By Joey Alarilla
INQUIRER.net
AS I’ve previously blogged in @play, Friendster is huge in the Philippines (and readers have sent in comments to explain why that’s so).
Sadly, however, elsewhere around the world Friendster has been overtaken by other social networking sites. But this could change now that Friendster is back in the news after finalizing a deal with Google for search and targeted advertising.
Friendster launched on June 8 Google search for its more than 44 million users in over 75 countries.
Here’s an excerpt from the press statement:
Friendster users will benefit from Google’s powerful search technologies and targeted advertising, and Google’s advertisers will have greater access to one of the largest online social networking communities in the world. Users can easily search the Web via a Google search bar from the top center of every page of the Friendster.com website. Google search results are presented within a Friendster page with natural search results and sponsored links clearly noted. As a result, users can save time by not having to navigate off Friendster to conduct web searches, and get to use Google’s powerful search technologies to do so.
This launch of Google search on Friendster marks the completion of the integration and deployment of several Google advertising offerings that are the focus of Friendster’s global advertising agreement with Google.
Friendster had previously announced in March 2007 both the agreement and the successful integration and global launch of the keyword-targeted text and display advertising components of the deal.
“As the 17th largest website in the world with over 6 billion page views a month and over 22 million monthly unique visitors, we are pleased to have deployed Google’s best-in-class Web search in Asia and worldwide,” said Aaron Barnes, vice president of global sales and business development at Friendster.
Lori Sobel, Head of Sales for Google Singapore, serving Southeast Asia, added “Google is focused on helping users access information quickly and easily, and we are pleased to offer our search technology to the Friendster community.”
June 11th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
[...] Tech Addicts: Friendster loves Google [...]