Cyworld: 21M uu a month, 16M page impressions a day, $100M a year.

Alan Moore has just posted this on communities dominate brands

Apart from anything else, I hope the headline on this suggests we all could learn a little here.

Visit this link and there's a 100-page plus report on best practices learned from Cyworld to download free.

The interview Alan conducts reveals, for example, that the US version I link to on this site (one's to watch) and have sampled is a much watered down version of the full-on Korean one. So that explains that then!

The numbers alone are staggering. A third of the population of South Korea has an account. And most of them appear to visit almost every day.

Take a look at Alan's full post.

Here's a few highlights from an interview with Benjamin Joffe of Plus Eight Star

"Among the most interesting aspects are Cyworld's business model relying on micro-customization, which concerns not only avatars but the whole page with music and many other functions. Also, the mobile aspects of Cyworld can certainly inspire companies who wish to step into this next 3-billion dollars industry'."

"The key point in Cyworld is its 'real-name policy'. Basically you need to use your real name associated with your official ID number to register. This has become more or less a standard among South Korean Internet services... Real name policy does not damage free speech, it brings responsibility, courtesy and a lot of benefits for users themselves in terms of trust in the information they can find."

"It is useful to note here that most Cyworld users write for their 'offline friends' and not for strangers. They can set privacy levels to their hompy, setting accessibily by content category to themselves only, friends or everybody. The role of the 'il-chon' friendship link is critical here. Visiting friends' pages and friends-of-friends' can help deepen relationships by understanding people better.

"Among the most important issues has been this privacy aspect: many information are at risk on (western) blogs: appearance, name, address, contact info, pictures, relationships, age, etc. Some problems have appeared in services like MySpace."

"what do users value in the service?
This is a critical question to ask yourself as a SNS operator, as it will largely condition service development, marketing and eventually revenues! In Cyworld we found the following drivers:
a). Not being left behind
b). Their creations
c). Their relationships
d). Their image"