Europe's Local Social Networks Before Facebook

Abstract

Before Facebook translated itself into their languages, most European countries had a home-grown social network that most of the country used. Germany had StudiVZ, the Netherlands had Hyves, Poland had Nasza-Klasa, Hungary had iWiW, Spain had Tuenti, France had Skyblog. In their home markets these were not niche products: Hyves reached 68% of Dutch internet users, iWiW covered two-thirds of Hungary online, Nasza-Klasa signed up more than half of Poland’s internet population. Nearly all of them followed the same arc. They dominated locally between 2005 and 2010, sold themselves to a national media or telecom conglomerate at the peak, and were then overtaken by Facebook within about a year of it localizing. By 2014 most were dead or dying. The national social graph lost to the cross-border one.

The Pattern

The story repeats with small variations across the continent. A student or a small team builds a social network in one language for one country. It grows faster than anything the local internet has seen, because a social network is most useful when the people you already know are on it, and in a single country that saturation happens quickly. National press covers it as the local answer to the American web. A legacy media company or a telecom operator, watching internet advertising move away from its own properties, buys the network at or near its peak for a headline price. Then Facebook arrives in the local language, the graph stops respecting the border, and the users leave for the network their friends abroad are already on.

The buyers were almost always old-media or telecom incumbents: Holtzbrinck (a book publisher), Telegraaf Media Groep and ProSiebenSat.1 and RTL (broadcasters and newspapers), Telefónica and Magyar Telekom (phone companies). The same miscalculation that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation made buying MySpace in 2005 played out a dozen times in Europe, described in The Social Media Revolution. An incumbent bought a fast-moving social product, slowed it down with acquisition-era caution and monetization, and watched a company that took no advertising revenue for years outrun it.

Germany: The VZ Networks, Lokalisten, wer-kennt-wen

StudiVZ launched in November 2005 in Berlin, built by Ehssan Dariani and Dennis Bemmann as a Studentenverzeichnis, a student directory. It copied Facebook closely enough that Facebook later sued it over the resemblance. Growth was fast: within a year it passed a million users, and in January 2007 the Holtzbrinck publishing group bought it for roughly €85 million, one of Europe’s first large Web 2.0 acquisitions. Holtzbrinck extended the brand into schülerVZ for pupils and meinVZ for everyone else. At the 2009 peak the three VZ networks together claimed more than 15 million registered members across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

The decline started in late 2009 and was steep. By October 2011 only 5.9 million of 16 million members were still active, and page views had fallen roughly 80% from the peak. schülerVZ shut down in April 2013. The core sites were sold in 2017 for around €10 million, pivoted to social gaming, and finally went offline in 2022. Holtzbrinck had paid €85 million and sold the whole thing for a fraction of it.

Lokalisten, founded in Munich in 2005, built its identity on regional connection rather than national reach, and hit a peak of about 3.6 million registered users in 2010. ProSiebenSat.1 took a majority stake in 2008. By June 2016 only 50,000 users were still active, and the site closed later that year.

wer-kennt-wen (“who knows whom”) was started in 2006 in Koblenz by two students, Fabian Jäger and Patrick Ohler. RTL interactive bought 49% in 2008 and the rest in 2009. It still reported 2.1 million active users in March 2013 before reach collapsed, and it was taken offline in mid-2014. In September 2011, Facebook already had 37.6 million unique visitors in Germany against 8.0 million for the VZ networks and 5.2 million for wer-kennt-wen. The German market had already tipped.

The Netherlands: Hyves

Hyves started in September 2004, founded by Raymond Spanjar and Floris Rost van Tonningen. The name came from beehives, after the domain hives.nl turned out to be taken. It became the default Dutch social network: by 2010 it had 10.6 million users and reached about 68% of Dutch internet users, one of the highest national penetrations any of these networks achieved.

Telegraaf Media Groep, the country’s largest newspaper publisher, bought Hyves in November 2010. Ten months later, in September 2011, Facebook drew more unique visitors in the Netherlands than Hyves for the first time. Dutch usage of Hyves fell to about 25% of the population by 2012. The social network shut down on 2 December 2013, leaving behind a games portal that also eventually closed.

