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From TIME Asia
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about Asia Buzz | more Asia Buzz Sticky Eyeballs The quest to keep Internet users glued to the screen By ERIC ELLIS November 2, 1999 Web posted at 1:30 p.m. Hong Kong time, 1:30 a.m. EDT Have a think about the word "sticky." What does it mean? The American Heritage College Dictionary defines five meanings for the word: two variations suggest an object with adhesive properties; another implies humid weather; a situational fourth suggests a quandary and a rarely used fifth imparts a stagnant economy.
The Web's stickiest sites are, naturally enough, the ones with the richest and most compelling content. Web surfers might stay logged onto, say, the Time Warner family of sites longer because there's something to read rather than, say, Intel.com, which is ostensibly a corporate brochure for the huge chipmaker. It was the need to develop stickiness, and hence advertising, that often spawned the appearance of chat rooms and free e-mail services, in order to get users to hang around longer, develop online communities and, as you head for the holy grail of the NASDAQ, make megabucks. The issue of stickiness is catching on fast as Asia develops its Net. A Malaysian-born sports portal startup, ZoomSports.com, uses a number of techniques to generate stickiness, perhaps the niftiest one being an interactive multiple-choice sports trivia contest. It now claims it is among the Net's stickiest sites. Unsurprisingly, it was a claim that got louder in September, about the time Disney's ESPN sports channel acquired a rival London-based sports portal for a rumored $40 million! That's only double the amount of venture capital raised by another Asian site with claims to megastickiness, HelloAsia.com. Impressively backed by big U.S. venture capitalist names like Greylock Partners and Hambrecht and Quist, as well as tech majors Intel and Critical Path, HelloAsia.com aims to generate big-time stickiness by rewarding users for the time, and money, they spend online. Think of it as a frequent-flyer program for the Internet. You register at the site in English, Chinese or Korean and get 500 points. You check your @helloasia.com "free" e-mail and get 50 points; you buy a CD, a movie ticket or a book from a partner site and--well, you get the picture. And like an airline mileage program or a bank credit card bonus-points plan, the accumulated points can be cashed in for free stuff. There's no content, just e-commerce, but despite that I think it's a novel idea. So, clearly, do a host of others. Thanks to the Goldman Sachs backgrounds of two of its principals, HelloAsia.com has attracted the biggest lick of first-round venture capital for an Asian Net company. Its board of directors and advisers includes Aneel Bhusri, a director of the hot U.S. startups Marimba, Corio and PeopleSoft; Jeffrey Koo, president of Taiwan's Chinatrust Commercial Bank; Singapore Telecom chairman Koh Boon Hwee; Hong Kong Bank director and China.com chairman Raymond Chi'en; Sina.com board member Pehong Chen; and Henry Rosovsky, a former dean of Harvard. So where are the profits going to come from? As to Chih Cheung, HelloAsia.com's Fuzhou-born, Harvard-educated, Silicon Valley-based CEO tells it, users will stay online longer and do more stuff in order to rack up free points. Then HelloAsia.com just sits back and watches the revenues roll in from advertising and click-through cuts from e-commerce. And, probably some time late next year or early in 2001, it'll take its sticky user community to NASDAQ. If it works, watch for the regional imitators. HelloAsia.com is a bold e-commerce experiment but it's definitely a company to watch. Write to us at mail@web.timeasia.com Search for recent Asia Buzz
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