StudiVZ and School Students
For my english readers: the article on School Students and the StudiVZ articles summarizes the recent developments in that field. In short: StudiVZ wants to attract also school students but faces a lot of tough competition which might render the success unlikely.
StudiVZ is trying to expand into the target group of school students because they are facing a stagnating community both in Germany and in Europe. After StudiVZ announced its complete sell-out to Holtzbrinck, it was rumoured that they had received 85 million Euros, which is surely overestimated since quite a large chunck of the capital will only flow after the successful expansion.
However, they have underestimated the difficulties involved in creating a German School Student Network. Not only that the demand for networking is probably much lower at schools, other large issues are as well that most of the people in the target group are minors and data security is difficult to maintain. Such networks would be open floors for right-wing agitators and pedophiles.
In the last weeks StudiVZ has tried to hire a team which would organize this expansion. They have not made a survey of the market or their competitors, communities such as SchuelerRg.de, Schueler.CC and Schuelerprofile.de. Their whole negotiation was marked by an arrogant attitude towards anyone involved – offering internships as a compensation and not realizing that everybody was already sharing infos and ridiculing the StudiVZ team.
They have now finally acquired two young people, Christian Beilborn and Oliver Skopec, which are being paid 2600 Euro per month for about a year plus another bonus salary per acquired school student profile (about 20 cents per profile in the first few weeks). Christian Beilborn has played a prominent role in contacting all the competitors of StudiVZ in his role as speaker of the Youth Press and carries now the internal information together with the still-to-be-developed ideas directly to StudiVZ – something that not everybody likes.
What will happen next? Since the contract starts on monday, I expect that SchülerVZ goes online soon. Neither Christian Beilborn nor Ehssan Dariani care much about the discussion raised in the blogoshpere – they remain silent and silently they start to implement the ideas that they stole from other social networks.
Februar 19th, 2007 at 23:53
Hey,
School Students heißt University Students und (!) High Schoolers auf englisch.
Im a native english speaker. Your english is great, but this lack of distinction in the article makes it impossible to understand unless you know german and can recognize the logic behind this error.
I would change all your mentions of “school students” to “high schoolers” or the more proper term “high school students (the “high” is very important!!!) and youd be set.
BTW. in british english you would say pupils for schueler.
I disagree with you on your negative takes on StudiVZ, but whatever. The whole StudiVZ controversy makes me really think that Germans just hate succesfull businesses. Or maybe its foreigners like Ehssan? I hope not! But to each his own…
Cheers
-J
Februar 20th, 2007 at 00:29
A few other things,
1) Facebook was a stolen idea…right? Zuckerberg worked at a competitor before ripping off the idea and doing it on his own…. Nobody is that original any more. Sad but true. Lots of people tried to rip off StudiVZ as well, from what I have read Studylounge and Unister are two examples.
2) 2400 Eur a month for a marketing position with one of the leading Web 2.0 startups in Germany is not going to garner much sympathy from people in the US. I think you are implying that is a lot of money. That is PENNIES for what the equivalent person would be getting here… no joke. A good summer internship in the US gets you at least 6000 for six weeks during the summer. Im just saying… I know the job market in DE has seen better days and interns arent paid much at all…
3) Also, yeah, there are competitors for SchülerVZ but I am sure the minute StudiVZ goes live and has all their students invite their siblings onto the platform that the number of SchülerVZlers will be pretty high… Facebook exploded when they opened to HS students. Why? Well, because every boy and girl with a brother or sister in college had heard so damn much about Facebook they wanted to be cool and try it out too. I wouldnt be suprised if the same happens there.
4) Lastly, I am pretty sure StudiVZ has a lot of more know how and resources other competitors do not. If you think starting StudiVZ in Germany wasnt a risky and challenging endeavor, I would beg you to ask yourself why many other entrepreneurs and even Facebook didnt try it. The idea wasnt supposed to work with the German Uni system, where students share almost no loyalty to their schools and do not live together 24/7 and often dont even have many friends at the same university. Thats how the logic went, at least. Obviously Ehssan and Co. really challenged that notion.
Just my 2 cents. I enjoy your posts.
J