LunarStorm

LunarStorm, in Swedish often shortened to Lunar, is a commercial, advertisement financed Swedish social networking website for teenagers, of which was also available in the UK before 2007. "LunarStorm" is operated by a company called LunarWorks. According to the company's official statistics, the website had 1.2 million members in 2007, of whom some 70% are 12–17 years old. The website has since 2007 drastically dropped in popularity and in June 2010, Wyatt Media Groups (current owner of LunarStorm) announced that LunarStorm will be shutdown 18 August due to lack of activity.

History

The predecessor to Lunarstorm was called "StajlPlejs" (i.e. "Style Place" transcribed to Swedish spelling), which started around 1996. It was created by Rickard Ericsson as Europe's first digital online community. Lunarstorm officially opened on January 1, 2000, after Lunarworks had taken over StajlPlejs and decided to rename it after the user name used at the website by Rickard Ericssons girlfriend.

In 2001, LunarStorm had grown to over 600 000 members but still experienced economic hardships. Since the beginning, LunarStorm had been financed by banners and other advertising on the website, but this soon evolved to include more of pay-by-SMS services. An early example was LunarStorm's own pre-paid card "Vrål" ("Bawl"). In 2002, "Kolla" ("Look" or "Check this out") was introduced which allowed users to visit LunarStorm from their mobile phones. In the same year, members were able to upgrade their membership to "pro" status and get unlimited access to a range of services for a fee. LunarStorm Pro was extremely popular among the member base and it improved the website's economic situation greatly.

Another great source of revenue was LunarStorm's cooperation with other companies. An early business partner was OLW who sponsored "RajRaj", a party-oriented photo album ("RajRaj" being Swedish slang for party). But LunarStorm has through the years also cooperated with numerous other companies including Arla, EA Games, Loka, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Aftonbladet, Sveriges Radio and Logitech.

In September 2006, the website style was changed. The change had already been introduced at the British sister site a few months earlier (May - June).

Both the Danish and British branches of the website were closed down on July 13, 2007.

On December 13, 2007, LunarStorm removed "Pro" from the website and made all the content free. Focus was instead put on a new function called "Club Lunar" where members got access to "exclusive offers" and "cool competitions". Lately, the popularity of LunarStorm has dramatically decreased which the owners explain with an increased competition from other social networking sites for young people in Sweden such as Bilddagboken. For example, the daily question that used to be answered by about 150 000 members per day and was used by polling institutes to study opinions of Swedish youth has now shrunk to about 10 000 - 12 000 daily answers, as of summer 2009. The number of users concurrently online has gone from about 100 000 to only 1500 as of 2009.