ARFU: New Measure for Online Services?

This advertising point is very important and takes us back to the fundamental difference between MySpace and Cyworld:

• If your revenues come from advertising, you are in the eyeball business and your clients are advertisers
• If your revenues come from users themselves, you are in a service business and your clients are your users.

We are now tempted to introduce a new metric to make clear this fundamental difference: we used to talk about Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), and would like now to introduce Average Revenue From User (ARFU).

• MySpace has: ARPU = US$ 2 ; ARFU = 0 US$
• Cyworld has: ARPU = US$ 0.5 ; ARFU = US$ 6.5

Please keep in mind those figures (rough estimates) are not corrected with Purchasing Power Parity – which means the revenues from Cyworld are comparatively even higher!