Friendster pounds its fist (in Asia)

If I were (according to Alexa) the 40th largest site on the Web and nobody took me seriously, I’d be upset too.

I can’t remember the last time I heard someone speak the name of Friendster without snickering. It’s obviously a qualitative thing. Friendster’s decidedly (umm) Asian traffic orientation has excluded it from the conversations in which real social networks, like Myspace and Facebook, are spoken of. It may have something to do with how little understood the Asian “opportunity” remains by the majority of American marketers. It may have something to do with the fact that Friendster traffic just doesn’t convert for shit.

But, be that as it may, Friendster was recently overheard asserting some superlatives:

• Friendster is the #1 Social Network in Asia. Friendster has over 50 million registered users and 34 million monthly unique visitors from Asia¹ - the number is actually much higher since comScore data excluding users accessing Friendster exclusively from Internet cafes (which are very popular in Asia) and via mobile phones.
• Friendster remains the 8th-largest Web site and the 3rd largest social network in the world in terms of traffic, and #1 in user engagement (time spent on site) among top social networks.¹
• 38% of the world’s Internet population is in the Asia Pacific region. Asia has almost twice the Internet population as the US, which only contains 22% of the world’s Internet users. Asia is also the fastest growing region for Internet usage.
• Friendster is More Than Twice the Size of Any Other Social Network in Asia. While Friendster has over 34 million monthly unique visitors in Asia, Facebook has 16 million, MySpace.com and MySpace.cn has only 15 million combined, Mixi (Japan) has 14 million, CyWorld (Korea) has 13 million, Hi5 has 12 million, Orkut has 10 million, Xiaonei (China) has 7 million, 51.com (China) has 7 million, and Bebo has 4 million.¹

Now, if they were only big in Japan — somebody might give a shit.

¹comScore Media Metrix, March 2008. Data excludes: a)users accessing the Internet exclusively through Internet cafes, and b) users accessing the Internet through mobile phones.