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...in interview with Lars Hinrichs.

Q: How does the business model work? How does it differ from Facebook or MySpace?
We have a very simple business model costing €5.95 per month and enabling users to benefit from extended features such as the power search, seeing who has visited their profile, contacting people outside of the openBC network and organising many events per month, to name just a few.

We differ from our competitors with respect to the fact that we do not concentrate on the fee to attract paying members. We are interested in attracting members by providing highly effective and secure networking features that are being constantly refined and upgraded and offer our users value for money and ROI. Our recent second international survey “Communication and networking on the Internet” reported that 16% of our members are experiencing business success from their online networking activities. All of our users are profiting from the site – not just specific user groups such as headhunters.

Q: How many users do you have?
Over 1 million – a figure that is growing by about 10% per month. That’s a faster rate than our competitors.

Q: How many of them pay?
A huge number of our users are paying members. Compared to other business social software sites, we make more revenue with a fewer total number of members.

Q: Can you say how fast the site is growing?
We are expanding at speed all around the globe, and especially in Europe and Asia. Our fastest-growing market is currently China.

...coming soon: chapter III.