What Do Friendster's Problems Mean For Social Networking?
May 29, 2005
The Friendster CEO has departed and Reuters reports that Friendster traffic in April 2005 was 15% lower than in April, 2004.
The company that helped springboard social networking appears to be
lagging behind some of its competitors.
"What these social networks have shown is that you can use the viral capabilities of the Internet to grow a site very quickly, but I'm not even sure that anybody has proven yet that these businesses by themselves are sustainable, stand-alone businesses," said David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
Friendster was the first popular social networking site, which typically offers users ways to create personal pages, post digital pictures, and invite people to link with them on the Website.
Friendster logged 703,000 visitors to its site in April, a 15 percent drop from the year-ago month and the average visitor spent 14 minutes on the site that month, down 65 percent year over year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. By contrast, MySpace boasted 8.2 million visitors in April, who spent an hour and 23 minutes on the site.
Some might see this as the first signs of trouble for social networking
itself but with MySpace.com's traffic soaring and web giants like Yahoo and MSN adding more networking features this does not appear to be the case. However, the increased competition from the top Internet companies might continue to drain traffic from some of social networking websites. Many companies are also combining blogs with social networking services. Friendster did eventually add blogs but arrived a little late to the party. Friendster has recently tried to add celebrity bloggers like Pamela Anderson which may be a way to boost traffic.
