Let’s YUP today !
Launching few months ago, yup.vn is a mixture of social networks and information sharing gateway for Young Urban Professionals. The website is target on other segment among pool of social networks in Vietnam, Yup.vn focuses mainly on restaurant, tourism and events in main cites of Vietnam (in the near future, Yup.vn believe that coverage the rest region is not over their expectation). All Yup members can post and praise and vote for their favorite places or gently criticize the not good point of the spot. It’s useful for others who want to have a neutralist comments.
Social network is not a new concept, yet the founder of Yup has recognized that there is no playground for like-minded people who love to travel, to eat out with family and friends, or just want to keep update the schedule of coming events in town. In facts, there are few forum attracts thousands of active members in posting and sharing ideas about their interested places, but all the information was listed as threads of discussing and was not systemize for later looking through. In additional, these kinda forums are less interactive as social network model; by using web 2.0, Yup provides many strong features to manage your post, to rate, to keep track and get alert whenever your post receive comment. The network also has some fantastic application such as “Message Board” for short discuss, testimonial for presenting to each others, integrated useful map to navigate the users easily…
All Yup information was be filtered before on live to avoid redundancy and inexactness, so Yup is a good way to reference, to check others’ comment and experience about the place you plan to go to, or just want to search for contact details. With ambition to be the Vietnam “Lonely Planet”, I believe the site much grown in next year.
URL: www.YUP.vn
November 13th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Interesting site. There are several examples of successful sites in the USA like this — CitySearch.com is one.
However, monetizing this website will not be easy. I think the most viable model for monetizing is through graphical display ads. But graphical display ads are still in their infancy in Vietnam. Even in the US, it’s challenging to monetize through graphical display unless site traffic is massive.
The central challenge with the business model on this site rises from the fact that the site provides what I call “soft value” instead of “hard value.” “Soft value” web sites provide interesting content but usually do not allow the user to take an action that immediately adds value to their lives (”hard value”). Examples of soft value sites are news, blog and video sites.
“Hard value” sites are sites that provide information or services that immediately add real value to me. For example, VietnamWorks.com is a hard value site because users can transact on the site to look for and apply for jobs. Caravat.com is a hard value site because it allows me to keep up to date with my contacts and learn what they are doing. VietnamSkills.com is 50% soft value, 50% hard value because it provides information about careers, but also practical links to courses that might be valuable to me.