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.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)