Loogic English

It’s good to set ambitious goals but multiplying revenues by 10 times from last year perhaps doesn’t fit with the current state of advertising in these times of economic crises and with the estimated levels of investment in advertising in Spain. Will we start seeing banner ads all over Tuenti? Will they start using Adsense? Until now, the advertising campaigns on the site have been few and far in between and have been mainly based in the events section. Not sure if that way of managing advertising can scale to multiply revenues by 10.

Since long we haven’t talked about Tuenti and taking advantage of the publication of Tuenti’s revenue figures quoted by Zaryn Dentzel in BusinessWeek, let’s go through some things about Tuenti that didn’t get a mention in 2008.

The most relevant without doubt is the one related with their last round of investment in September. We have learned more details since then about the investment. Sources at Tuenti haven’t disclosed but it seems that related investors or companies haven’t had much problem in filtering information. From what has been published until now, the closest account is the one published by Cotizalia in December, which said: Grupo Timon, the parent company of Grupo Prisa, has become the latest investor in Tuenti through its venture capital arm Qualitas Equity Partners and that Borja Perez Arauna, director of investments in Grupo Timon, will take one of the six seats on the company’s board of directors, as per sources close to the deal. Qualitas Equity Partners thus takes a 16.98% stake in the company with an investment of about 10 million euros.

Around the end of 2008, there was also a lot of talk about the competition between Tuenti and Facebook, mostly about the evolution of the global giant of  social networking which has already taken one of the top positions in Alexa for Spain. Regarding this, I think we will see important migrations of users in the future between Tuenti and Facebook, surely in funtion of one social network becoming popular in different cities or as per user types. But both the social networks will continue to grow, although perhaps not with the same intensity as they have throughout 2008. Without a doubt, this year will be a year to search for profitability now that the critical mass of users has long been reached.

Photo credit: Tuentiadictos.

Ruben Colomer, Juan Luis Hortelano and Mariano Amartino present us their new project, Media Reload, an advertising network specialising in blogs, social networks and the new media.

It’s very interesting to read the principles upon which Media Reload is based with regards to the support and the advertisers. The principles are the ones that we all look for when it comes to advertising on our blogs, but unfortunately do not always coincide with the principles followed by the advertising agencies. Hope that at Media Reload, they will always maintain these ideas and that the work that they do from now on will help improve the business of advertising in the world of blogs.

Right from the start, Media Reload can count with two blog networks, the social network Catodicos and two important blogs: Online and Celularis.

From Loogic, I wish them lots of success to these three entrepreneurs, whom I also consider to be friends, and I know that they will do a great job with this new company and that we all will benefit from it.