Wer-Kennt-Wen

» see wer-kennt-wen.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Wer-kennt-wen.de translates as "who knows who" and that was the entire product thesis: a German-language site where you find old classmates and current coworkers and stay vaguely in touch. It launched in October 2006 from Koblenz, built by two students at the local university, Fabian Jager and Patrick Ohler, on a budget that was effectively a side project. By December 2007 it had crossed a million registered accounts. RTL Interactive, the digital arm of the broadcaster, bought a majority stake in 2008 and the rest of the company a couple of years later.

The reason wkw worked in Germany was very specific. StudiVZ was the dominant student-network site and was concentrated on university campuses. Facebook in 2006 to 2008 still required a.edu address and had not yet localized properly into German. Wer-kennt-wen filled the gap that StudiVZ left open: the people who were already out of university and the people who had never been. By 2011 wkw had passed 9 million registered users and was running a profitable advertising business inside RTL's wider portfolio.

Wer-kennt-wen was German-only at the language layer. The interface was not translated into anything else, the audience was DACH-region, the cultural conversation on the site was rooted in German pop television and German workplace humor. I was in Turkey on MSN and donanimhaber forums during the entire arc of this site, and the only reason I knew the name was that the European tech press in 2011 kept running comparisons of which Facebook clones were holding the line in which country. Wer-kennt-wen was the German one, alongside StudiVZ.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

The peak number of 9.4 million registered users landed in November 2011, which is later than most regional Facebook clones held on, and is partly explained by demographics. The wkw audience skewed older than StudiVZ and was less mobile-native. The cohort that joined wkw between 2007 and 2010 mostly did not have a Facebook account yet because they had not been in university with American exchange students, which was the original Facebook spread vector in Germany. RTL was therefore looking at a real ad-supported business with low churn and a recognizable brand inside the broadcaster's portfolio.

~ the postmortem ~

Facebook localized into German over 2009 and 2010 and the curve broke. The wkw audience did not switch instantly because the older demographic took longer to migrate, but the curve was visible by late 2012 and accelerating by 2013. RTL ran a redesign in October 2013 that was supposed to modernize the interface. The redesign accelerated the loss instead, partly because the new look pushed away the very users who had stayed on the old version specifically because it looked nothing like Facebook. In March 2014 RTL Interactive announced it was looking for a buyer. No buyer materialized. On June 2, 2014 the servers were turned off.

~ what it left ~

Wer-kennt-wen is the German entry alongside StudiVZ in the regional-clone graveyard, with the same Facebook-localized-into-German cause of death. The lesson the German tech press extracted from the wkw shutdown was that the older-demographic audience is more loyal but also slower to migrate, which sounds like an advantage and is actually a trap. Once Facebook had localized fully, the wkw cohort migrated over four to five years instead of one. RTL had the longest runway of any regional-clone owner and still could not find a way to pivot. The Koblenz office was emptied out by the end of summer 2014.

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