Friendster's flanking play......

The report that Friendster's traffic has rocketed by 40% last month is interesting, but not half so interesting as why or where.

Growth has been predominantly in Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines etc where they have tie in deals with local players and advertise widely in-country. (No doubt at far lower cost of customer capture than in the west)

Why is this interesting?

Well, its where the people are.

The population of the USA/Canada is about 6% of global population, Western Europe + OECD bumps it up to around 15%....but there are a lot of people coming on to the internet in Asia especially - its not just China and India that have large populations.

And given that - currently - sustainable social network monetisation seems largely to be a chimera (apart from persuading large corporations to hand over the lolly that is), you may as well go for eyeballs (sorry, traction - eyeballs is too Web 1.0) until something turns up - quantity has a quality all of its own.

Now, many of those people in developing contries are also using the net heavily from mobile devices, so one imagines that the first major fixed/mobile - or even mobile only - social nets will really take root here...and mobile means ARPU.

Friendster have also learned - belatedly - to use the same tricks as the others to enhance traffic without actually having more users:

....Friendster is driving page views in other ways. Just as on Facebook, when your friends change their status, such as add a friend, that information gets updated on your profile. The system also defaults to sending you an email with those changes weekly — prompting you to click through to Friendster, and creating still more page views. It has added a classmate function, to track people you may have gone to school with. It has added a classifieds section. When you sign up with Friendster, it will prompt you to add your contacts from your address books, and tell you who is not already in Friendster and prompt you to invite them. This, of course, drives still more page views as those friends click into to see your invite. And yet, while many of these features drive up page views, and may seem artificial, they have become pretty standard at other sites.

(That "single network" thing in Facebook irks hugely by the way!)

Ah...the dark arts of Social Engine Optimisation ....

Caveat Investor !

(As an aside, mobile - because of the limited screen - tends to get more hits per content unit than fixed line, so there's another traffic enhancing trick to consider, apart from paying Chinese Social Miners that is)