Social network Facebox hit the headlines this week, rebranding as Netlog and taking €5mn in funding from Index Ventures. Ian Delaney interviews CEO Lorenz Bogaert to find out more.

You launched in September last year. With the presence of Facebook , MySpace , Bebo, Piczo and all the rest, why does the world need another profiling site?

We view ourselves as much more than a profiling site and more of a social site. Also, this is the only social networking site that is pan-European with localised interfaces in eight languages. (Currently, English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian and Romanian). This localisation is very much appreciated by the users. We now have 17mn users and they create two billion page views a month.

These American and British brands have very few users in places such as France and Germany, where having a product in the user's own language is very important. There are 'homegrown' alternatives in these countries, which I suppose will prove our main competitors. In France, the Skyblog network is very successful, though we think that's a lot less interactive than Netlog.

A lot of the features I see are familiar from Facebook?

We believe that we are completely different from FaceBook, particularly with the demographics of our users. We are aimed at 14-24 year-olds, while Facebook has historically only been open to college students, and retains a lot of that culture even after opening its doors to anyone.

You said that your site was more interactive than the others. In what ways?

Well, for example, if you post a photo onto the site, your friends are given notification that you've done that. They can then give it ratings and leave messages about it. You find this sort of interactivity on most parts of the site. There are comments for everything. Also, at any point, you can launch an interactive messenger program and chat one-to-one with your friends. Most of the other networks don't do that because it's technically quite tricky.

I notice some use of mobile aspects. Can you go into those?

We use mobile phones for micropayments. Users can purchase credits using their mobile phones. These credits can be used to purchase more space for multimedia and photos. We also use mobiles for identity verification. You have to send in a text message in order to obtain certain rights on the system, to obtain what we call 'trust level'. This is a lot more secure than an email address, which can come from anywhere, and we could potentially hand this to the police, in the case of any trouble.

What USPs can you offer to advertisers?

Advertising can be very targeted on our system to users across Europe. If an advertiser only wanted to target people between 20 and 30, for example, who were into a certain kind of music, then we are able to offer that.

You use people's profiles to target advertising? Isn't there a privacy issue there?

I don't really think so. We make it clear in our Terms and Conditions that we will be using the information to target advertising. But when you look at how Google adverts work, that has always been contextual based on the content of the page. Also, users actually prefer it when we show adverts that are relevant to what they are interested in.

Some advertisers are keen on having branding campaigns, rather than regular adverts. We allow users to choose from various skins to personalise their profile page. Some advertisers, such as Seat, Coca-Cola and Twentieth Century Fox have had their own skins made to reflect their brand. Then when users to choose these skins, they are doing a very good job of promoting that brand. A more viral effect, you might call it.

We have also been able to develop exclusive skins that are just used on the profile page of a brand. Electronic Arts has a completely customised page for The Sims who have a profile on Netlog.

Congratulations on the funding. What will you use the money for?

There are two areas where we are going to develop. The first is in building on the work we're able to do with brands. We are in the process of hiring a commercial team and are opening an office in London. Second, we have considerable infrastructure costs: two billion page views a month put a lot of strain on our data centres and we need to be ready for further expansion. We will also be launching in Scandinavia and in Eastern Europe within the next few weeks.

So with all these users, why did you feel the need to rebrand?

We previously had a number of localised sites for some of these European countries that had been launched earlier and which were running on an older system. The Netlog relaunch brings all of our users across Europe together and standardises them on the most up-to-date system.

It seems to me that not all of these social networks can survive. What do you think is the formula for success?

The first thing is profitability. And fortunately, we have been profitable since we launched. Unless you are profitable, life is very hard. The second thing is the appeal to the user; that they like the experience you are offering. Again, we think we have managed to be successful there.