Some weeks ago Myngle.com announced a new partnership. They teamed up with the Latvia based social network ONE.lv. A press release should have followed. As time goes by and I am sure there will be other topics to talk about, soon I decided publish this draft today. So, let’s have a quick look on the facts as I know them.
First of all Myngle is now available in Russian as the sixth located language of the platform. I don’t know what came first, the egg or the hen e.g. the decision to translate the website into Russian or the possible partnership with ONE.lv but one depends on the other, of course.
Quoting the Myngle blog:
With more than 2,9 million registered users, ONE is smaller than social networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn, but in terms of single country market penetration ONE.LV is a completely unique phenomena. You can see our banners on their website and the members of ONE can give each other our lovely parrots as a gift and get a discount to learn a language on Myngle.
I think it is more a social network like facebook. The fact that you can send gifts to your friends definitely sounds “facebookish”.
That said ONE.lv seems to have gone the same way as the german StudiVZ.de. Both of them are concentrated on a niche market which has not been targeted by facebook yet. As facebook is having a hard time in Germany to get market share from StudiVZ, facebook even tried to sue them for copying their platform, the same situation seems to be in Latvia.
So, what do we know about our northern friends? All three baltic countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are meanwhile highly developed and demographical young countries. They are known for innovation and to be fairly open (minded). Therefore a perfect target group.
All three countries where part of the former USSR and have each a big Russian speaking community.
ONE.LV is the largest Russian-speaking online community in Latvia.
None of the web destinations in Latvia came even closer to that huge number of Russian-speaking Internet audience concentrated in one place.
ONE.LV – more than 860 000 users with 160 000 visits daily!
The bigger part of the ONE community seems to be either registered at ONE.lt or does not speak Russian. Comparing the visits to facebook we see less activity. 50% of the facebook users log in every day whereas ONE.lv seems to be around 20% which I think is fairly good for a community of “just” 860 000 members.
If you have a look on Alexa.com you see that all of a sudden Latvia is on the second rank behind India on the list of countries Myngle.com is receiving traffic from.
Looking at the latest sign ups for one of the languages I teach, German, there are quite a few new students from Latvia. Problem: most of them are between 11 and 18 years old. So really young and not the main target group for paid language lessons yet another similarity to the German StudiVZ. Another problem: most of them only speak Russian which means Myngle needs new teachers who are able to speak Russian with their students.
Looking at all sign ups located in Latvia you find about 1120 students located in Latvia and ONE of them (coincidence?) = 0.01% took a class on Myngle so far.
Bottom line: I think the basic idea to link up with social networks is not bad. If exactly this partnership will be fruitful for Myngle and its teachers, I am not so sure. But I will keep you updated, of course.
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