The Big Book of Successful European Social Networks
Written on December 17, 2007 – 5:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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Last week, General Manager of VC LGiLab Ouriel Ohayon announced an investment in Bahu, a European social network for young students across Europe. Bahu (French slang for High School) is focusing on promoting talents and mainly popular in the south and east of Europe. Only four months after they launched they’d already welcomed a stunning amount of 2 million unique visitors from 6 different countries. Bahu is another chapter in a book about successful European social networks. And trust me, it’s a big book.
Consider Hyves for example. Launched by a group of friends in October 2004, aiming at the Netherlands, a country with only 16 million citizens. Earlier this month they threw a party because they counted five million users. Four million of them are Dutch.
You want another example? No problem! Let’s go south of the Netherlands: Belgium. This even smaller country is home to Netlog, an extremely successful social network that is offering 8 different languages for its 29.8 million users and counts 4 billion page views every month. When Netlog wanted to expand in Turkey, they hired two students to translate the site for 1000 dollar. It took them a week and four months later the Turkish version has 2.5 million users.
The big question is: how do all those European networks, despite the Facebook and MySpace hegemony, manage to attract so many users? There seems to be no space for competitors in the US, but there most definitely is in Europe.
The answer to that question is actually quite simple. Whereas Americans just use one global network, Europeans also use a local version. If I look at my own social network usage, I use Hyves for my Dutch friends and Facebook for the contacts I’ve met during
international seminars and conferences. A lot of my friends and colleagues do the same thing. It’s exactly that kind of usage that adds pages to the Big Book of Successful European Social Networks.
Facebook: Coming to a Country Near You Second round of start-ups that are shaping the next web Battle for Europe continues with translations of Facebook and LinkedIn Upcoming Facebook acquisitions in Europe? Bemba.com: a new sharing add-on for social networks
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8 Responses to “The Big Book of Successful European Social Networks”
By Peter Robinett on Dec 17, 2007 | Reply
Ernst-Jan,
While you are definitely correct that there are many successful European social networks, I think the situation has different explanations than the one you give.
First, I don’t think you can talk of Europe as a cohesive market for purposes of comparison to the US. At the simplest, the diversity of languages fragments the European market. So, if we instead talk about markets consisting of (usually) individual European countries, social network diversity is less apparent. To use your own example, Hyves is pre-eminent in the Netherlands. The situation is similar in other countries with other networks. That being said, there is diversity, both in European countries and the US – witness how many Americans divide their social networking activities between MySpace, Facebook, and other sites.
Second, the current situation shows the strengths and weaknesses of social networks on both sides of the Atlantic. American social networks, thanks to their large, basically mono-lingual home market, are very poor at internationalization/localization. This allows companies like StudiVZ to come in and blatantly clone them, with the important different that the sites are translated into other languages. New European social networks don’t have this luxury of a large home market and thus, as you note, expand internationally early on. At the same time, American social networks have been able to get much larger user-bases. Some of this can be attributed to being around slightly longer and to having a larger home market, but not all of it.
By Patrick on Dec 17, 2007 | Reply
Loved this quote about hyves:
“25% of all Dutch people have an account on Hyves, this includes all fetuses”
By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on Dec 17, 2007 | Reply
@Peter Amongst others, Bahu and Netlog do look at Europe as one market, despite the diversity. Some with more success than the other. Netlog however, is market leader in Belgium, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Romania and Turkey. And in Germany, Holland, France and Portugal they come in second.
By Ivo on Jan 18, 2008 | Reply
Let’s see what happens now that the US Godzilla’s come to Europe: http://www.web20friends.net/?q.....al+network and http://www.web20friends.net/?q.....OR+studivz