut Google Information provided by CrunchBase → 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
In April, Facebook caught up to MySpace in worldwide unique visitors (actually nudging past it with 116.4 million unique visitors versus 115.7 million for MySpace). Now the worldwide comScore numbers are out for May and Facebook continues to blow past MySpace with 123.9 million uniques (up 6 percent), versus 114.6 million for MySpace (down 1 percent). Facebook also boasted more pageviews worldwide (50.7 billion versus 45.4 billion). Maybe MySpace’s redesign which just went live this week will pick things up for them again. In the U.S., though, which is the biggest advertising market, MySpace is still well ahead of Facebook, with 73.7 million unique visitors in May compared to 35.6 million for Facebook. And that number for MySpace is up 2 percent from April, whereas Facebook’s had 0 percent growth. So it remains to be seen if and how fast Facebook can catch up in the U.S. As for the second-tier social networks, they have fewer than half as many visitors. Here is the breakdown for May: Worldwide Unique Visitors To the Top Social Networks Facebook—123.9 million MySpace—114.6 million Hi5—49.6 million Friendster—38.1 million Orkut—32.2 million Bebo—25.1 million → Read More
If you try to buy an ad on Facebook, there are certain words that are taboo. Any ads that contain four-letter words are automatically blocked. So too are ads with the names of competing social networks “MySpace,” “Friendster,” “Hi5,” , or “Orkut.” (Curiously, “Bebo” and “OpenSocial” go through just fine, as does “Microsoft,” “Yahoo,” “Google,” and “AOL”). Okay, so Facebook doesn’t want to run ads for some of its competitors. But why is 3Jam blocked? The startup offers an SMS service that lets people send multiple text messages at once, and it even has a Facebook app that does the same thing. CEO Andy Jagoe was befuddled when he tried to create a Facebook ad to test a new product, only to find out that the term “3Jam” was also blocked. (The product actually sounds pretty cool: it will be a way to send and receive text messages for free while you are online, and then route them to your phone when you are offline). Says Jagoe: It seems crazy to think that they consider us competitive. This is kind of weird. It is like censorship. It does seem weird. What other startup names or products are blocked by Facebook? CrunchBase Information 3Jam Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
These stories are becoming more common as Internet companies operate under the laws of many counties. In February A Moroccan man was arrested for pretending to be the Moroccan king’s younger brother, Prince Moulay Rachid, on Facebook. Facebook complied with Morrocca information requests about the man, leading to his arrest. The man was granted a royal pardon after his sentencing, and was out of jail by mid March. Today we’re hearing of another arrest, this time in India. 22-year-old IT professional Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid. His crime was writing in an orkut community named “I hate Sonia Gandhi.” Sonia Gandhi is a prominent politician in India. Vaid was charged under section 292 of Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information Technology Act because he created a profile and then posted content in vulgar language about Sonia Gandhi in the community. During investigations, the cyber crime cell of Pune police communicated with Google (which owns Orkut) seeking details about the man who formed this forum and circulated the obscene content. It was known that the vulgar message about Sonia Gandhi was circulated through an email address – Rahulvaidindia@gmail.com . The owner of the email id Rahul Vaid was traced, using information supplied by Google, to Chakarpur in Gurgaon city of Haryana. He was then charged under section 292 of Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information Technology Act because he created a profile and then posted content in vulgar language about Sonia Gandhi in the community. If he’s convicted, he can be imprisoned for up to five years and may have to pay a fine up to Rs one lakh. This is an issue that needs to be addressed everywhere, but the hot spots right now are areas where extreme laws make what would be legitimate actions in the US or Europe into fairly serious crimes in their jurisdictions. Our companies have to decide if they’ll defy the law and take the consequences. On the upside, users will flock to them knowing their data is secure. CrunchBase Information Google Orkut Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites. MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect). Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this. The reason these companies are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties). If what we hear is correct, Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it. We’ll have to wait until Monday for the exact details, though. But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want to access their data. By controlling the flow through Open Social and the new Friend Connect product, they can effectively become a huge social network without actually having a, → Read More
In the global race to be the top social network, MySpace and Facebook are neck and neck. In January, 2008, MySpace was still the biggest social network worldwide with 109 million unique visitors, according to comScore. But Facebook was close on its heels with 101 million. (Meanwhile, the data in the U.S. for Facebook at least shows a possible slowdown in growth). While MySpace and Facebook are fighting it out for the top spot, back in the second pack some interesting sprints and scuffles are going on that are worth keeping an eye on. Everyone in that second pack (Hi5, Freindster, Orkut, Bebo, Imeem) are about a third to a quarter the size of the leaders in terms of worldwide unique visitors, so I’ve isolated their performance in the chart above (it is harder to see if you include Nos. 1 and 2, MySpace and Facebook). In January, both Hi5 (No. 3, in red) and Friendster (No. 4, in blue), made moves to pull away from Google’s Orkut (No. 5, in green) and Bebo (No. 6, in yellow). The latter two maintained a more steady pace. Coming on strong from behind is Imeem (No. 7, in purple), which surpassed Multiply (No. 8, not