In Marios Blog I found this remark about the Social Network “Iwiw” created by Szabó Márton and Seprenyi Péter:

The page has 2.6 million users, even though only 3.5 million Hungarians have Internet.

This is a market penetration of 75%. […] In July 2006, the site had 1 million users, it grew by 50% in six months and another 70% in the last ten month. Last year the social network was bought for 5 Million US-$ by Magyar Telekom (subsidiary of the German Telecom).

Neil writes that iWiW stands for International Who is Who:

With 1.6 million members out of a population of 10 million, if you’re a young, social and computer-literate Hungarian, you’re almost certainly a member.

It was perhaps this opportunity to have almost universal access to the country’s most sought-after consumers that prompted T-Online, a part of Deutsche Telekom, to pay almost €4m for iWiW in April 2006.

The deal made the founders, led by Zsolt Várady, pretty well-off overnight – although they must now be wondering if they could have held out for more, given the speed with which T-Online has increased the operation’s revenue from online advertising.

“We started the network in 2002. At that time it had no name; it was just an IP address where friends could connect. We had no cash, we used old computers and we worked from home,” says Márton Szabó, another founder, who is now managing director of iWiW.

Rather than being a scheme aimed at making millions, iWiW owes its existence to a “sociometric survey” of people’s social habits, which revealed that the internet could improve social dynamics. As membership snowballed to 20,000 in the first six months, the founders brought in a local software firm.

[…]

In 2005 iWiW turned over just €20,000 and made no profit. Under T-Online it turned over nearly €900,000 revenue and made a profit, the vastly increased revenue stream owing everything to a strictly commercial approach to web advertising adopted by T-Online.

Thanks to Laberena for the link.