America, get ready for Badoo. Haven't heard of it? Until recently, I hadn't heard of this social network either. But apparently, lots of users and investors in Europe have.
Essentially, as its Russian founder has explained before, Badoo is a "nightclub on your phone," where people, "as adults, are looking to do adult things." The site first was launched in Spain, where it soon expanded to neighboring Portugal and France, and then hopped the pond to Brazil and Mexico. Now, it claims users in 180 countries.
Last fall, The Economist proclaimed it as having "a shot at becoming one of Europe's leading Internet firms." But now, says GigaOm, the site appears poised to grow rapidly in the United States, particularly after its official American launch just last month.
That's because the site already has a toehold here—"a disproportionate amount of its [US-based] users are Spanish-speaking," or just under 25 percent of the site's 8 million registered users in the United States. (The 2010 United States Census reports that about 11 percent of American residents are native Spanish speakers, or about 37 million people.) By comparison, over half of people in the US are also Facebook members.
Badoo was founded six years ago by Andrey Andreev, a Russian entrepreneur living in Spain, as a way to distinguish his floundering social network from Facebook. As Andrey Andreev told the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, the site's current incarnation drew its inspiration from a St. Petersburg, Russia bar that he visited in 2008.
"I was in a nightclub called Telephone Bar," Andreev said. "There were about 100 tables in the club and there were phones on each table and a number. Everyone was ringing from table to table, so we started to do the same, chatting to girls, having fun."
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