shown). The chart below has most of the stats, except for the last two—Imeem had 17.8 million global visitors in January, 2008, a 477 percent annual growth rate (Multiply had 17.6 million, a healthy 203 percent rise from the year before). For Hi5 and Friendster, global growth is a major part of their game plan. Friendster, for instance, which dropped off the radar for most of us in the U.S., is now the single largest social network in Asia. It’s top five countries are the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, the United States (legacy members who never left, plus new growth among Asians here), and Singapore. Friendster has kept its growth going by launching fan profile pages for Asian pop singers, launching four new languages since September (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish), and letting developers create apps for its site. So does that mean that Friendster and Hi5 are worth more than the $1 billion Bebo is rumored to have sold itself for? Not necessarily. It depends on the actual composition of their members, click-through rates, and other financial factors. Generally speaking, advertisers like to target their campaigns by geography, and pay less for ads that target populations with → Read More
Spanish language social networking site Sonico is the biggest social networking site you’ve probably never heard of before today. If you haven’t you wouldn’t be alone, it has zero hits in Google News as I write this post. Buenos Aires based Sonico from FNBox launched in August 2007 with the usual social networking mix of message boards, profiles and networks based on school or workplace. Nothing remarkable, until you look at the numbers. Sonico now has over 8 million registered users, and has recently launched a Portuguese version as well (so as to cover the rest of South America). According to Alexa the site now ranks at 167, and is in the top 50 sites in Colombia, El Salvador, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Honduras, Panama, Chile, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Argentina, Cuba and Mexico. We can only get the worldwide figures from comScore and although it’s still below the leading second tier social networking sites, it’s still placed extremely well for a site that is just 6 months old. Targeting the South American market is in vogue at the moment with players such as MySpace and Facebook now offering Spanish language versions, and smaller players such as Wamba trying to get a foot hold in a continent that has a growing online user base. Google’s Orkut is already big in Brazil and Hi5 is also popular locally. If their current growth continues Sonico will be a site to watch. → Read More
Today’s agreement between MySpace and nearly all the states attorneys general to bulk up protections against sexual predators will no doubt have spillover effects on other social networks as well. No social network can afford to look like it is lagging in this area and will do whatever it can to be at par with emerging industry norms in this area. In fact, not long after I originally posted about the MySpace deal earlier today, I received the following statement from Facebook: Facebook has always created an inhospitable environment for predators by limiting access to users’ personal information based on real-world social connections. We have led the way in our partnership with the New York Attorney General and continue our involvement with the Attorneys General of all states and other law enforcement agencies to keep children safe from those who would do them harm. We are happy to work further with the states to develop and deploy strategies to protect kids online. I am pretty sure that not only Facebook, but also Bebo and Google, will do whatever is necessary to fight sexual predators. With that in mind, here specifically is where Facebook, Bebo and Orkut (i.e., Google) are now lagging MySpace in protections for younger users, and where they may have to spend money to catch up: Update: See clarifications/corrections from Facebook below in italics: 1. IMAGE AND VIDEO REVIEW MySpace proactively reviews videos and images for pornographic and sexually inappropriate content. Humans look at every image and banned images are digitally fingerprinted to prevent them from being uploaded again. Facebook and Bebo only ban inappropriate images and video that are reported by users. Orkut doesn’t even do that. Facebook has automated examination working on video, but they find that reports work extraordinarily well in removing inappropriate content quickly – for both images and video. They have always had report links, which MySpace was forced to add under this agreement. 2. GROUPS REVIEW MySpace monitors group discussions for predatory content. Facebook and Bebo regulate only reported incidents. Orkut does not review group discussions. Re: Groups, Facebook has algorithmic monitoring for inappropriate names/themes and a variety of technical tools that automatically cull them. 3. SEX OFFENDER DATABASE MySpace helped develop and fund a database of registered sex offenders and deletes the accounts of members who are registered sex ofenders. Facebook, Bebo, and Orkut do not have a policy of automatically → Read More
The Google OpenSocial site is now live (here). The video above comes from the Google OpenSocial Campfire held Thursday night and is featured on the front of the new page.The site includes the complete OpenSocial API Documentation, FAQ and Group area.Also now live is OpenSocial support for Google’s big in Brazil social networking site Orkut (here). According to Google, the OpenSocial implementation on Orkut has the following benefits: * Building both showcase and canvas views, with Apps having the ability to create multi-page experiences in the full page canvas view. * Foster communication among friends by allowing access a user’s profile information, friend list, and an update feed so that people can see what their friends are up to. * Learn once, write everywhere as apps written for Orkut under OpenSocial can be used to build social apps for other websites. The OpenSocial team also has a blog here. Orkut joins Plaxo, and possibly tonight Ning as being the first sites with OpenSocial support. → Read More
Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle. MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. We’ve confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining. Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining. Google will be making an announcement today. MySpace and Six Apart join Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle as announced Google partners. No word on whether MySpace will continue with efforts to complete its own recently announced platform, but the answer is probably yes. They are likely to simply do both (Update: see below). Suddenly, within just the last couple of days, the entire social networking world has announced that they are ganging up to take on Facebook, and Google is their Quarterback in the big game. Update (12:30 PST): On a press call with Google now. This was embargoed for 5:30 pm PST but they’ve moved the time up to 12:30 PST (now). Press release will go out later this evening. My notes: On the call, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said “we’ve been working with MySpace for more than a year in secret on this” (likely corresponding to their advertising deal announced a year ago). MySpace says their new platform efforts will be entirely focused on OpenSocial. The press release names Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING as current OpenSocial partners. We’re seeing a Flixster application on MySpace now through the OpenSocial APIs. Flixster says it took them less than a day to create this. I’ll add screen shots below. Here’s the big question – Will Facebook now be forced to join OpenSocial? Google says they are talking to “everyone.” This is a major strategic decision for Facebook, and they may have little choice but to join this coalition. Bebo has also joined OpenSocial. Flixster/MySpace screen shots: CrunchBase Information MySpace Six Apart Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Business Week has a long article expanding on the Google Social Nework Platform story we wrote about last month. Key facts from the article: Orkut is 1/4 the size of MySpace (Comscore shows a much closer race), but they’ve recently taken the lead in the Asia/Pacific region. Orkut is also very strong in Latin America, with double the traffic of MySpace and Facebook combined. Business Week also confirms our estimated November 5 launch date for a new set of APIs which let developers build applications that span a number of Google services. We heard the from sources here in Silicon Valley; their sources are third-party developers based in India. Google plans to open up Orkut as a Platform, with fewer restrictions than Facebook. As an example, they say, application developers may be able to host applications on their own servers (Facebook does not permit this). Other Google services will be made available as well “If the plan succeeds, users might begin to see applications combining Orkut with Google Maps that would show where friends are located.” And the article is also confirming that Google is thinking beyond their own properties, too. “For example, an Orkut widget for Facebook might enable Facebook users to see whether their Orkut friends are online through their Facebook pages.” → Read More
When I wrote about the upcoming Orkut redesign yesterday I was hoping for something a little more…I don’t know. Inspiring? Instead we get new icons and rounded corners. I’d love to hear what some of the designers out there think about Orkut. The new look for the second biggest social network on the planet is below. Here’s the old version. I’m underwhelmed. → Read More
The upcoming Orkut redesign prompted us to check out Orkut’s page view numbers according to Comscore. U.S. Comscore data shows, as expected, barely a blip from Orkut (Facebook shown for comparison). Orkut has 425 million monthly page views compared to 15 billion for Facebook: But, wow, take a look at the worldwide Comscore numbers – Facebook doubles to 31 billion monthly page views, but Orkut jumps all the way up to 38 billion (we’ve also included some of the other big social networks for comparison in this chart): Not that it adds much to the conversation, but Alexa agrees Orkut is bigger than Facebook in terms of page views. Is this accurate? I don’t know. Compete barely shows Orkut as existing, let alone anywhere near Facebook’s traffic. But Orkut is famously popular in Brazil and other Non-U.S. countries. Perhaps, somehow, it is actually a social networking heavyweight. → Read More
We rarely mention Google’s three year old social network Orkut these days. Except to point out down time or flawed Alexa stats that suggest it is bigger than MySpace. But now some real news. Take a good look at that screen shot because Google is promising an “updated look” for the site. They are staging this to users in batches, so it may take a while to make its way to you. Damn, I guess I need to add a friend or two. I sure hope they create a Facebook application. I can’t keep track of all of these social networks. Update: Check out the surprising Comscore analysis of Orkut. Update 2: New look is out. zzzzzzzzz → Read More
Google’s Orkut social network, which has been having a bit of a renaissance this year, has been down for the last thirteen hours as of 2 am PST. It’s unlikely this is an upgrade given the amount of time the site has been offline. This just isn’t Google’s day. Update: Orkut is back online now, after 22 hours of down time. → Read More
Google’s Orkut has been steadily rising on the Alexa charts, and for the first time today overtook MySpace in total page views. Since all of the other indicators suggest that MySpace is still significantly bigger than Orkut, we took a look at the Comscore data, which tells a different story than Alexa. Comscore September numbers (October will be out in a couple of weeks) say that MySpace is generating over a billion page views per day (35 billion total in September), while Orkut is at about 200 million page views for the entire month. So Myspace generates 5x the monthly page views of Orkut in a single day. For fun we compare Alexa and Comscore for all of the other large social networks as well. Both sets of data are below. Clearly something is out of whack at Alexa with regard to Orkut specifically. And according to Comscore, MySpace still has more monthly visitors and page views than all of the other social networks listed below combined. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
