Bronte Media

Perhaps it’s the contrarion in me but whenever an Internet company falls out of favor I tend to pay more attention to it. No more so than Friendster, who has ridden both sides of the extreme hype and despondence curve. In the beginning, the site was practically a revolution and more recently high profile publications have written near-obituaries and cite it as a constant example of how things are ‘fads’ online (total bullshit).

They mightn’t be able to tell the muppets who write these articles to shove it just yet but they are close. Junior points to an article saying the site has dropped Yahoo and brought in Google to sell its ads. That’s usually good for another +20% in revenue but since so much of their traffic is based in Asia, the agreement is likely to improve the financials a lot more. And there is also the fact that this time the bidding is likely to have been a lot more competitive.

If you click through to the Reuters article from the post, there is also this:

“Friendster had 19.4 million active global users in January, up from a recent low of 13.6 million in March of last year. according to research firm comScore Networks Inc.”

The venture firms who have participated in the financial restructuring are certain to make a lot of money on their investment. Kleiner and Benchmark have continued to invest and keep the company alive, but the big balls award would have to go to DAG Ventures, who led the most recent $10m financing last August. Well done.