Remember Old-School Social Networking?
Remember FriendsReunited? Back in 2000 the UK spin-off of ‘Classmates.com’ in many ways laid the foundation of today’s biggest sites. It had a business model, a growth rate to rival that of Twitter and even made a profit of £22 million in 2007 - something Facebook and MySpace are still struggling to do. So what went wrong and what can be learnt from failures of the past?
Cast your mind back to the year 2000. The millennium bug roams the streets, the Internet was at a lightning fast 56k per second for most and we all enjoyed the modem dial sound before being redirected to the Lycos homepage. The Internet was a void filled with Geocities websites, javascript hit counters and Google before it started selling adverts. Images took an average of 2 seconds to load and a full site could take more than 25 seconds.
Users saw the Internet as a peripheral… not as a utility as it is viewed nowadays. FriendsReunited captured the imagination and turned the Internet into something useful. Never before had there been a directory where users could connect and find people they had virtually forgotten about. The genius that built FriendsReunited was sucking people in. Someone once said the art of good business is being a good middle man and boy was this site a good middle man. You could create a profile and search for free… but talking to the guy who used to sit next to you 10 years ago is going to cost you. And people paid (remember back in the day when people paid for the goods and services they received). They paid in their masses and in December 2005, Friends Reunited had over fifteen million members (which is equivalent to approximatelya quarter of the population of the UK).
So what changed? Firstly competitors arrived on the scene. By 2005 MySpace emerged as the biggest social network of them all, with a staggering 48 million users. With MySpace, users could join for free, they could customise their profile and add music and videos to portray their personality. What is more, it brought social networking to everyone. FriendsReunited was fine for finding your classmates years later, but what if you were still in school, or just wanted to find out what your friends were doing without emailing them? The site fell behind with outdated technology and an unfeasible business model. People could now find their classmates on other social sites and they could do it without paying £5 a year for the luxury. One thing the growth of Facebook has proven is that if you want to make it big… start with the young market. Facebook brought ‘Apps’ to the equation, users could create groups and see what their friends were up to as soon as they wrote it, without the need to email and ask.
ITV, the British broadcaster paid £120m for the site in December 2005. In February this year the value was estimated at just £20 million. A sad demise for a company that just couldn’t keep up.
Related Articles
- Friends Reunited valued at fraction of £175m paid by ITV (telegraph.co.uk)
Tagged as Business, Facebook, Friends Reunited, Google, MySpace, Social network, Social network service, Twitter + Categorized as Business, Commentary