Social Brand Visibility: Friendster

Founded in 2002, Friendster is one of the web’s older social networking services, launched before MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn came into being. Users can join and connect with friends, family, school, groups, activities and interests.

Friendster mission is to create a safe environment for meeting new people by browsing user profiles and connecting to friends, friends of friends and so on, allowing members to expand their circle of friends more rapidly than in real life.

Today, Friendster has a membership base of more than 115 million registered users. Over 90% of Friendster’s traffic comes from Asia where it has more monthly unique visitors than any other social network.

The website receives approximately 19 billion page views per month, and is in the top 500 global websites based on web traffic.

As for advertising, Friendster offers two systems: a pay for impressions (CPM) or Cost Per Click (CPC) models.

For CPM, a single impression is when your Ad appears on a Friendster page someone is viewing. CPM is calculated by one thousand impressions – the cost of showing your ad 1,000 times. If your ad is $5 CPM and your budget is $100, your ad will appear 20,000 times over the span of your campaign.

Cost Per Click (CPC) is where you pay for each click on your ad. CPC advertising allows you to specify a certain amount that you are willing to pay each time a user actually clicks on your ad up to your specified budget.

Targeting allows you to specify where and who will see your ad – This powerful tool makes your advertising more effective by zeroing in on your target audience. Their system allows advertiser to target a group by different criteria; age, gender, country, interest etc. and is available in different languages