On Read/Write Web, there’s an interesting interview with Benjamin Joffe, Managing Director at Asia Internet consultancy +8* and Co-Founder of MobileMonday Beijing. The interview is based on the informative presentation he gave at this month’s Media 08 event in Sydney.
The above slide (with Alexa rankings) is from Joffe’s presentation (and the table is my own, created with data from Joffe’s slides). These show Facebook being outpeformed in three vital metrics (profitability, Alexa ranking in home market, and percent of home market internet users who have accounts). Joffe suggests that the U.S. and the West has a lot it could learn from Asia in this Web 2.0 area: Asia is where the social networks are profitable, mainly from selling digital goods – from background music to personalization, avatars or casual games.
Check out Joffe’s good and interesting slide presentation, New Business Models in Online Communities. The best thing in there is the screenshots of QQ and Cyworld with translations of the content on their top pages (for those who don’t read Korean and Chinese)–on slides 36 and 38. (Oddly, he doesn’t do this translation for Mixi, from Japanese. Drop me an email if you’re interested in hiring me to do this for you!)
