Tagged is a San Franciso based social network founded by my friend Greg Tseng, an Asian American entrepreneur, and Johann Schleier-Smith. Tagged is different from Facebook in that it engages users who want to find new friends. Greg told me that Tagged is doing well with 25 million monthly users, 4 billion monthly page views which makes it a Top 100 site in the world, and profitable at roughly $1.25M monthly.
The company recently raised $5 million in debt financing instead of the traditional equity financing because they are profitable. Given how wary investors are in this current economic crisis, so equity financing could lead to really unfavorable term sheets. By going with debt financing, they are able to use their monthly profits to pay off the loan over time. Given Tagged’s profitability and growing user base, I’m not surprised if Greg were to sell the company at the right price.
30% of Tagged’s traffic comes from the United States which is great since advertising revenues are stronger in North America. However, given that 70% of their traffic is international, I cannot be wonder how much growth they could get if they were to target Asia too. Granted, they would be competing with Xiaonei, but Kaixin101 has already shown the social networking world that Xiaonei doesn’t completely dominate. To appeal to the Asian masses, Tagged needs to first internationalize their pages. Once they get that in place, they can potentially get their active community to help on that just like Meebo and Facebook did.
I don't know how big tagged is. I've never used it, and probably heard of it just a couple of times.Another SNS that is trying very hard to consolidate in Asia is friendster. Actually they might even be the biggest player in South East Asia, namely Indonesia.I personally think that friendster is bland, the best thing it is offering is “degree of connection” which apparently was patented.
kudos to the tagged team to be profitable and raise a 5m debt to shore up for a couple of bumpy years. although a little crowded in terms of SNS space but I think post post april 09, the cash rich online/media maybe on the prowl, good time to chat about a trade sale but with the 5m infusion and a steady or growing net profit, they are probably not in a rush.
I think your full of it, Greg is no more than a control freak and half of you running that site are hyprocrits.. you want a church run facility get a pastors job!!! But deleting accounts cause people dont play by your orders to me is childish and stupid and most of you dont know what your doing. The site is full of spyware, malware, hackers and password stealers not to mention uneducated people who dont know how to upgrade a site without messing up privacy settings. Go back to school!
I belive in fairy tales, the prince and the princess were living in the golden castle blissfully and guarding their love. Elfs in the world was watching us form the darkness, I standed in the rye, violent sneezed, golden poppled.http://www.the-various.com/