The Next Web

Friendster’s rollercoaster ride just passed a booster of $20 million

Written on August 5, 2008 – 11:44 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Remember Rollercoaster Tycoon? The addictive game turned you into a theme park manager and rollercoaster designer. Although I enjoyed the managing aspect, the building possibilities really did it for me. One of the options during the construction of a rollercoaster were the boosters, which helped the trains gain some speed.

Social network Friendster is often called a “rollercoaster failure“. It was one of the first popular networks, attracted millions of users, and reached its peak in 2003 - Google then almost bought it for $30 million. Due to scalability problems, MySpace and Facebook took over the Western market. The rollercoaster went down pretty fast.

Yet the next steep was already in sight, as Friendster became the no. 1 service in several South Asian countries like the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore.

Earlier today, Friendster passed two boosters, which make the social network an important player again. The company closed a $20 million investment round, led by IDG Ventures with existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Founders Fund. Moreover, the San Francisco-based company welcomed a new CEO, Richard Kimber, the regional managing director of South Asia for Google.

So while Facebook and MySpace have their ball in the west, Friendster now has the money and the right guy to firm their good position in South Asia. That’s one hell of a rollercoaster ride…

I hope you like that post!

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facebook, friendster, google, myspace, richard kimber, social networks, south asia

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Cubics serves tons of ads across social networks, no word on actual return

Written on July 23, 2008 – 3:50 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

Cubics was the one of the first advertising networks designed specifically for social networks, and currently boasts support for most major social networks including Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Bebo and others. The company prides itself on displaying highly targeted ads, based upon detailed demographic, interest, and behavioral data, a strategy that led to its acquisition by online targeted advertising house Adknowledge in December of last year.

Cubics sent out a press release today about the fact that they now apparently serve more than 10 billion ad impressions per month on social networks (hat tip to MarketingVox). The company claims this number far exceeds those of Social Media, citing a volume five times as large. The release also correctly states that more and more time is spent on social networks, and that the engagement of people with social applications is very high.

While this may be true, social networking sites are notoriously hard to monetize, and the company remains dead silent on the actual return the ads they serve yield for their customers. For reference, TechCrunch yesterday wrote about Lookery lowering its guarantee on Facebook ads to a mere 7.5-cent CPM.

It’s unfortunate that Cubics didn’t talk about their current numbers, challenges and opportunities. We could have a learned a lot more than the fact that they serve billions of ad impressions on social networks that everyone else says rarely get noticed or clicked on.

Update: Cubics’s general manager and PR manager responded in the comments with some context, so scroll down for their perspective.

adknowledge, bebo, cubics, faceobok, friendster, myspace, social networking monetization, social networks, targeted ads

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