LiveJournal.sg has officially launched in Singapore, as the press conference just ended a couple of hours ago. As most of our readers know, Tickled Media is the managing partner for LiveJournal in Singapore.
In a nutshell the new LiveJournal.sg site is more localized for its Singapore audience, and you might be surprised to hear that some of its user stats are pretty remarkable. Annelies van den Belt, the CEO of SUP Media, revealed that in Singapore there are currently 500,000 registered users and these bloggers/shoppers generate a whopping 30 million page views each month.
While SUP Media is the owner of LiveJournal, we were told that the blogging platform runs independently. We thought Blogger or WordPress might triumph in blogging in Singapore, but surprisingly LiveJournal kicks its competitors’ asses as the top blog platform for e-commerce — or in other words, ‘Blogshops.’
For many Singaporeans, when we think about LiveJournal, Blogshops naturally come to mind. Here’s one of my own personal experiences: Most of my ‘girlfriends’ in Singapore are using LiveJournal to buy or sell clothes online. True, it’s a small sample size, but it still shows how ladies in Singapore are embracing the blogging platform as their online shopping destination.
This new LiveJournal.sg site will primarily focus on e-commerce, featuring goods ranging from cosmetics to clothes sold by users to other users. So, if you’re a blogshop owner hosted at LiveJournal, be prepared to get a boost in both traffic and sales. Of course, make sure you’re selling quality stuff if you’re hoping to be featured on the homepage. Here are some of the screenshots and statistics that we received:
Note: LiveJournal.sg currently still redirects back to LiveJournal.com (as of 3:30pm GMT+8 ). But we were told that the site will be up pretty soon. We’ll update you as soon as we hear news from Tickled Media.
Update: LiveJournal.sg is up (as of 8.00pm GMT+8).
Empowering Users
In the industry always a great idea to empower your users in some way. LiveJournal and Tickled Media did exactly that by inviting two successful blogshop owners — Keith Tay and Joelle Pang — to join the launch. They have very diverse entrepreneurial backgrounds but share the same fears and anxieties at the crossroads of trying to turn their blogshops into full-time jobs.
They were at the launch today because they managed to make their blogshops profitable. Keith revealed that his business can bring him SGD$20,000 to $30,000 each month in revenue. That’s a pretty sizable sum. Apart from an online site, he also runs several bricks-and-mortar retail shops in Singapore.
Joelle also has her own retail shops and revealed that her site gets about 1,600 unique visitors each day and has over 10,000 email subscribers. All are eager to receive her latest batch of clothes. Blogshop start-ups might not be making millions of dollars yet, but a successful store can still bring in a sustainable cashflow and can provide a decent living for someone with a little entrepreneurial spirit.
Of course, the journey has only just started for many of the blogshop owners at LiveJournal as the blogging platform has finally taken notice of the social commerce potential here in Singapore. We can expect many of these blogshop owners to gain some momentum, and perhaps even grow to be the next Zara or Forever 21.
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