Studivz against Facebook - David against Goliath?
Facebook is hype:
Now Facebook certainly has the biggest market share with students in the anglo-saxon world, while in the germanophone parts of the world, Studivz is still much stronger.
This is how they are growing internationally:
While it was always clear that studivz would never be able to beat facebook worldwide, the question arises on how long the studivz can sustain itsself when facebook grows in users and in features.
It is not that simple to compare user numbers in specific countries. The facebook network Switzerland has 16′000 users now, while Studivz claim they have 52′000 users in Switzerland. But a lot of people on facebook don’t necessarily join their regional Network. In fact, of my 136 total friends on facebook, only 71 of them are in the Switzerland network. I guess I have about 100 people that actually live in Switzerland as friends, which makes my guess at the penetration 70%. According to this, There would be 16k / 0.7 ~= 23k users from Switzerland. That’s already close to half of the Studivz users. How long until we surpass Studivz?
Let’s take a look at University penetration. ETH Zurich Network on Facebook has 8 people called Philipp. Studivz shows us 90 results for ETH. That would be a penetration of less than 10 percent, if we generalize over all students.
St. Gallen University has a better penetration in facebook: 23 Philipps while Studivz shows
72 results, this is roughly a third.
While it is hard to really compare how much penetration those networks have, two things are clear:
- Studivz still has much more users in Switzerland and Germany
- Facebook is growing fast internationally, also in those two regions.
The question we haven’t answered yet is, who grows faster?
Nevertheless, I would suggest that facebook will win sooner or later just because of their wider international reach ( you need facebook for your exchange student friends in the US/England. ) and their massive expansion strategy with facebook apps. They understand what’s important and what’s viral, execute fast and deliver results.
June 29th, 2007 at 09:14
I am not so sure that this will be an easy win for Facebook. Here are my issues:
1. studiVZ has a huge penetration in the key markets - and the penetration is more than 9 to 1 in favor of studiVZ in terms of importance in the daily live of students and pupils! studiVZ is the key communication platform in those markets.
2. The worldwide chart is not the right view because facebook with its much bigger home markets US and UK is much more in favor in terms of size. But the comparison in each market would be interesting. Say Germany, Switzerland Austria but also Spain, Italy etc. In all those markets studiVZ is much bigger!
3. The application platform is realy great. But with its big potential comes also a huge problem of the diversification of facebook. Will facebook be seeen as the network for my close personal network? Do I actively invite today my friends to facebook? A big network might be interesting to serve people but for the main communication there is no must to go to facebook. If you are a student in DACH you have to be studiVZ otherwise you miss the live of your friends
So it will be very interesting to see what will happen once facebook is localized to the international languages.
June 29th, 2007 at 09:16
Additional short comment: studiVZ has today all the international markets and also schuelerVZ (that explodes right now) under different domains - so you would have to include them as well to have an accurate comparison!
June 29th, 2007 at 01:59
Peter,
Thanks for your insights.
#1 Is certainly true now in Germany, probably also in Switzerland. Although the younger generation is on facebook already now and not on Studivz (not relevant.) Do you know how many swiss pupils on Schülervz?
#2 I checked just shortly for the name Stephan in Italy: Studiln: 54 names, Facebook: 42 names. You also have to see that the a lot of users in the international brands are the same that on studivz, because for a reason I do not understand, the networks are not interconnected.
#3 True for now. From what I see in Switzerland, the whole highschool community is on facebook. In Switzerland the growth has been accelerated by the not to be underestimated presence of International/American schools, which students are all the earliest adopters on facebook.
#4 very valid point. I’ve been trying to find numbers on those networks, but I didn’t. If you know where I can find it, it would love to include them into my comparison.
I don’t think facebook will overcome studivz overnight in the germanophone markets.
In France we are counting 42k users on facebook in the France network, and if you divide by the rate of people who join their regional network that is already 60k+ users, and those are unique. Happy to put in the studiqg.fr number if you have it.
June 29th, 2007 at 06:44
When talking about world leadership in the long-rung I wouldn’t forget that Asian students even though being very active networkers are rarely present on facebook.
July 9th, 2007 at 01:05
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