StudiVZ

» see studivz.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

studivz launched in november 2005 out of berlin. ehssan dariani and dennis bemmann built it as an explicit clone of facebook for german university students, at a time when facebook itself was still locked to.edu addresses in the us and not yet open to the rest of the world. the german product worked: by mid-2006 it had several hundred thousand registered students, and by the end of that year it was the default social network on every german campus. the holtzbrinck publishing group, one of the larger media houses in germany, bought it in january 2007 for 85 million euro. that was a serious price for a 14-month-old website, and at the time it looked like a steal.

the next two years were the peak. studivz expanded into schülervz for high school students and meinvz for everyone else, all sharing the same backend. by september 2009 the company was claiming over 15 million members across the three sites, most of them concentrated in germany with the rest spread across the wider german-speaking world. there was a feature called "gruscheln", a portmanteau of greet and cuddle, which served the same role as facebook's poke. it became briefly famous enough to land in the duden, the german dictionary of record. for a stretch of about three years studivz was the place a german university student kept their photos.

i did not use studivz. it was a german-language product for the dach region and i was on msn and turkish forums in those years, watching this one from the same distance i watched hyves and nasza-klasa. what made it visible from outside was the holtzbrinck price tag and the lawsuit. in 2008 facebook sued studivz in a us court for copying the look of its profile pages and the contact list logic underneath. that suit was eventually settled in september 2009 with no admission of wrongdoing. by then it had stopped mattering.

~ the case file ~

~ the actual end ~

facebook localized into german through 2009 and 2010 and the curve broke fast. studivz had been holding the line on the home-language advantage, which had worked while facebook only spoke english. once you could use facebook in german with all of your foreign friends already on it, the dual-account window closed inside a year. by february 2012 studivz traffic had dropped 80 percent and active users were down to about 5.9 million from a peak of over 15. the platform was bleeding both attention and ad revenue, and holtzbrinck started looking for an exit.

holtzbrinck sold studivz to a small outfit called vert capital and then to momentous entertainment in 2017 for around 10 million euro, roughly an eighth of what they had paid a decade earlier. the new owners pivoted the brand toward gaming and group chat, neither of which the remaining users wanted. by march 2022 the lights went out for good. wikipedia notes the final shutdown was triggered in part by losing a major gaming partner in china and russia, which is a strange epitaph for what was once the social network of the german university system.

~ the next chapter ~

studivz is the german entry in the regional-facebook-clone graveyard. it sits next to hyves in the netherlands as the western european case, while cyworld in korea covers the asian one. each of those products won locally for a window of three to six years on the strength of being native first. each of them lost the same way once facebook bothered to translate. the lesson the european tech press kept drawing from this run is that being first in a language is worth less than being globally networked, once the global player decides it cares.

the duden still has gruscheln in it. that is more than most dead social networks get to leave behind.

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