The above chart says it all. After battling it out with local clone StudiVZ and the other social networks in the VZ networks group, Facebook has reigned supreme. Produced by Fitton & Maass Consulting, it shows that the U.S. social network has 64.4% of the market based on users who login at least once per week. StudiVZ claims just over 12% while the group as a whole sits at 32.7%. Thus Facebook continues to eat away at its local competitor’s market share. This, as Fitton & Maass points out, despite a German government minister warning the public not to use Facebook based on privacy concerns. → Read More
Simfy, a sort of German equivalent to Spotify, has signed an exclusive partnership with VZ networks, Germany’s largest social network and operator of the so-called Facebook clone StudiVZ.
The deal will see VZ’s 16 million users being given access to simfy’s ad-supported and free on-demand music streaming service, which comprises a catalog of more than 6.2 million songs. In addition, simfy is launching a new student rate for qualifying VZ users offering premium features, such as offline playback and mobile access, starting at €6.99 per-month – a first of its kind, says the company, and fully supported by the major labels. → Read More
German trade publication W&V is reporting that Holtzbrinck, one of Germany and Europe’s leading publishing groups, is shutting down their incubator “Holtzbrinck eLab”, launched in 2006.
Holtzbrinck is famous for backing some of the most successful German Internet startups and also for acquiring not so successful companies. Most notably, StudiVZ, the early Facebook clone, which it purchased for roughly €100m, and although generating significant revenue it looks like Facebook is ultimately the winner in Germany too. → Read More
[Germany] Two and a half years after Facebook, its German clone StudiVZ follows the US social network’s most successful move by adding support for third-party applications.
The 15.7m users of StudiVZ and its siblings MeinVZ and SchülerVZ can now play games from Plinga or Wooga, sing online Karaoke with Mikestar or order Italian food from Pizza.de. After 12 months of engineering and a trial with a music video app since October, nine apps are available as of Monday and several hundreds are in the making. The next step will be the implementation of a payment system in early next year, so that users can fork out money for in-game goods, pay for pizzas or make charity donations to the fund raising portal Spendino. → Read More
Facebook and StudiVZ have reached a settlement in the alleged plagiarism case, with the German social network operator paying Zuckerberg and co an undisclosed sum as part of the deal. Both companies will be withdrawing their respective claims both in the United States and Germany and continue to operate their business as before (statement in German).
StudiVZ and Facebook have agreed not to disclose any more details about the settlement. → Read More
Facebook and StudiVZ have reached a settlement in the alleged plagiarism case, with the German social network operator paying Zuckerberg and co an undisclosed sum as part of the deal. Both companies will be withdrawing their respective claims both in the United States and Germany and continue to operate their business as before (statement in German).
StudiVZ and Facebook have agreed not to disclose any more details about the settlement. → Read More
Bad news for Facebook from Germany today. Facebook has had issues with Berlin-based social network StudiVZ (“student directory” in German) for years before deciding last summer to finally sue their German clone in the US. In November, Facebook filed another suit [PDF], this time in Germany. The allegation in both cases: Intellectual property theft, with Facebook saying StudiVZ infringes on their site’s design, features and services. In addition, StudiVZ is accused of having stolen PHP source code from Facebook.
Anyone who spends more than 2 minutes on StudiVZ must come to the conclusion that the site is a total knock-off of the American original. It’s even rumored that several lines of very early StudiVZ code contained the word “Fakebook” and as a German, I can say StudiVZ is more or less a translated duplicate. But today the County Court in Cologne (where the suit was filed in November) decided against Facebook. And the judges were pretty harsh in their verdict. → 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).
Nimbuzz is launching a brand new VoIP application for the iPhone / iPod Touch today, making it one of the most comprehensive communication tools for the platform available today. It took several weeks for the Dutch startup to get the app approved for the iTunes Store, but now that it’s finally there it’s well worth taking a look.
You could already make free calls to your buddy list over WiFi, but as of today Nimbuzz also enables VoIP calls to landlines and mobiles via Skype-Out, and thanks to partnership agreements with global SIP providers like Gizmo5, Vyke and SIPgate you can now also call over WiFi using the iPod Touch device. And for those not on WiFi, Nimbuzz is introducing a so-called “Dial-Up VoIP” option that lets users make calls over 3G in over 50 countries, using a fresh interface with a full dial-pad (screenshots below). Update: to clarify, what Nimbuzz does is dial a local access number that connects to their VoIP servers when WiFi is unavailable.
Another new feature allows Twitter updates via the Personal Message option in the mobile social messenger app. → Read More
Holland-based IM and VoIP services provider Nimbuzz has just announced a noteworthy strategic partnership with StudiVZ, the largest social networking site in Germany famous worldwide for sporting a look closely resembling Facebook, which the Californian company to file suit over the summer.
StudiVZ will become the first in what Nimbuzz refers to as a series of international networking sites to integrate its technology, bringing real-time web and mobile communication capabilities to online communities. Nimbuzz says similar deals in Turkey, Asia and Italy are imminent. → Read More
Facebook may be the world’s largest and fastest growing social network, but apparently Germany remains a tough market to crack for the company. The site is just ranked 19th on Alexa’s Top 100 list for this country, 10 positions behind StudiVZ, its local clone. While Facebook currently has a German user base of an 800,000 (according to the site’s ad placement tool), StudiVZ boasts a membership of over 10 million, making it the largest social network in the German-speaking world. Facebook is available in this language since March this year and reportedly grew by just 200,000 members since then.
