Cyworld App store coming soon
Cyworld held a conference today for App store developers. For those of you not familiar with Cyworld, it’s the largest social networking site in Korea with over 24 million unique users. While most sites have trouble accurately identifying unique users, Cyworld doesn’t have this problem since users much input their real name and Korean identification number to register. There are also 27 million NateOn (instant messenger) users.
Cyworld is inviting third party application developers to write apps that can run on its service. These apps will be listed on the Cyworld app store. Currently, all apps will have to be freely distributed but developers can still monetize their apps by selling virtual items. Cyworld uses a virtual currency called dotori, or acorns and has been one of the most successful services in the World in monetizing social networking traffic.
Developers will share revenue with Cyworld 70/30, with 70% of the revenue going to app developers. There are a number of companies doing an enormous amount of revenue on Facebook and the same should hold true for Cyworld. While Cyworld doesn’t have the mass amount of users Facebook does, Cyworld users are more used to paying for dotori to decorate their page.
A number of companies in Korea have also found success creating free games and realizing revenues by selling virtual items within their games. This is a business model that has proved quite lucrative in Korea.
It will be interesting to see the Cyworld app store launch and it won’t be long before we hear a number of success stories.
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