Cyworld Attaks MySpace

by Channy Yun on Aug.01, 2006, under Uncategorized

Business 2.0 wrote a strange success story of Cyworld and matching with MySpace in US by Erick Schonfeld in a printed version of August.

South Korea’s most successful social network, a strange blend of Blogger, Flickr, and videogame-like avatars, brings in about $300,000 a day.Now it’s launching a U.S version. Should MySpace be worried?

It covers this story with 6 pages about history, status and global business of Cyworld. As following is a comparison chart between Cyworld and MySpace.

Business 2.0 shows three successful ideas for Cyworld as followings:

Idea 22 Give customers their own virtual space, and then charge them to decorate and customize it.
Idea 23 When importing a product from overseas, be ruthless about cutting features that won’t translate well to your domestic market.
Idea 24 If you want younger customers, forget advertising: Offer enough cool features that they’ll do your marketing for you.

As following is small captured images of articles. You can read it online e-book of Business 2.0.

Also this magazine includes many web 2.0 based services in the world in an another article.

:Cyworld

3 comments for this entry:

Peter Koh
August 13th, 2006 on 10:19 pm
Hello, Mr. Yun. My name is Peter Koh and I attended your lecture on August
2nd in Jeju about Web 2.0 in Korea. During your lecture, you mentioned
the long tail theory presented in Chris Anderson’s book, “The Long Tail.” I was
impressed to hear during your lecture that at Amazon, a large chunk of sales
fall outside of the top 20% of top-selling products.

However, a friend recently sent me an article from the July 26th Wall
Street Journal that raises some questions about Chris Anderson’s bold claims.
The article can be found at the following URL:

http://online.wsj.com/public/article SB115387606762117314.html?mod=technorati

The article can only be viewed by subscribers, but if you send me your email,
I can send you a PDF copy of the article.

It turns out that some of the things that the author claimed about Web 2.0 and
long tails are exaggerated or misrepresented. Anyways, keep up the good work
on your site!
Channy Yun
August 14th, 2006 on 2:19 am
Peter, Thanks for your visit and comment. I knew Lee Gomes’s criticism against long tail theory of course. You can see anderson’s reply in http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/07/backlash_coda.html about criticism. If you read korean, please refer to my thought in http://channy.tistory.com/57