'China's Facebook' Renren facing 'wider losses'

Beijing, May 15 (ANI): Chinese social networking site Renren faced wider losses in the first three months of the year, partly due to weak advertising revenues.

The company said it faced a loss of 13.6 million dollars compared to 2.6 million dollars in losses for the same period the previous year.

Renren, often dubbed as 'China's Facebook', said it had to raise expenditure on marketing to 17.4 million dollars, a 78 percent increase from last year, mainly on its daily deals site Nuomi.com.

The firm also admitted that its advertising business had not performed as well as expected, The BBC reports.

"Our brand advertising business experienced a challenging quarter due to seasonality and the Chinese economy slowdown, resulting in a more cautious approach by new advertisers on our social networking platform," the report quoted its said chief executive Joseph Chen, as saying.

Chen, however, added that online gaming has proven to be a good alternate source of revenue for the company.

"Gaming revenue, driven by the popularity of our recently launched games and mobile gaming efforts, outperformed our expectations, offsetting the weakness in advertising," he said. (ANI)