Orkut

Orkut, Google's first social network, caught on in Brazil and India rather than the US. Facebook passed it in both countries, and Google shut it down on September 30, 2014.

What it was

Orkut was a social network that Google launched in January 2004, a month before Facebook.

Google engineer Orkut Büyükkökten built it as a 20 percent project, and it was named after him.

The Register reported that each page was branded "in affiliation with Google" and that you needed an invitation from an existing member to join. It called Orkut a "Friendster clone" and said Friendster had rebuffed Google's attempt to buy it.

What happened

In August 2008 G1 reported that 54% of Orkut's 60 million users said they were Brazilian, and that Google was moving control of the product to its office in Brazil.

Facebook overtook Orkut in India in 2010 and in Brazil in 2011, according to comScore.

Google announced Google+ in June 2011. By July 2012 Orkut users could link their profiles to it.

On June 30, 2014, Google said it would shut Orkut down on September 30 and stopped new sign-ups that day. Google said users could export their profile data, community posts and photos through Google Takeout until September 2016.

Folha de S.Paulo put Orkut at about 5 million users in Brazil at the time, citing Ibope Nielsen.

Google kept the public communities online in an archive, which it said held 51 million communities and more than 1 billion interactions. In April 2017 Google said on its Brazilian blog that the archive would stay up until May 15, and the post gave no reason for closing it.

Why it failed

Orkut closed, Google said, because its other social products had outgrown it, while the audience data reported at the time shows Facebook overtaking Orkut in India and Brazil.

What Google said

Google's shutdown announcement gave one reason. Its farewell post said YouTube, Blogger and Google+ had taken off, and that "the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut's growth." Google said it would put its "energy and resources" into those products instead.

The post didn't mention Facebook. Google also declined to say how many users Orkut had, Reuters reported.

In September 2010, Marissa Mayer, then a Google vice president, had given the company's explanation for why Orkut never caught on in the US. TechCrunch reported that, as Mayer told it at TechCrunch Disrupt, Orkut drew "several million users in a few days" after launch, and the rush slowed it to a crawl and turned a lot of US users away.

"It's all about speed here," she said. Brazilian users didn't mind the slowness, according to Mayer, and by the time Google had scaled Orkut, she indicated, it was probably already too late in the US.

What reporting showed

TechCrunch reported in September 2009 that Facebook was pushing "a special Orkut import tool" on users in India and Brazil, and had added Hindi and other Indian languages that May. Citing comScore, it said Orkut's Indian audience had dipped from 16 million to 15.2 million visitors in a month while Facebook's grew from 7.5 million to 8.2 million.

comScore put Facebook on top in India in July 2010, with 20.9 million visitors to Orkut's 19.9 million. Orkut was still up 16 percent on the year.

comScore had Facebook ahead in Brazil in December 2011, with 36.1 million visitors to Orkut's 34.4 million. Orkut had grown 5 percent in a year, and Facebook 192 percent. comScore's Brazil figures leave out mobile phones and internet cafes.

TechCrunch wrote in July 2010 that "Google is no longer pinning its social networking hopes on Orkut." In June 2011, as Google announced Google+, Steven Levy wrote in Wired that Google "failed to capitalize on early enthusiasm" and that, aside from its huge share of Brazil and India, Orkut was "now a footnote."

Orkut's share of social-network visits in Brazil fell from 50.51% in April 2011 to 2.20% in April 2013, counting fixed-line access, according to Experian Hitwise data reported by Canaltech. Facebook had 66.54% by then. YouTube and Google+, two of the products Google said had outgrown Orkut, had 18.48% and 0.78%.

Orkut was also in legal trouble in Brazil when Google announced the shutdown. Folha de S.Paulo reported that federal prosecutors in São Paulo had charged two Google Brasil directors in February 2014 over at least 14 unmet court orders in child-abuse investigations involving Orkut users. Google disputed the charges, and Folha didn't connect the case to the shutdown.

What later analysis found

Alice Noujaim, an anthropologist based in São Paulo, wrote in an essay for Summer of Protocols that after "two or three years of decline, Orkut had become a ghost town" as its users "migrated en masse to Facebook."

In her reading, Google "chose death by official ending, rather than pay for the ongoing maintenance of a neglected space."

Asked by Onmanorama in 2016 why Orkut declined, Orkut Büyükkökten, by then a former Google employee, said it "was a service designed for a generation that was just getting familiar and starting to use social media."

The stage it reached

Orkut reached the decline stage, because it won a real market in Brazil and India and then lost it to a substitute, the same as BlackBerry.

By 2011 it was growing more slowly in Brazil than the country's social networking category as a whole, by comScore's count. On the product life cycle, that looks like maturity to me.

The exit was planned, with three months' notice and a promised two more years of data export, which is what I'd want to see in a decline.

The lesson

I think Orkut shows that a product can keep growing while it loses its market.

If you lead a market, track your share against the fastest-growing rival there, and watch what that rival ships to pull your users across. Facebook's Orkut importer was in TechCrunch in September 2009, ten months before comScore had Facebook ahead in India.