Philippines is Friendster capital
By Ike Suarez, Manila Times

The Philippines is longer just the text capital of the world, but also the capital for one of the most popular social networking sites on the Internet.

“Today, there are 30 million Filipinos registered with Friendster and 24.3 million of them are active users, logging at least once every 30 days to our online social network,” this was according to Friendster PR and Marketing Director Jeff Roberto who spoke with The Manila Times during a break in the sessions of the recently held Google DevFest at the UP College of Social Work and Community Development at the Diliman, Quezon City campus of the University of the Philippines.

Roberto flew to Manila along with other advocates of the Open Social initiative to speak before participants in the one-day developer conference held early November in UP.

Roberto told The Manila Times Friendster today has 85 million people around the world registered with it and 60 million of them come from Asia, making it the number one online social network in Asia and number three globally. “We are four times bigger here in Asia than Multiply and 15 times larger than MySpace” he claimed.

Roberto said that the other three countries in Asia next to the Philippines in the number of registered users were the following: Indonesia (11 million), Malaysia (6.1 million) and Singapore (1.8 million).

He admitted that the number of Filipinos registered with Friendster exceeded the 24 million Filipinos estimated by various Net research companies to be connected to the Internet through various means. He explained this was because many Filipinos had multiple accounts with their online social network.

Roberto attributed Friendster’s popularity with Filipinos to the fact that it launched in the San Francisco Bay area in 2003 in California, a state with a large Fil-American community who made up one of its early adopters. These Fil-Ams then invited friends and relatives in the Philippines to join, jumpstarting a viral membership recruitment campaign in the country.

Roberto said Friendster today generates revenues from online advertising and corporate sponsorship of pages. He added that their company would soon announce new revenue streams to be added to their current marketing model, but did not elaborate.