Sunday, October 15, 2006
The Fall of the House of Friendster
Friendster's decline and fall. If only founder Jonathan Abrams had taken Google's $30 million dollar offer, he'd be worth $1 billion today. Instead he chose to take venture capital in the hopes of building Friendster into something on the level of a Yahoo!, which similarly declined a buyout offer and of course, became hugely successful.
Friendster's decline and fall can apparently be described by three factors: a revolving cast of CEOs (3 in 12 months), scaling problems (at times the site took 40 seconds to load up), and an out of touch board that wasn't well-versed in the social networking market (and was assuming success instead of working towards it).
One thing stood out: Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark, and other VCs pumped in another $3 million to keep Friendster afloat, citing in part Friendster's brand name recognition and millions of users (most of whom hadn't visited the site for a while). What interests me is that they expected those inactive users to show up again. Most likely, even at Friendster's height, most registered users had already abandoned Friendster. More thoughts later.
Gary Rivlin over at the New York Times has a great article on
Friendster's decline and fall can apparently be described by three factors: a revolving cast of CEOs (3 in 12 months), scaling problems (at times the site took 40 seconds to load up), and an out of touch board that wasn't well-versed in the social networking market (and was assuming success instead of working towards it).
One thing stood out: Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark, and other VCs pumped in another $3 million to keep Friendster afloat, citing in part Friendster's brand name recognition and millions of users (most of whom hadn't visited the site for a while). What interests me is that they expected those inactive users to show up again. Most likely, even at Friendster's height, most registered users had already abandoned Friendster. More thoughts later.
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