Tech Crunchies

September 10, 2009

How Much Has Youtube Grown In the Past Year?

Filed under: Overview — Tags: , , , , , , , — Anand Srinivasan @ 8:28 am

One of the greatest liabilities humankind has ever known in the internet space has to be Youtube. It is one of the biggest traffic puller websites in the world (It is the fourth most visited website in the world, according to Alexa), the biggest bandwidth guzzler with little or no money in return. Assuming that Google has middle little to no progress in the monetization of the website in the past one year, it is interesting to study how much additional liability they have taken in this period.

Youtube has been the undisputed numero uno in web video segment all along. For July 2008, Comscore reported that Youtube had 92 million unique visitors who viewed more than 5 billion videos; a number that was ‘whopping’ at that time. Today, a year later, the numbers have grown to 120 million unique visitors who have watched close to 9 billion videos!

Let us do the math – the uniques have grown by over 30% whereas the videos watched have close to doubled; or more precisely, grown by 80%. That is indeed a whopping increase in the videos per user ratio (a 38% increase!).

What is contributing to this dramatic increase? It’s definitely not that the videos have become a lot more interesting. In fact, more and more lame virals are doing the rounds these days. Also, a Susan Boyle or an MJ Thriller couldn’t have pulled the numbers this high.

My presumption is Google owes a lot of this additional traffic to Facebook. The phenomenal growth of Facebook in the past year has led to a spurt in the number of videos shared among friends and peers. In the past one year, Facebook has grown from 39 million uniques (for July 2008) to 87 million uniques (for July 2009). A growth rate of 124%, which is probably the biggest reason to the dramatic increase in the number of videos watched per user.

September 9, 2009

Is It Aloha For Akoha? I Pray Not!

Filed under: Overview — Tags: , , , , — Anand Srinivasan @ 8:00 am

Some companies, you love just because the concept looks nice and the people running it are seemingly good too. Akoha is one such company. I have not been a member of Akoha myself, but I remember wondering if they can make big when they launched with a ‘mystery kit’ on TechCrunch50 last year.

So, what’s Akoha? Akoha is a “social reality game” whereby the game doesn’t stop online. Players carry forward to complete real life missions like ‘giving flowers to  a stranger’ or ‘build a library in Nepal’. The game is also viral in that you invite ‘targets’ to a mission and make them play the game, thus spreading the word. So, that makes it a potential traffic riot, right? You’re wrong.

The website traffic has been dropping since the time the website got media coverage during launch. We do not have an idea about how many users have played the game nor how many missions have been completed. But the signs of a thriving community is visible from the Akoha accounts at Twitter and Friendfeed.

The company had secured a $1.9 million angel funding back in April 2008 and it would be interesting to see how much the money has helped the company grow.

Yammer – Twitter for Business : Is The Service Valuable Enough?

Filed under: Overview — Tags: , , , , — Anand Srinivasan @ 7:20 am

A year exactly to the date, Yammer – the twitter for enterprises was launched. The purpose of Yammer was to enable easier collaboration between employees of an organization; a better way of keeping everyone in the loop. The website was launched by David Sacks, the founder of the genealogy site Geni for his employees, but saw enough potential for a public launch.

This has been one of the websites to have made it significantly popular in the one year that has passed. The website has added on a remarkable number of features through this period – including things like threaded conversations, iPhone app, posting from Google reader, etc.

Yammer won the best startup award at TechCrunch50 last year and went on to secure a $5 million funding in January of this year. The future seems pretty bright for this startup owing to the fact that the revenue model is pretty robust – paid membership from corporates who would need additional control over the features. Coming as it is from the corporates, the subscription cycle should not drop all of a sudden, nor the amount be considered too high either.

So how much has the site grown? The home page of Yammer claims that today over 40,000 businesses are using the service, pretty much possible for a service that can serve as a way to keep employees be in the know of all that is happening. But traffic-wise, Alexa and Compete through different results. While Alexa has shown a positive growth, compete has shown the traffic stagnate over the past ten months. Assuming that new enterprises are still taking to the service, it is probable that the older users of the site do not find great value to keep using it or do not find the service sticky enough.
yammer

What do you think is the reason for traffic not to have grown?

