PopteenUS.com, a teen girl focused community and social networking site which had a soft launched two weeks ago by one of the premiere publishers of teen magazines in Japan, Haruki Kadokawa Corporation, is well on its way to becoming one of the top online lifestyle resource for teen girls. The site focuses on letting teens run the show. Instead of dictating content, PopteenUS.com encourages girls to express their opinions, create personal profiles and portfolios, interact in forums, participate in surveys, share their dating disasters and secrets, and enter to become a PopteenGal, a highlight unique to PopteenUS.com.
“We teamed up with Haruki Kadokawa Corporation out of Japan to create an edgy and aggressive brand in the US teen girl market and only two weeks into the site’s soft launch, PopteenUS.com has had great early success,” said Mark Stutzman, former CTO of bolt.com and current CEO of Digital Variant, the company that created PopteenUS.com. “We are effectively letting teen girls control the space and we are taking our direction from them.”
Recently, the news has suggested that sites like Flip.com, who PopteenUS.com sees as a direct competitor, are out to compete with MySpace.
“MySpace does a great job of aggregating huge numbers of people in a range of demographics and will continue to do so. The key differentiator for PopteenUS.com is not to compete with MySpace, but to coexist with MySpace by better serving teen girls specifically and by listening to them on a daily basis. If we keep this focus we are confident PopteenUS.com will be the gorilla in our niche,” continued Stutzman.
PopteenUS.com has already gathered some significant momentum in the first two weeks of its soft launch period. The site has seen a 500% increase in page views from week one to week two, as the numbers climbed from 10,000 to 500,000.
Building a user base the old fashion way, by getting traffic to the site and using its services to convert users, PopteenUS.com has already seen over 50,000 teen girl visitors, is home to over 3,000 user profiles and has a 25% return user rate; all in just two weeks!
