It used to be the most popular social networking site in the country. In fact, that was probably part of what led to its downfall. But don’t cry for Friendster…
Friendster was the pioneering social networking site. It was there before Facebook, and it was there before MySpace. Within a few months, it grabbed three million US users and made overnight celebrities out of its founders, Jonathan Abrams and Peter Chin, back in 2002.
That’s about as far as their fifteen minutes of fame went, though. Soon, Americans were migrating to the younger, hipper MySpace. And of course, today everyone is celebrating Zuckerberg and his monster.
Part of the reason for Americans abandoning Friendster: Filipinos discovered this service early on and immediately populated it. It quickly became our social networking site. By the late-2000s, the owners of Friendster would have loved their stats showing millions of users… except that much of those millions were Filipinos! They certainly didn’t know how to monetize us! That was certainly frustrating for them.
And when Americans realized that Friendster has become mostly an Asian site, they abandoned it in droves. Soon, Friendster was just a shell of what it was.
Why you shouldn’t cry for Friendster
In 2008, Friendster hired ex-Googler Richard Kimber as its CEO. Kimber promptly understood that Friendster’s weakness was actually its most powerful strength: namely, its strong Asian roots.
Kimber then set about reconfiguring Friendster into a site for Asians. By the following year, Friendster was acquired by a Malaysian-based Internet company for over $39 million. It’s not much as far as web buyout prices are concerned, but here’s where the buyers proved to be shrewd: they closed the site first for renovations… and then sold its portfolio of patents. Price: $40 million. In other words, they already got back their investment with the patent sales alone!
Friendster was then relaunched just last June as a social gaming site for Asians, under current CEO Ganesh Kumar Bangah. Since then it has gained over half a million new users. It is now purely out of the US market and primarily targets Asians, particularly Filipinos, Malaysians and Singaporeans. The objective, perhaps, is to become the Zynga of Asia.
So don’t cry for Friendster. They are onto something here, and indications are that they can become pretty big once again.
