Asian social networking sites profit from virtual money
The Australia-based uSocial is selling friends and fans to Facebook members. Reuters photo.
By selling an array of virtual products from avatar clothes to e-furniture, Asia’s social networking sites appear to have solved the conundrum of how to leverage big profits from their extensive user bases.
It’s simple, they say, the money might be virtual but the profits are all too real.
Chinese university student Tan Shengrong spends about 20 yuan ($2.90) per month purchasing outfits for her pet penguin avatar or playing games on QQ, an instant message portal on Qzone, China’s most popular social networking site.
It might not seem like a hefty sum, but every fen, or cent, is money in the bank for Tencent Holdings, which owns Qzone and saw an 85 percent increase in its second quarter net profit this year compared to 2008 despite the economic downturn.
“They keep growing even though the economy’s bad because they keep making millions from cents from millions and millions of people,” said Benjamin Joffe, head of Internet consulting firm Plus Eight Star. (More …)
