Multiply has been growing rather quietly internationally. The social media aggregator now has 7 million registered users and 10.5 million monthly unique visitors according to their internal numbers, nearly triple their 2006 traffic. Comscore’s most recent numbers show 12.5 million uniques for September.
The service acts like a meta social network where users can collect and share content from multiple social sites (photos, video, blogs). See our earlier comparison with Vox. Users post 1.25 million photos, 16,000 videos and 55,000 blog entries daily. However, while the U.S. is home to the largest share of their registered users, most of their traffic is international.
The Philippines is one of the most pronounced examples of their large international following. Alexa ranks Multiply as the 5th largest site in the Philippines – with more than 2 million unique monthly visitors. We had earlier reported that 39% of the site’s traffic comes from the Philippines. Therefore it’s no surprise that they’ve managed to land a multi-year ad deal with one of the Philippine’s largest networks, ABS-CBN. ABS-CBN has 67 televisions stations, 19 radio stations, 30 websites and reaches 97% of the Filipinos with televisions. Under terms of the agreement, ABS-CBN interactive will sell advertising and mobile services for Multiply’s Filipino users, with the two companies sharing revenues.
The deal highlights the importance of international markets U.S. press often take for granted. Sites like Friendster and Orkut have found large international followings while their U.S. markets are dormant. With a global internet, foreign markets are expected to become even more important in the future. According to research firm Datamonitor Plc., by the end of this year, Asia will account for 35% of the world’s social networking users, with 28% of users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 25% in North America, and 12% in the Caribbean and Latin America. Once again, startups concerned about getting big may want to get international.
Congrats Paolo, Rico and Jojo.
Awesome.
Didn’t Friendster try this already? East asia is great if you have money to burn and wait for the future.
I am from the Philippines, and although everyone I knew is in Multiply, I just couldn’t see the growth in this one. SouthEast Asia is not -yet- a bigger market. Yes, friendster tried this one and look what happened to them.
hopefully we’ll see more of this mobile-web intergration since Philippines is considered SMS/texting capital also.
interesting deal and ABS-CDN is a large media company in that region. the funny thing here is the fact that ABS-CDN is now playing into multiply’s highly illegal music distribution platform which resembles napster 1.0 in many ways. users can currently upload unprotected files in mp3 format and make these available for download on their personal pages. even though you decide whom you share your page with, many pages can get picked up on open web search like google and yahoo. i wonder how long it will take before legal action is brought against them. if other social media sites/networks implemented a similar model, i’m sure they’d see the same growth too. i’ve been working in the music industry for years, and maybe this model flies overseas, but it doesn’t here in the US.
Success abroad can mean failure domestically. Most US teens will not flock to a site that is overflowing with people from the 3rd world. Multiply has to adopt regional boundaries similar to how Facebook is setup.
magnus, teens don’t decide to join a social ‘networking’ in site the same way you might avoid going to a mall where Asians or Blacks hangout.
Social Networking is the new starbucks. Most western technologies/ad campaigns dont work in Asia and vice versa. Adapting international schemes is a good way to gain insight into other people’s lives (not necessarily 3rd world). Facebook, i think is gaining popularity in Asia leaping ahead of Multiply in a way that its open to user created apps.
Magnus, it certainly sounds as if you haven’t used Multiply. (Not that that typically stops people from commenting…)
Unlike other social networking sites, one could, in theory, use Multiply without it being apparent that x% of users come from a certain country! How do we manage this? By showing users, when they sign in, photos and videos and blogs and things from the people they know and care about — not Random Hot Users of the Moment on the homepage.
Western technologies and ad campaigns will work in Asia. Let us take for example in our country, the Philippines. We have been petitioning for the complete service of Paypal for years but it was only this year (2007) that our request was heard. Yes, finally the Filipino talents can now compete in the outsourcing job world and we can now buy the stuffs that we want online. I say that Multiply is making the right decision, they have to support their Asian users. For the record Asia rules in social networking traffic.
interesting
ABS-CBN + Multiply = FAIL.
Multiply + ABS-CBN(Lopezes) = Epic FAIL & AIDS.
dude i have to do a rescerch paper on this country