Poland: Nasza-Klasa

Nasza-Klasa (“our class”) launched on 11 November 2006, built by Maciej Popowicz and three fellow computer-science students at the University of Wrocław. Its premise was reunion rather than status: find the people you went to school with. That framing made it spread through age groups the American networks were not reaching, and at its 2010 peak it had around 14 million active users and covered more than half of Poland’s internet population.

The turn came from the owners, not from Facebook first. A June 2010 rebranding and a change to the terms of service, which claimed commercial rights to users’ main photos and some private data, set off a public backlash, along with confusion over new micropayments and a poorly received feed feature called Śledzik (“Herring”). Accounts began leaving. By August 2014 registration had dropped below 7 million, most of the departed having moved to Facebook. The site, renamed nk.pl, finally closed on 27 July 2021.

Hungary: iWiW

iWiW was the oldest of the group. Zsolt Várady launched it as WiW on 14 April 2002, inspired partly by the American pioneer SixDegrees.com, and it was the first social network in Hungary. Renamed iWiW, it was the most visited Hungarian website from 2005 to 2010. At its 2010 peak it had about 4.7 million members, roughly two-thirds of everyone online in the country, with 1.5 million visitors a day.

Magyar Telekom, the national telecom operator, owned it at the end. The shutdown was announced on 15 May 2014, and iWiW went dark at midnight on 30 June 2014. No full archive was made. The Wayback Machine holds around 250,000 URLs from a site with nearly five million profiles, so most of what one of Hungary’s central web properties contained is simply gone.

Spain and France

Tuenti, founded in Spain in 2006, was invite-only and aimed at the young, which earned it the label “the Spanish Facebook.” It reached well over 10 million users and dominated among Spanish teenagers between roughly 2009 and 2012. In August 2010 the telecom operator Telefónica bought an 85% stake for about €70 million and steered the company toward telecommunications, launching it as a mobile virtual network operator in February 2012. As the product’s focus shifted to selling phone plans, the social network faded against Facebook and Instagram; its active base fell from around 15 million in 2011 to about 300,000 by 2016, when the original social network was discontinued and Tuenti continued only as a mobile brand.

Skyblog, launched in December 2002 by Pierre Bellanger of the rap radio station Skyrock, was more a blogging platform than a profile network, but it filled the same social role for a French-speaking generation. By June 2008 it ranked as the world’s seventh-largest social network with over 21 million visitors, and some 27 million blogs were created on it over its life. France was one of the clearest head-to-head cases: at the start of 2008 Facebook had about 2 million French visitors against Skyblog’s 10 million, and by December 2008 Facebook had passed it at home. Skyblog kept running long after relevance left it, ceasing operations only on 21 August 2023. The early French web that surrounded it, the CaraMail email service, the Lokace search engine, the classmate-finder Copains d’avant, was displaced by American platforms in the same years.

Why the Local Networks Lost

Three forces broke the same way in every country. First, the buyers. Selling to a broadcaster, publisher, or phone company put the network under owners who wanted predictable advertising or telecom revenue and applied the caution of a mature business to a product whose value depended on speed. StudiVZ and Nasza-Klasa both lost users directly to owner-driven changes in monetization and terms of service.

Second, the graph crossed the border. A single-country network is strongest exactly until the moment people want to reach friends, relatives, and colleagues in other countries. Facebook’s advantage was not features; it translated into dozens of languages and let a Dutch user, a German user, and a Spanish user share one network. Once Facebook localized, the national champion’s core strength, that everyone in the country was on it, was matched and then exceeded by a network on which everyone abroad was too.

Third, the data mostly did not survive. When these sites closed, the profiles, photos, and group histories rarely moved anywhere. iWiW left almost no archive. The communities that had been the reason to use Nasza-Klasa or the VZ networks did not transfer to Facebook; users started over. Compare Content Moderation and the fate of Orkut, Google’s own social network that thrived in Brazil and India and then vanished the same way.

A few local networks did survive, by not competing where Facebook was strongest. Germany’s Xing held on as a business-contacts network, a use Facebook did not target, and Russia’s VKontakte kept its home market against a Facebook that never localized deeply there. The lesson the dead ones left is narrow: national scale, reached fast and sold high, was worth very little once the network everyone’s friends abroad used learned to speak the local language.