In the latest in
Read/WriteWeb’s coverage of international Web markets, we explore Hungary – a central
European country of 10 million people. The information in this post was supplied by Hírbehozó, a professional journalist
for online media company Index.hu.
Hírbehozó
told me there are not too many startups in Hungary. The big companies like Sanoma
and T-Online tend to create their own web apps in-house. However one success story is
Blogter.hu, which began as a startup – then they got an investment of some 70 million
Hungarian Forints (about US$350,000) and now they have a strategic partnership with
T-Online.
In Hungary, the annual online ad spending growth is around 10-11 percent. In 2006 3Q
online ad revenue will be around 1.84 billion HUF, which is around 8 million USD. (1 USD
~ 211 HUF). It’s about 50 percent growth, compared to the same period a year before.
Out of Hungary’s total population of 10 million, there are around 800,000 broadband
users according to a recent government report. In August there were around 30,000 new
broadband subscribers, so there is strong growth.
Top Web Apps
The biggest web 2.0 service
in Hungary is iWiW.hu, a social network. iWiW means
International who is who, and according to
Wikipedia it currently has over 500,000 registered users with real names and over
15,000,000 connections between them. The site is invite-only.
iWiW now is the 3rd most popular website in Hungary and it was recently acquired by
T-Online Hungary for around 1 billion HUF (~ 4.7 million USD). Interesting to note
the privacy concerns that arose soon
after, similar to when News Corp acquired MySpace:
“Users expressed concerns that their personal data may be sold to telemarketers or
used for other purposes potentially hurting their privacy. Because of fears for abuse by
the Hungarian telco giant, several iWiW clones and unrelated Hungarian social networking
websites appeared or gained in popularity since the take-over.”
MyVIP.com is a rival social network site, but is far
behind iWiW.
freeblog.hu is the most popular Hungarian blog
service. One of their interesting features is a tool enabling you to place audio files on
your freeblog site – screenshots
here.
blogter.hu is a blog service, associated with
T-Online – see also an associated social bookmarking tool called linkter.hu and coming soon is a start page (a copycat of
Netvibes.com).
blog.hu is another blog service, owned by the online
media company Index.hu (nb: Hírbehozó works for them; he says it is the
most popular independent news site in Hungary). blog.hu has a lot of pro blogs, written
by professional journalists – Hírbehozó is one of them and writes at
http://webisztan.blog.hu. This blog service is not yet open to the public, but they hope
to open it for the public in the near future.
videa.hu is the biggest video sharing site in Hungary –
again run by T-Online.
videobomb.hu is a video sharing site, run by
Blogter.hu.
videoplayer.hu is another video sharing site, run
by Sanoma Media Company.
Live.hu – Microsoft has just introduced its Live.com
services with a Hungarian interface. Here is an audio file from the press conference
announcing it – Arend Hendriks, regional manager of MSN MEA is speaking.
Summary
Hungary is a small but growing market and telco T-Online seems to have a hand in a lot
of their top web apps. My thanks to Hírbehozó for the info about Hungarian
web apps.
This post is part of Read/WriteWeb’s continuing coverage of international Web markets.
Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden and Australia.
