The big social networks continue to side with Advertising networks to help monetize their sites. MySpace signed a $900 million deal with Google in August 2006, and Facebook countered by choosing Microsoft a couple of weeks later. This morning, Friendster announced a mult-year exclusive deal to work with Google on both search and keyword-targeted advertising.
The financial terms are not being disclosed. Friendster is not in the same league as MySpace and Facebook, but this is still a win for Google. Friendster generates 6 billion or so page views per month, about 1/6 of MySpace.
New social networking sites are popping up faster than I can create bogus accounts on them.
I’m waiting for a Google partnership with the recently announced PlayStation Home network – that’d be a kick for Microsoft.
6 billion page views per month is not shabby
I wonder which of the big advertisers will win the coveted Crunkfriends.com search account?
At a standard junk page eCPM of 40c thats $29M a year in revenue. Which begs the question of why the recapitalization last year gave it a rumored pre-money of $3M? Perhaps the down round was a relatively bigger bargain for the VCs than Murdoch’s acquisition of Myspace.
That under valuation was based upon the idea that something as generic as social networking could be winner takes all, and that a has-been with significant traffic, couldn’t survive.
The premium over raw traffic numbers, that is attached to being number 1. is skewed.
David, my guess is the eCPM is closer to the 10c range, but that’s still a reasonable amount of money for a company most folk were effectively relegating to the DeadPool.
I am wondering when Google will partner with our local community for Part-Timer/FreeLancer. Then, it will be nice to form a nice
Then, we can have Google to feed us with all the relevant content/ads which helps our local community grow.
To be honest, I was surprised Google reached out to Friendster. Google struck a similar, but much larger, deal with MySpace, so I imagine that this won’t go lightly with NewsCorp. Let’s not forget that Google also owns two major MySpace competitors, YouTube and Orkut (see Orkut’s astonishing growth: http://www.alex...;url=orkut.com/).
Is Friendster even worth risking a major deal with MySpace?
- Jawad Shuaib
Follow the money, folks. Investors/board members in common? Ram? Are you really surprised? “Friends help friends”, especially in the SV VC world
Somebody has to take Google’s spot soon. Adsense revenue is very poor. A lot of bait sites as well.
(@11) AdSense isn’t the only platform out there to monetize your site. Googles spot in this game is not one that will be taken easily considering they have control over massive advertising inventories..
One wonders if Google now just wants to be a big hosting company running other people’s sites on ultra-modern custom engineered infrastructure
I think the deal has been done for quite a while. At least 2 months already.
Why would MySpace care if Google Ad’s are on Friendster or any other site? NBC doesn’t get mad that Pepsi advertises with ABC also. Google Ad’s don’t exist to make MySpace a “better” site. They exist to make money off the people already on MySpace.
Google adsense competitor = http://www.quigo.com
And yes, I was taken aback by the 6 billion page views a month also!
Ah Friendster… the social websites for us mature individuals. I’ve been there since before myspace and feel too old to change.
Most of those page views are probably robots searching the site to cache content or steal profiles for their own sites…