The total number of members of Wretch Co (無名小站) — Taiwan’s leading social networking Web site and a subsidiary of Yahoo-Kimo Inc (雅虎奇摩) — hit 6.5 million recently, showing that more Taiwanese are interacting in social communities in cyberspace.
Wretch had a total of 5.25 million members last year, a sharp rise from 2.75 million in 2007, company executives told reporters at a briefing yesterday, where it revealed the site’s membership numbers for the first time.
Taiwan’s Internet population stands at 15.8 million, which means one in every three netizens is a registered Wretch member, the company said.
However, the portal’s increases in membership are likely to slow as Internet penetration shows signs of saturation so the company says “increasing traffic by offering a better user interface and innovative services will be critical,” the company’s founder Wretch Chien (簡志宇) said.
As broadband penetrates into many households, social networking sites such as Wretch, Facebook, Plurk and Twitter have gained popularity.
Data from researcher InsightXplorer Ltd (創市際市場研究顧問) found that in August Wretch showed the highest reach rate at 78.6 percent, meaning 78.6 percent of netizens polled visited Wretch pages at least once in that month. The second was Pixnet (痞客邦) at 55.5 percent. Xuite came in third at 49.7 percent and Facebook was No. 4 at 44.9 percent. Yam Blog (天空部落) was the fifth at 41.1 percent.
The researcher said that Facebook, which currently has 250 million members worldwide, is quickly winning the hearts of Taiwanese netizens.
Facebook’s reach rate in August was up 60 percent from July and Taiwan recorded the highest growth in new members worldwide during the period from Sept. 3 to Sept. 13, InsightXplorer said.
Happy Farm (開心農場) is the Facebook application that Taiwanese spend the most time on, the researcher said. Happy Farm is a game created by outside developers for Facebook where members can grow crops in their cyber farm and friends can steal those crops when the host is away.
Chien said Happy Farm has become popular among users because they can play with their friends.
“It is indeed a simple application and coming up with similar applications that friends can use to interact with each other in cyberspace is the way for Wretch to go,” he said.
Meanwhile, Wretch said its revenues this year are expected to grow by 30 percent, thanks to more companies advertising on the site. However, the number pales with last year when the site saw 80 percent year-on-year revenue growth.
“It isn’t a good year for most Web site operators so far, but we fared well,” Chien said.
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