Due to impressive numbers of Friendster subscribers in the Philippines, company executives bared plans to expand presence in the country by increasing its manpower roster.
In an interview with BusinessMirror, David Jones, vice president for global marketing of online social networking site Friendster, said they are increasing the number of personnel in their Makati City office by hiring more people, mostly marketing executives, who will promote further awareness for the site.
Friendster was the 2007 recipient of the Webware 100 Award for best community site. The company has also been granted a number of social networking focused patents.
Friendster’s competitors include Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Piczo, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Visible Path and others.
“Yeah, we will be hiring additional people to help us in marketing the site in the Philippines. Friendster is really popular here that’s why we’re embarking on this effort,” Jones said.
A report by Alexa.com, a Web information service provider that tracks statistics of various web sites, including traffic details, showed that among the 1.26 billion Internet users that visited Friendster last December, around 8.5 million came from the Philippines.
“That’s about 10 percent of the total population of the country already, and that’s enormous,” Jones continued.
Other social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace managed to attract around 490,000 and 570,000 visits, respectively from the Philippines. In the Asia-Pacific region, 26 million surfers visited Friendster compared to 14 million for Facebook and 9 million for MySpace.
Founded in 2002, Friendster is one of the web's older social networking services. Adults, 18 and up can join and connect with friends, family, school, groups, activities and interests. The site currently has over 50 million users. It's rumored that Google offered $30M to buy Friendster in 2003.