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Friday, June 20, 2008

Filipinos are Top "multiply" Users

A third of the traffic going to social networking site Multiply, or approximately 300 million page views, is coming from Filipino users worldwide, top Multiply executives said Wednesday.

Multiply President and Founder Peter Pezaris said Multiply gets about a billion page views a month, a third of which comes from Filipinos in different parts of the globe. This makes Filipinos the number one users of Multiply, ranking higher than users in the United States where the site is based.

Pezaris said the Filipino culture's emphasis on family and relationships is the main reason why the social networking site is so popular in the Philippines.

"The reason why we are popular here, I think, relates to that notion of friends and family, the fact that our service is much more focused on connecting you with people that you know in real life rather than introducing you to people that you don’t know. It’s a site that really plays into the cultural phenomenon that’s here in the Philippines," he told abs-cbnNEWS.com.

David Hersh, Multiply Vice-president for Business Development, also said the integration of unlimited photosharing in Multiply is very attractive to Filipino Internet users. Most Filipino Multiply users are female, in the 18-25 age bracket, and average about 160 Multiply page views a month.

"Filipinos are just rabid consumers of content. It’s amazing. Those 160 page views aren’t just fluff page views of people bouncing from profile to profile. It’s people consuming photos, videos and blogs from the people in their world. It’s meaningful activity. It reflects the deep level of engagement that we have with our user base especially here in the Philippines," Pezaris said.

Hersh said Multiply currently has nine million registered users worldwide, of which 2.2 million are Filipinos. He said that while the growth of Multiply has been slower compared to other social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, it is the real-world relationships in Multiply that sets it apart and ensures its longevity.

"If your online social network is full of people that you have no real world connection to, there’s very little reason to keep you there and it’s very easy for you to switch. But on Multiply, it’s your real-world social network online and your content and it’s the discussion that goes on around that content that’s going to keep you coming back," he said.

Adds Pezaris: "It’s closer, deeper relationships which enables the sharing of personal, meaningful content to you and the continuing sharing of that is the personal documentation of your life online. Over a period of time, you build up this history like a living scrapbook of what’s happening in your life and it’s a collaborative effort because while you add to it, all your friends and family add to it also and that’s what really develops the long-term value."

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