Badoo has a new idea on how you gain popularity on a social network: You buy it.
Using a feature named "Rise Up", members of the newish social network can pay $1 in the USA, €1 in Europe, and £1 in the UK to raise their profile to the top to make it more visible to the rest of the site. This is all in an effort to support a social network without advertising, and according to Neil Bryant, the site's managing director, 20% of their 12.5 million users are doing it a month.
Already popular with Latin American countries, and European mainstays such as Spain and France, Badoo is trying to crack the UK in the coming year. Currently they only have 100,000 in the country, a far cry from the likes of the big players there such as Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo. In an effort to gain some popularity, they will be allowing UK users to use the Rise UP feature for free for a time.
They must be doing something right as Google says they were the second fastest growing search term in 2007, just ahead of Facebook. The advertising scheme may seem crazy, but if over 2 million users a month are paying to use their popularity tool, it may just work out for them.
(via The Guardian)