Dec 17, 2009
Friendster.com acquired for $110 million
This came as news to me when Friendster.com was acquired by a company in Malaysia. Friendster.com used to be the leading online social networking site and was often copied by the one Maga social networking site – MySpace.com (see book I finished on Stealing My Space).
I know that Friendster.com is a big hit in countries like Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Phillipines and maintains a strong foot hold in Asia, but the growth of the company within the last few years were very disappointing. According to an article in Wired.com (Issue 12.04 | April 2004), they valued Friendster at $53 million. After five years, Friendster was only able to double its value in comparison to companies like MySpace or the current social networking website titan, Facebook which is able to command a higher value and have seen a huge surge in growth.
A couple of days ago, Frindster was sold for a price tag of $110 million to a Malaysia company – MOL Global. MOL Global is an affiliate of online payment solutions provider MOL AccessPortal Bhd, which has Berjaya Corp Bhd chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) Tan Sri Vincent Tan as the principal shareholder.
An industry blog, TechCrunch, had in July valued Friendster at US$210mil, a fraction of Facebook’s estimated US$10bil valuation. According to Compete.com, Friendster is currently generating 1.1 million unique hits in Nov 2009 while Facebook is generating 128.3 million unique hits for the same period.
I doubt that Friendster will come close to what Facebook is doing but I am sure that MOL sees a value in Frienster to cough up $110 million, and if TechCrunch is accurate in their estimate, then Friendster was sold at 50 cents on the dollar.