Update: In a mail to us, Yammer has declined to post the actual numbers, though they claim there is an increase in the users as well as revenue.

September 8, 2009

FFWD – Have Users Fast-Forwarded The Site?

Filed under: Overview — Tags: , , , , — Anand Srinivasan @ 7:49 am

It does amaze me when I read about a startup that seems to have a great potential but you look back to see it has not performed as well as you would have wished it to have. One such is ffwd.com (fast forward). Think of this one as a StumbleUpon for videos.

Once logged in, users can ‘train’ the ffwd engine into understanding the kind of videos they like by watching or skipping (fast forwarding) videos. So, over a period of time, the ffwd engine will know the kind of videos you personally like and will stream such videos alone. Alternately, you could also choose the likes-dislikes of another like-minded person so that you don’t have to spend time training the engine.

With soaring popularity for sites like YouTube, College Humor and Hulu well known, you can only expect ffwd to get a lot of publicity since it is like choosing the best from all these websites for your viewing. Apparently, this is not to be. It has been a year since ffwd demoed at Techcrunch50. Now, let’s see at their traffic stats:
ffwd

As you would see, the traffic growth is good, but not something you would see after such a high PR. But the feeling of the site not doing really great came after I visited the site and saw this section
ffwd1

Seriously? Is this all the action that has been happening at ffwd? Three people have done something on Sep 6, four on Sep 4 with none on the fifth. You would expect much more activity on a website that has been around for more than two years now, is funded by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and employs close to eight people!

September 7, 2009

Groupsite: A Social Collaboration Portal – Is It Profitable Business?

Filed under: Overview — Tags: , , , , , , — Anand Srinivasan @ 9:12 am

It has been close to three years since the launch of Groupsite – a social collaboration website that provides communities a platform to interact (like Yahoo Groups), share files (like Sharepoint), and network (like LinkedIn).

The website was formerly known as CollectiveX and was launched in 2006. In June this year, the website has rechristened itself as Groupsite. While most websites experience a dip in traffic levels during such a transition, it is commendable that Groupsite had not faced a similar experience. A look at their traffic chart from Alexa suggests a smooth transition
groupsite

The website has a pretty robust “freemium” where it is free for new groups but those looking for additional features and storage need to pay money. Group owners can choose to make the group public, semi-public or private. The website today has around 30,000 groups.The largest of the public groups has close to 6650 members; something that definitely suggests that things are pretty smooth right now.

Is the company profitable right now? I do not have much of an idea, but just that close to 8% of the groups are paid. So, at the least the company should be breaking even right now.

Update : Groupsite.com CEO, Mr. Clarence Wooton in a mail has wrote to me that the company is indeed in a position to be profitable, but they have chosen to reinvest the money back into the system for further growth. So although technically it is not profitable, it is a pretty robust strategy to grow big.

Happy Birthday Google – A Relook at the Eleventh Year

Filed under: Overview — Tags: , , , , , , — Anand Srinivasan @ 8:30 am

Today is apparently Google’s eleventh birthday. It is amazing about how the company has grown from strength to strength and today is among the most recognizable brands in the world today. Google has been an innovator all along and it is a nice time to revisit all the innovations and news that Google made through the past year.

It is incredible about how much has changed in one year. Last year same time, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Product had claimed that the company had accomplished 90% of what search can be. That was because, Google was close to decimating all its rivals, as far as search was concerned back then, and hence innovation was not of high priority.

Things have changed in the past year. We now have Bing. The need for real-time search is getting a lot of noise. That means that though Google’s market share in search has increased by around 2 percentage points from September 2008 till July 2009, the complacency is gone.

What else has changed? In the browser market, Google’s Chrome launched incidentally just a week before their tenth birthday has had a sluggish growth. A 2.8% market share at the end of one year is not something that would excite Google.

After a lot of ridicule, Google has did well to remove the beta tag off some of their old products – including Gmail, and Google apps. Google reader tried to get more social by adding a few new features to ‘liking’ blog posts, read shared items from friends,etc. but nothing has been enough to catapult the usage or capture the imagination of the users.

There have been a lot of noise about Google Voice and Android, but nothing..nothing at all has been something worth ticking my memory. Overall it has been an average, not so special year for Google. Nevertheless, Happy Birthday, Wish you many more exciting years ahead!

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