FAZ.NET – one of Germany’s largest daily papers on weblin -

We have revealed user figures for the first time in months. Dr. Holger Schmidt, business editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), one of Germany’s most read daily newspapers, took time to talk to weblin.

A lot has happened since we last talked about user figures. In 2007, weblin made considerable progress in respect of session length and user stickiness – a good basis on which to build our strategy for 2008.

As one can read in the faz article, we have not been as strongly visible in Germany in the last few months as perhaps many would have expected. But that does not mean that we are not satisfied with the user figures in Germany. On the contrary, from today’s perspective, we can only summarise that we have planned well and realised our plans consistently. We have created a good product for the user which is a lot of fun. The enthusiasm is measurable: weblins actively spend an average of 30 hours a month with weblin. If one compares this number with other social networks, as one can read in Holger Schmidt’s blog, we can be really proud of the result. With this high intensity of use, weblin comes close to the figures of Instant Messengers or even surpasses them depending on which surveys one looks at.
We therefore succeeded in setting up a sound basis in 2007, one on which we have begun to internationalise and, with the new features, we have above all ensured more safety also for non-weblins. The new functions weblin.lite, weblin Publisher and weblin.lite Widget have extended weblin’s range far beyond the download. For the first time, Mac users too can travel the Web with their avatars. Every blog item with the weblin Publisher reaches many readers who click on the link or screenshot and thus use a weblin avatar for the first time.

weblin, now available in eight languages, entered the US market by visiting the virtual world conference n New York and has been intensifying its PR activities in Spain, Italy and France since April.
In addition to the countries weblin is actively working on, downloads come day after day from more than 50 other countries. Here, too, the strategy has proved successful: thanks to the cooperations and the enthusiastic users who install the weblin download in their blogs, weblin is available on several hundred websites. weblin has thus grown strongly, to a six-figure user community.

There is possibly a connection between the number of reports on weblin and the ebbing away of the media hype on Second Life. I discussed this too with Holger Schmidt. But more about that in another blog. Because Germany is about to play ...