Friendster.com targets Thailand

Worldwide social network Friendster.com is to begin a campaign to invigorate its 1-million-strong Thai membership, because Thailand is proving to be the Southeast Asian country with the fastest-growing adoption of social networks.

 The move aims to pave the way for the addition of commercial business to the Friendster.com online community, called "social shopping", as well as enhancing the online-money business, which is the core pursuit of its parent company, MOL AccessPortal.

MOL AccessPortal's president and chief executive Ganesh Kumar Bangha said that Friendster.com currently had 115 million users. Of these, 90 per cent were in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. In Thailand, it has around 1 million users, but most of them are not active.

He told The Nation in an interview that his company planned to aggressively promote Friendster.com in Thailand, starting in the middle of the year, with the aim of converting its existing 1 million users into active users within 12 months.

He said MOL Global, an affiliate of online payment-solutions provider MOL AccessPortal, had acquired the entire equity in social-networking website operator Friendster Inc. The operations of MOL and United States-based Friendster.com will now be combined to create Asia's largest end-to-end content, distribution and commerce network.

The deal between MOL and Friendster enables the integration of MOL's offline retail-channel partners and payment platform with Friendster's large online footprint, social network and user community in Asia. MOL has a network of more than 500,000 physical and virtual payment channels across 75 countries, to collect payments for content and services.

"The acquisition had a strategic value, and the new entity will retain Friendster's offices in various locations," Bangha said. "We are creating a unique company that will be well positioned to provide content to a huge regional user base here in Southeast Asia. Thailand is the fifth country on our focus."

Bangha said there were about 400 games available at Friendster.com, and they generated spending of between US$30 and $40 (Bt985 and Bt1,314) per user per month.

"Our aim is to have only 1 per cent of Friendster.com's total 115 million users each spending only $2 to $3 online per month - or around 10 per cent of Friendster.com's average revenue per user," he said.

The company is currently in the process of rolling out its core business in the Thai market. Its first move was setting up MOL Access Portal (Thailand) in the middle of last year, with registered capital of Bt22 million.

The new company's first business will be limited to its online-payment services, which will be distributed through 1,100 offline retail-channel partners throughout the country.

MOL Access Portal (Thailand)'s chief executive Preecha Praipattarakul said his company's mission was to build Friendster.com to become active and popular among social-network users in Thailand. The company will integrate its core online-payment platform to enhance user experience at Friendster.com by introducing the concept of social shopping.

"Normally, Friendster.com's core revenue comes from advertising, but from now on revenue will come from e-commerce and from our 400-game content. Of those games, about 40 come from Thai game-service providers," Preecha said.

He said social shopping was a service that allowed Friendster.com users to merge their online and offline lifestyles and daily expenses for both virtual and physical goods. For example, it will promote the concept of groups of users pooling small individual contributions to buy birthday gifts for their friends.

"The 115-million users of Friendster.com each have a list of their friends' birthdays. So, in each day, there are about 300,000 birthday anniversaries. Each user has, let's say, an average of 50 to 100 friends on his or her list. It is possible that these friends will be attracted to the idea of spending just a small amount together to buy a birthday gift for that person. It is the company's mission to make this kind of scenario happen," Preecha said.

At present, the company is working on the technical tasks of making Friendster.com's technology platform strong and giving it a friendly interface and interaction with mobile-phone platforms.

Apart from its business in the Friendster.com community, Preecha said the company would also expand its core online-payment business in Thailand. It has three money services called Fun Loader, MOL Point and MOL Reload. All are designed for online payments from the gaming community, but each is a little different to the others.

Fun Loader is an online-payment service with Internet cafes as its distributors, MOL Point is an online-payment service using a membership model and MOL Reload accepts online payments at electronic data-capture (EDP) machines installed in physical outlets such as book stores, mobile-phone shops and convenience stores.

"In our first three months with only one service - Fun Loader - we have gained about Bt6 million in revenue. For the whole of this year, with full provision of three services, we aim for revenue of Bt100 million," Preecha said.

Recently, Friendster.com launched a new brand and website packed with new features to focus on the Asian youth market.