Even assuming StudiVZ doesn’t get new users anymore, it would take Facebook over 20 years to catch up with this speed of growth. In Germany (where I hail from), organic growth doesn’t seem to be an option for the company and it seems it has understood: After taking action in July (when StudiVZ was sued for infringing Facebook’s “look, feel, features and services”), Facebook now takes another (quite unusual) stab at its clone by partnering up with Smaboo, a Zurich-based promotion agency. → Read More
StudiVZ, the Facebook clone (and by clone, we mean exact duplicate) in Germany, says in an email that they still havn’t received the lawsuit complaint filed by Facebook on Friday. The lawsuit claims intellectual property infringement and accuses StudiVZ of running a “knock-off” of Facebook. StudiVZ says they “cannot comment in detail” about the lawsuit since they haven’t seen it yet. But that isn’t stopping them from talking smack about Facebook in general. StudiVZ says they’ve filed for a declaratory judgment in the District Court in Stuttgart, Germany to “to have the responsible German court declare that the claims made by Facebook are without merit,” whatever they may be. Marcus Riecke, the CEO of StudiVZ, goes on to call Facebook arrogant and says they are trying to create an international monopoly over social networking: Now that Facebook, despite trying hard, has not been successful in the German market, the company seeks to obstruct studiVZ through court action. Their strategy appears to be: If you can’t beat them, sue them. There are numerous social networks. Facebook was not the first and certainly isn’t the only one. By attempting to harm studiVZ through a meritless California lawsuit, Facebook is arrogantly laying claim to an international monopoly over social networking sites that the facts show it does not deserve. These comments would be credible if StudiVZ wasn’t such a direct ripoff of Facebook’s look and feel (see screen shot). Early versions of the StudiVZ site reportedly “borrowed” Facebook’s CSS files as well. Perhaps StudiVZ could save themselves the legal bills and just hire a designer to come up with a unique profile and interface instead of posturing and filing counter suits in Germany. CrunchBase Information Facebook Studivz Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Facebook is starting to pursue social networks that have copied their design or features by suing German site StudiVZ. The Financial Times has reported that Facebook filed a suit in California against the German company for what it claims is an infringement of Facebook’s “look, feel, features and services”. StudiVZ claims to have 10 million active members, and is the largest social network in the German-speaking world, covering Germany, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland. The network is actually comprised of three different sites, each one a separate social network aimed at different segments of the market. StudiVZ.net is the classic site for college-aged students, SchuelerVZ.net is for high school students and MeinVZ.net is for older adults (these three networks were very hard to decipher in German when I attempted to sign up). Facebook does seem to have a claim here, as the German site looks like nothing more than Facebook in red and translated in German. Everything from the first public page to the sign-up page and the profile pages look eerily similar to the US-based social network. StudiVZ was acquired earlier this year by the German media group Georg von Holtzbrinck, with an acquisition price in the €100M range. They always say you should sue where the money is, and Facebook has certainly found a pile of it by targeting Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck. Disclaimer: This is not the real Mark Zuckerberg profile in StudiVZ (at least we don’t think so). CrunchBase Information Facebook Studivz 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
Last week we reported on Frazr, one of Germany’s many Twitter clones (if you’re eager for more side-by-side comparisons, see Sloggen, Wamadu, Faybl or 1you, which all launched in March or April). Frazr is symptomatic for the state of Web 2.0 in Germany and to get a better understanding for the many international developments, this post starts a series of regional profiles on Web 2.0 around the world. I’ll start the tour with a closer look at Germany, home to Europe’s largest population of internet broadband users. Hype vs. Hesitate Just as this week’s Pew Internet Study stirred a debate on the view of Web 2.0 in the US, Germany has seen similar arguments on the size of the phenomenon locally. For a long time, several indicators had hinted that Germany was falling behind in broadband penetration compared to other European countries like Sweden or Norway. But a recent OECD study painted a very different picture: looking at the total number of households (as opposed to per-capita penetration), Germany comes out on top in Europe with 14.1 million subscribers in December 2006 (followed by the UK at 12.9 and France at 12.7 million). So the crowds are here, but where can they go? “Web 2.0” is a term that brilliantly translates around the world, but many of the sites that are commonly associated with it have a language barrier for international audiences (take MySpace for example: it officially launched its German version only in March of this year). While English certainly isn’t foreign to Germans, it has still slowed their adoption – and network effects, which have been a driving force, are often tied to language and reach as well. What’s been the consequence in Deutschland? A mushrooming of German copycats that have localized and copied their US role models, sometimes down to the last pixel. Copy/Paste Innovation Whether you’re looking for social bookmarking, photo sharing, video posting or a college social network, Germany’s clever entrepreneurs have done the translation for you and some even fared quite well. The best example by far is StudiVZ, whose name stands for “student directory.” Launched in October 2005, it now claims to house 2.1 million users. Despite a myriad of security problems and controversies, new users kept coming in, which only speaks to the universally strong demand for such networks among students. In January of this year, Germany had its mini-YouTube moment when → Read More
German Facebook clone Studivz has been sold to one of its investors, Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, a German publishing group, for €100 million (about $132 million). Other investors of Studivz include the Samwer brothers, founders of ringtone company Jamba (sold for €270M) and Alando (sold to eBay for €43M in 1999). The story broke on German news site Spiegel. See here for a beautifully useless translation of the article. We’ve gotten confirmation on the transaction, but not specifically on the price, from a contact within Holtzbrinck. More from GigaOm and CenterNetworks. → Read More
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