The Silent Death of StudiVZ

The online-community expects it to happen in less than one week: StudiVZ is going to die. The once highly popular German social network is rapidly loosing its users and will implode completely in a couple of days. The death of StudiVZ is an example for the ongoing process that local or national social networks worldwide face a steady decline due to the power of facebook. 

StudiVZ was founded in November 2005 as a project of studiVZ Ltd.. After the German publisher Stefan von Holtzbrinck acquired the platform it became part of VZ Netzwerke Ltd., a subsidiary of the German publishing group Georg von Holtzbrinck. The name StudiVZ is an abbreviation for German Studentenverzeichnis, which means students´directory. StudiVZ was created as an online platform for German students. At first, StudiVZ was highly successful in German speaking countries and the number of members grew rapidly. The website even expanded to other European countries such as Italy, France and Spain, but those websites were closed again in 2009. Since then, the network concentrated on the German market. Based on the high demand of non-students, two additional versions were created: SchülerVZ, which concentrates on secondary school students and MeinVZ, which serves a platform for those who have finished their studies or have never been a student. As a result, the VZ-group emerged. 

StudiVZ was so successful in Germany that facebook even tried to buy the website in 2008 since facebook had difficulties to establish itself in Germany. Convinced of the success of StudiVZ the Georg von Holtzbrinck publishing group denied the selling. The VZ-project reached its peak in July 2010 with 17,1 Million members but since then is facing a steady decline. 

StudiVZ has always been highly criticized for its similarity to facebook. Some even call it „a facebook in red“ and facebook even sued StudiVZ for stealing their ideas in 2008. And now, after facebook lost its national character and started to expand internationally a few years ago, facebook is the greatest threat for StudiVZ.

In the past, StudiVZ had huge problems concerning the assurance of the users´data security and after its database was attacked in 2007, many users left the platform and joined other social networks. StudiVZ learned from its mistakes and now gets best grades for data security. This fact is even used as PR against facebook but users do not really appreciate that. The problem is that data counts as the currency of the online world and StudiVZ loses touch with the real developments of other social networks. 

What is more, StudiVZ always only had a national character and was not able to become internationally established. In contrast to facebook, it even misses hyperlinks that directly connect the user to the open internet. This weakens its usability.

StudiVZ also lacks own innovations and for a long time seemed to be stuck as the 2005 version of facebook. In addition, StudiVZ does not provide any games or other apps. In fact, a lot of facebook users spend most of their time on the platform by playing games. Games often help to keep users attracted, even if they do not use the social network for chatting or communicating with other users in the first place. On StudiVZ users have the possibility to participate in groups, created by other users. The topics of those groups can be freely chosen and vary from the discussion of certain issues to just funny names as a statement.

Even after a comprehensive relaunch in autumn 2011 the downward tendency did not come to an end but intensified instead. What is more, VZ CEO Clemens Riedl left the company shortly after the relaunch. And besides him the marketing director and other staff members turned their backs on the company. It seems as if the people in power are deserting the sinking ship. 

Now the Holtzbrinck publishing group tries to sell the VZ networks but nobody is ready to pay the claimed price.

At the moment, StudiVZ claims to still list about 16 Millionen users but most of them are inactive. The network consists of an innumerable amount of orphaned and out of date profiles. This can perfectly be underlined by the number of visitors: While the VZ-websites still registered 466 Million visits in May 2010 there were only 84 Million visits in November 2011. This means an immense decline of 81 percent.

On www.wannstirbtstudivz.com the steady decline of StudiVZ can be observed since there is a countdown showing the time left until the network is dying. The website was created by Online Journalists of www.blinkenlichten.de and shows the massive downfall of visits during the last two years.

StudiVZ´s fate is a demonstration of facebook´s power. Social networks can only function if they are able to keep their users attracted. A network without active users is completely useless and cannot fulfill its task. Facebook, with its millions of users all over the world, is the most successful social network of our time. Let´s see if other networks can have a chance against this giant and if for example Google+ can be equally successful.