What is it about Turkey? They are really getting into social networking. Turkish social network Yonja (whose logo actually looks Irish to me) has raised $12.5M in Series A funding from Greywolf Capital Partners and Tiger Global Management, reports PEWire. HQ’d in San Francisco, the firm is led by founder and CEO Kerim Baran, who was educated at Harvard and Siebel before launching Yonja. Founded in 2003, Yonja claims a billion page views per month and nearly 5 million members. Owners Yonja Media Group also launched MetroListe (a craigslist for Turkey), 7inci (a DailyCandy for Turkey) and Nolyo (a Twitter for Turkey), says AlarmClock. In fact, Turkish startups aren’t doing too bad. Last week we reported that Xing, the Germany-based European business social network which resembles LinkedIn, had bought Turkish business social network Cember, for about $6.43 million (€4.36 million).
by Mike Butcher on January 29, 2008
Social networking sites are to bring people from different demographics on a common platform. Now, too many social networks are creating confusion and basically it is dividing us again… wat you say??
It doesn’t matter if logo looks irish to you. At least he created job in Turkey that’s good thing.
Tiger owns a stake in Mail.ru in Russia. See my post on http://blog.quintura.com/2007/.....-internet/
“Yonja” means “(four-leaf) clover”. You pronounce it Yon-juh.
Yonca (reads as yonja) means “four leaf clover” in Turkish
I’m really surprised to hear this actually.. I’m Turkish and have had an account in Yonja for years.. (Although I haven’t checked it in a very long while)
Back when I was still using it, Yonja had the most atrocious site design ever.. It was also painfully slow.. The only reason why they made it big is that they were the first “social” network in Turkey.
As for the 5M users? Yonja doesn’t delete or suspend inactive accounts, considering the number of new social networking sites opened since 2003, I’d guess less than 2M _active_ users.. (Check this Alexa graph: http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....ize=Medium )
Once Facebook and MySpace release Turkish versions, Yonja will be dead in the water..
A couple of tidbits:
* Yonja is derived from the work “Yonca” in Turkish, meaning “clover”, hence the logo.
* The site’s slogan is “Get Lucky”. (Can you guess what its primary purpose was?)
* Although the site was of Turkish origin and was consisted of almost exclusively Turkish speaking people, an Turkish version of the site was released several years after it was founded.
FYI, the Irish shamrock is a regular three-leaved clover. It was supposed to have been used by St. Patrick to help explain the Holy Trinity. A true shamrock, then, is not much use to the (mostly Muslim) Turks, and a four-leaved clover is not much use to the (mostly Catholic) Irish.
Btw, “Nolyo” (short for “ne oluyor?”), the Turkish Twitter, means “Wassup” (as shortend for “what’s up?”)…
It´s good that they have good gains, those are the companies the country needed to create jobs… but I visited yonja.com, and really I did not understand anything!!! and if it´s a social network, it must be in an universal language.
Ebay picked up another Turkish site not long ago. In the coming years you will see quite a few more Turks getting grabbed not only in social networking but the local versions of what flies (or is hoped will fly
in the rest of the world but also various hardware and software startups that mature.
With a young and dynamic population of 75M and the 14th largest economy in the world the biggest disadvantage enterprenuers face is early stage funding. The IPO (expected late 2008) of the recently privatized incumbent Turkish Telekom will be the largest IPO in that part of the world…
I think the attraction with turkey is the huge percentage of its people are under the age of 35. Ideal for long term growth in SocNets
Great accomplisment for the network if we take in advice what Can provided!
It’s nice to see start-ups from neighbours and successfull ones [Cember]
@Omer: you are exaggerating a bit [for the second part.. and the numbers] but I don’t want to be marked as a conflict starter..
@can, hitman
if yonja has active users as its first months; it raises $ 50m. now.
as cem yilmaz said before “you can easily realize” : )) —> for video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDuxlpoV9uA
I am very happy on this news. Really I am!
nice to hear that there are companies ready to give money startups outside the USA
until now it seemed that in the USA is everything OK, everywhere else is everything KO
Their traffic number is bogus. 1 billion page views per month? That is bullshit. I am Turkish and I know 50 other Turkish friends who don’t even consider this a social network.
I would like for Mr. Kerim to come and defend these numbers.
It was supposed to have been used by St. Patrick to help explain the Holy Trinity.
I would not invest a penny to that crap web site. Its been popular once, but not any more. And all what they are doing is just the clone of foreign ones (twitter, craigslist). They are nothing but crappy followers. Never going to become an innovator one day.
With all due respect, 1 billion PV is complete BS. I am guessing that they are counting all requests towards this including JS + CSS.