Yonja.com, Kerim Baran - CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Oct 23, 2007 -- Yonja.com is Turkey's leading social network and is based out of San Francisco. Here's my interview with the CEO/Founder Kerim Baran. - Mark Brooks

What is Yonja’s founding story?
I grew up in Turkey and came to the U.S. for college (Northwestern and Harvard Business School) and then work. I worked mainly at technology companies for about 10 years. Right after getting my green card in late 2002-early 2003, I took a little time off and traveled the world. When I was traveling, I used blogs and whatnot to share photos with my friends and family. At that time, people were just starting to use these tools.

When I came back from traveling, I wanted to start my own technology business. At the time, there were only a handful of social networking sites, like Friendster, MySpace, and a little bit of LinkedIn. I realized they were powerful concepts that didn’t require much capital and grew virally. I wanted to create a hybrid of Friendster and MySpace for the European populations.

I had limited funds and bootstrapped Yonja mainly with what I had saved over the years. We never really got any good VC offers that we liked, so we decided to go it alone. In early 2004, an engineer partner and I put together the first, English version and invited my friends to do some QA and testing. Half of my friends were Turkish ex-pats living in the U.S. and the other half were a mix of Americans and Europeans from all over the world. Somehow, the Turks really owned the site and drew other Turks in. From there, it just became a viral success story. The first month, we had about 200 members; the next month we had 4,000; the following month we had 15,000; the following month we had 40,000; and so on. With only an English user interface – we didn’t even have a Turkish version for the first two years – we became the most trafficked website in Turkey probably within two years of launching. Now we have English and Turkish versions and 95% of our traffic is coming from Turkish users.

How many registered members do you have?
We have a little over 4.6 million registered members. Google Analytics has our last 30-day unique visitor count at 6.5 million, mainly because you can visit the site without being logged in. And I think Google Analytics counts IP addresses, which kind of errs on the high side. Right now, we’re getting about 6,000 to 8,000 new members a day. Our traffic, growth, and revenues have all pretty much been doubling every year for the past three years.

How is Yonja different from other social networks?
I think Yonja is different because it’s Turkish in nature and culture. Yonja is a female first name that means “clover” in English. In terms of services, it’s really a hybrid of other social networks, but for the Turkish market. We very closely follow all the innovations of the major social networking players and select and adapt the features and services we like to the Turkish culture. Because we possess the local taste, language, and know-how, we can do this.

Right now, we are by far the most trafficked Turkish website in the world. We serve about 45-50 million page views a day, which is about one and a half billion page views a month. We try to provide all the entertainment and other services that other social networks are providing. We promote Western and Turkish music at Yonja. We contract with local musicians in Turkey and promote them just like MySpace promotes musicians here in the U.S., but we also work with companies like Sony BMG in Turkey and help them promote Western albums. We also have other content, like listings, games, quizzes, polls, videos, and news. We are the prominent social networking site for the Turkish market.

Are you profitable at this stage?
Yes, we’ve been profitable pretty much since the 10th or 11th month. We really operated on a shoestring. When everybody was spending tens of thousands of dollars for colocation facilities, we shopped for the cheapest one. We took out functionality that was too CPU intensive – such as mapping out relationships, like Friendster used to do – so as to not tax our systems.

We were lucky because we were in a market that had less competition than most Western ones. That allowed us to charge for some features, such as excessive messaging, which is part of what made us profitable. Our ad revenues were there, but they weren’t enough. We’ve been working on maximizing the ad revenue, though, ever since and now we have a balanced revenue mix. We operate with quite high margins. We recently did a deal where we exited some of our ownership to a hedge fund, but I still pretty much control and run the company.

Tell me about the new media component.
We see ourselves as a media company. We take our revenues from advertising. I call it new media because we’re mainly on the internet. Beside Yonja, we’ve adapted a couple of other proven Western concepts to the Turkish market. The most important one is our listing service called MetroListe, which is a craigslist service for Turkish cosmopolitan areas, like Istanbul and Ankara. We also have another service called 7inci, which means “seven pearls”, a pearl for each day of the week. It’s a Turkish adaptation of DailyCandy.com. We also have services called Nolyo (“what’s happening”) and Yonjashop, which is a shopping portal similar to Amazon.

How much revenue would you attribute directly to Yonja?
Most of our revenue comes from Yonja at this point. MetroListe and 7inci are free services. We do make some advertising revenues from 7inci, but we don’t really make anything from MetroListe. We do make a little bit of income from Yonjashop, but we have a local partnership and only get a small percentage of the sales from the company we partner with.

What are your goals for 2007 through 2008?
Our immediate goals are to continue growing the Yonja side of the business and the team. We now have about 25 employees in our San Francisco and Istanbul offices, with most being in Istanbul. We want to add more features and services for both consumers and advertisers on Yonja and, to do that, we need to grow our development, customer service,  advertising,  sales, and marketing teams. We’ll probably get into one or two other new services for our user population in 2008. But, that’s it. We’re profitable, but conservative. We wait to see what works in the Western market first and then adapt accordingly to the Turkish market. At this point, we have no plans to launch into other languages or countries. It makes a lot more sense to capture more of the Turkish consumers instead.