Netlog, the Belgian social networking website that’s up-and-coming fast in the world of social networking is the latest offering on the Ad Chap network. Netlog has caught a lot of critical acclaim for using advanced localization technologies to target their varied userbase; although Netlog was originally created to target the European youth demographic, the site has since taken off internationally and sees wide usage across several demographics throughout the world.

In terms of usage patterns, Netlog has fairly good retention for a fast-growing social network; users spend, on average, almost 17 minutes / day on the netlog.com domain and localized subdomains. In terms of pageviews, over the last year Netlog has seen some ups and downs; in January, 2009, unique visitors and visits peaked, followed by a small slope off in February, which then leveled off and has remained roughly steady over the past six months.

In terms of national demographics, Netlog is a very varied social network for its size. Created for the European community, Netlog has since become quite popular across the continent.   As social networking gains in popularity in those areas, we can assume that a disproportionately large portion of Netlog’s userbase will hail from these countries.

Language                 Members
Español                    8 897 205
English                     7 528 534
Français                   6 470 199
Türkçe                      6 333 215
Português                3 726 983
Italiano                    3 616 781
Deutsch                   3 390 745
Nederlands             2 791 155
Română                   1 364 690
Other languages     5 122 613
Total                         49 242 120
In particular the Spanish demographic can be expected to grow significantly as internet access and awareness of social networking continue to skyrocket in these areas.

In general, Netlog presents a good opportunity for advertisers interested in reaching particular geographic demographics, since Netlog itself is such a varied platform in terms of language and content, and since Netlog’s content distribution system already ensures that users are seeing the best content for their area, in the language they expect to see it in. Growth can be expected to continue as the social network moves forward with new features and enhancements to its popular “tribes” social group system. With users adding friends as quickly as they can, eyeballs on Netlog applications are expected to shoot up quickly, and their application platform makes it that much more attractive to develop and monetize applications for the Netlog social network.

Last week we have added the ability for application developers on the netlog social network to deliver ads with Ad Chap to monetize their applications.

Ad Chap is now available on the following social networks:

facebook
bebo
friendster
hi5
myspace
netlog

For those of you that are not familiar with netlog, we will be posting an overview of of this popular European social network in the coming week.

This week we have introduced a new ad design and format for publishers.  It is a standard size IAB 728 x 90 banner size that looks like this:

- Advertisers can include a picture (left) and a custom call to action of their choosing.
- Publishers can customize the look, feel and colors to suit their application pages.  You can configure this in the Ad Chap web interface as usual.

The new ad design and the call to action feature for advertisers is available for use immediately.

If you like the design and would like to see other IAB sizes in this format, let us know.