Date: Friday, August 3, 2007
Facebook boom flounders in Asia
Scores of copy-cat social networking sites are appearing on the Asian cyber scene, catering more specifically to the local market, meaning that Facebook is having difficulties achieving the same kind of success there it has had elsewhere.
The growth of Facebook has been phenomenal, but it seems that this growth may be about to stagnate if the social networking site, and other similar ones, are not able to work out a way to crack the Asian market soon. In 12 months Facebook’s membership has grown to 52.2 million users an increase of more than 270%. Bebo’s membership has increased by 172% to 18.2 million, and MySpace although holding the largest membership has actually had the least amount of growth of the sites, only 72% to 114.1 million. However, at the moment nearly all of Facebook’s members are from the US and Europe, with two-thirds of its members from North America and 17 per cent from Europe. MySpace has 62% of its users in North America and 25% in Europe. Only 7.1% of Facebook’s members, or 3.7 million people are located in the Asia Pacific, as opposed to another social networking site, Friendster which has 89% of its 24.7 million users located there. According to the global internet information provider comScore, this is because Friendster has a unique local interest in the region, as links to local pop stars in Malaysia have been set up on the site. Experts say that if sites such as Facebook wish to crack the Asian market they must cater for the individual needs of each culture, just as any major international corporation must do.
An additional problem for social networking sites in China is that the Communist government has attempted to control the content of these sites, and people’s access to them. The other problem is the copycat sites achieving better success than the big names. Tudou is a video-sharing site similar to YouTube which has achieved great popularity in China, with 40 million users viewing 1.2 billion videos a month online. Other popular video-sharing sites in China include Mofile, 5show, and 56. All of these sites are competiting with the big international names for the Asian market. One of the largest networking sites in China is Xiaonei and this is a main factor barring Facebook dominating the region. The site will be an even greater barrier to Facebook’s success once Oak Pacific, the American backed Chinese company which owns it, merges the site with its own social networking site 5Q forming an enormous Facebook copy.
Source:
Times Online
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