Hi new visitor! At Green & White we discuss startups, business models, new media marketing, usability and more.
You can subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe for email alerts so that you keep up to date with the latest content. Now, on with the regular content...
Social networks are cropping up a dime a dozen. After the wave of pakistani’s who have benefited Orkut and Facebook, some people have taken it onto themselves to get into the local scene and (maybe) profit from it. However, given the fact that you need critical mass of users before you can even begin to see any of the benefits, a lot of localized social networks die a slow death, wavering off into the void of the internet.
Stop.pk, a new entrant in this field, has come up with a new and novel approach! Use Easyload to get more signups. The idea behind it is, you get a number of ‘points’ on the site based on your activities. Activities include sign-up, complete profile, post content, invite friends and so on. Once you get enough points, you redeem them for easyload via their marketplace. You get Rs. 100 to signup and a further Rs. 180 if you get 1000 points or above. Not a bad move i’d say. For one thing, they’ve quantified the amount for customer acquisition!
So what are the pros and cons of this feature?
Well, the first con ofcourse is it can’t really scale well.. unless you have a way to ‘making’ those 100’s you’re spending in easy-loads. If you get upto 10,000 users, that’s 1 Million in easyload? And you cant really have a decent social network without that many people.
The first pro is that they’re setting up a staging ground for a brand new experiment. From where i stand, stop.pk has effectively made talktime into currency! If this site takes off, then i can only imagine the potential marketing campaigns that will go on with easyload as the reward.
What do you think? will it work?
| Written by mansoor on 05/19/08 in PakStartup, Marketing/Adv |
Loading ...
May 19th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
They need to capture the right type of audience, and even though the addiction to earn may become sticky even when they stop offering rewards, people will only stick if their service is good enough. Unfortunately, they need to spend more on their service (the web app) at the present time; it seriously is inferior in quality as of now.
It’s important to act smart and think out all aspects when you decide to go ahead with something of that kind.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Just checked the site out… your calculations need correction. They are giving 100 points per signup, and you need 1000 points to claim 100 Rs. of credit.
So, 100,000 users is not a million in easyload, it is not even 1 Rs. in easy load until an individual manages to get 900 more points. So where do those points come from? I didn’t search for it but it did mention something called ‘public stops’ which is probably user-generated content - one point per stop. This means that to earn 900 points, you’ll need to write 900 stops, whatever they are - that is about 0.10 Rs. per stop, or lets say a page.
If they run ads on each such stop/page, that is a VERY cheap method of generating content/ad revenue, and they don’t need to worry about money if their SEO is any good.
If 95% of the people DONT generate content, they lose zero Rs. but gain subscribers.
Their website may be broken, but their model is certainly smart.
May 20th, 2008 at 12:40 am
shohaib: thanks for clarifying, however isn’t the 1000 point rule on getting an additional Rs. 180 in easyload? their home page says Rs. 100 just on signup (a promotion running till 31st May)
May 20th, 2008 at 1:09 am
The name is Sohaib ( I forgive you though
)
I am not entirely sure about the 180Rs thingee, just spent 5 minutes there (as I am trying to stay away from my cellphone and anything mobile), but let me see…
There’s some whining about not getting points here:
http://stop.pk/forums/display_topic/id_14/
and this page says >>> http://stop.pk/store/
Item:
100 Rs. Easyload for your Mobile
Price:
1000 activity points
Postage:
N/A
Available Until:
May 31st 2008
May 20th, 2008 at 9:20 am
amaana is the pioneer of using this type of viral marketing in Pakistan, linking sign ups to their mobile payment service with airtime rewards.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I guess I haven’t accessed the amaana website in quite some, because i didn’t think they were giving out airtime in exchange for signups :S
May 21st, 2008 at 2:05 am
AOA Mansoor,
Thank you so much for you’re post regarding my site and the promotional campaign I am running at the moment. I am really encouraged to see your review and all the comments.
Before hitting “stop.pk” on Google, I had in my mind that somewhere on some Pakistani blog/forum, my site must be a topic of interest and I am glad that I have found one.
I would also like to mention that, yours is the first site having my personal comments about my experiment. So far we have made around 2500 sign-ups in only 4 days and managed to get an invitation list of around 15000 users. Content stats are also very encouraging even excluding the sign-ups*5 SEO friendly pages which comes with every sign-up as default with their basic info.
I believe that it would only be a matter of time when most of the Internet users of Pakistan will have a STOP at STOP.pk.
Please wish me luck and let me know if you have nay question.
Thanks!
Touseef Ikram
May 21st, 2008 at 11:15 am
tauseef: thanks for coming over and presenting your views. the numbers you are telling us are a real inspiration and though i think you can work on certain aspects of the site to make them better, over time it would be a great addition to the pakistani social scene.
plus, any site which would take away revenue from foreign sites like orkut and facebook and bring them to pakistan are always a welcome sight!
June 7th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
This is just an update.
On day 20th of our launch we had passed 10,000 users milestone and as of writing this on 22nd day we have following stats.
Total Members: 11940
Members Online: 180
Total Online: 1227
Insha Allah it will only get better with the passage of time.
I am thinking to get a presee release out if that can create more awareness and help us get more exposure. Can you guys please help me out with it? Do you have any experience with writing and releasing a PR?
June 7th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
More stats:
So far we have managed to generate 450,000 pageviews with around 55,000 visits by 32,000 unique visitors. If you want to have a case study on my site, I can give you access to my google analytics account.
Well, on jun 3rd we were in top 500 sites accessed by Pakistan according to Alexa and we are getting up daily by atleast 50 points. I hope by the time they will update it we will be on a much better position.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Just an update. We have just crossed 15,000 users about an hour ago. This is day 26th and I am really happy to see the stats.
June 27th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Hello friends salam.. Friend i am the user of STOP .. Realy it is a very nice and very good site.. i sure when a person came here he must like and appreciate the site.. Mr. Tauseef who is the Master mind of that site is very geniouis. and another person Rashid is also very co-operative and good working boy.. another person Akmal is also doing very well.. in nutshell STOP is very best site.. you guys must visit that site.. ok bye Good wishes for the site.. bye Have a nice stay there
June 28th, 2008 at 3:59 am
Touseef, do you mind giving me a demo account where I can see all this activity to see what makes this fun?
June 28th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
thanks Osama for your interest.
You can use this account.
user: demo
pass: demo
BTw, I know there must be a lot of improvments to be made and I would really wait for your feedback.
Touseef
July 11th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
plz send me a card of ufone plz
my cell no is
03335387969
July 11th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Rizwan made me laugh! Thanks Rizwan!