The office of Friendster Philippines, formerly known as Pusit.com, has been closed down. William Yu took some pictures of their office and asked Where Did Pusit.com Go?
Migs adds that Friendster has ceased running Friendster Classifieds and Friendster Ads (FAds) - They’re outsourcing their technical stuff to another company here, though, AFAIK (something called EGG which listed Friendster as one of their partners). Is this the same one I got from another source a couple months ago about that BPO?
It’s possible Friendster Ads and Friendster Classifieds weren’t successful in monetizing the service among the 5 Million Filipino Friendster users.
Even the domain pusit.com now resolves to Friendster.com.
There’s no official word from Terence Pua though. William Yu has more juicy information from several unverified sources here. Looks like Friendster will be doing a local BPO after all.
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Yes Abe. Pusit.com is now officially under friendster. We’re moving into a new venture now.
EGG as in Entertainment Gateway Group?
i read somewhere (was it from duncan riley?) that social network monetization is very bad. CPM is something like 0.001 cents.
The story of Friendster’s failure:
http://www.kottke.org/remainder/06/10/12011.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15friend.html?ei=5090&en=3e9438ed349f7ce7&ex=1318564800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
Argh. That’s bad. Very bad.
but didn’t they patent themselves as the first networking service of its kind?? so bale, its not all failure… they’re barely breathing but ok pa naman siguro…
they lost to other networking sites…. and they can’t earn money just by ads with traffic from 3rd world countries…
nalugi na po yata kaya nagclose.
siya nga po pala…. down po ba ang server po ng ploghost.com? Pati po kasi yung site ko down din simula pa po yata kanina umaga.
I read an article a while back about why friendsater is far behind Myspace. The author said is due to users geographical location. 50% of Friendster’s users are based in Asia were Myspace is US based users. How this affect Friendster in terms of revenue and finding Venture Capital? Well the author stated that more US based Companies will likely backup and advertise with Myspace.
Friendster focused too much on a geographic market niche. Today’s most profitable market niches are not geographic, but psychographic.
This part is completely incorrect - “Migs adds that Friendster has ceased running Friendster Classifieds”
Friendster Classifieds is still up and running and can be found at http://classifieds.friendster.com
Friendster PH CPM may look cheap but getting high SOV is a killer to advertisers… we (pinoys) are afterall a friendster crowd and geo-targeting ads to PH users is basically geo-targeting a large chunk of the community.
AJ: I was speculating that it was gone because classifieds.friendster.com was down. This was last Friday when I saw the closed sign.
keekai: that was much of the topic of last nights’ Google Philippines presentation.
in any case, about Friendster… the reason why we started speculating is for the lack of official word from the companies involved.
pusit.com, what an interesting name, i thought they’re into seafoods business?? my bad.
Being first, doesn’t account for much apparently in this situation.
The reason why Friendster failed is because their servers got so slow and unusable, all the early adopters from the U.S. left, and never came back or gave a damn. The article I linked to sums it up pretty nicely.
I guess you stick to where your friends are that’s why so many Filipinos are still using Friendster.
With 75% of its user base outside the U.S., this American company is now forced to service cultures it is completely alien to. I don’t know about you guys but isn’t it obvious that its a money-loser? If 75% of Friendster’s users are outside the U.S. then all the ads they have there (netflix, t-mobile) are useless! (Question: If you are in the Philippines, does Friendster sill serve you Netflix and T-Mobile ads? Or are they Philippine advertisers?)
Becoming a major Philippine website was obviously not the goal of Friendster when it started.
Either the Pusit group, or Friendster, should come out with an official statement so they could end this speculation.
jayvee..
[quote]
i read somewhere (was it from duncan riley?) that social network monetization is very bad. CPM is something like 0.001 cents.
[/quote]
You just don’t know how bad
Our company lost millions (my former employer that is) :p
What’s with your content.. shouldn’t you be blogging on Google’s new acquisition or books.googler.com or something.. heck with friendster and all those filipino code monkey.. FYI.. they’r too incompetent to finish the jobs..
your fool of crap!
@miguel:
here’s your answer…
http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2006/nov/12/yehey/career/20061112car1.html
I would like to be a member of thise yugatech……………