San Francisco based Piczo is having a media coming-out party today, with announcements on the current state of the service and key statistics. A few weeks ago CEO Jeremy Verba did the same thing in the UK – which we covered on TechCrunch UK.
Piczo is adding 35,000 new member registrations per day, 75% of which are teenagers between 13 and 16 years old. Ten million unique visitors come to Piczo sites monthly, adding up to 2.5 billion page views. While this isn’t much compared to monster competitor MySpace (which serves over 1 billion pages per day), it shows what the power of the network effect can do when applied properly – Piczo hasn’t spent a dime on marketing.
And unlike Myspace, Piczo is focused on safety first. It is virtually impossible to browse user pages on Piczo. There is no search or browse feature. Users must share their page URL with others for it to be found, and there are numerous ways for users, parents and others to report inappropriate behavior. Piczo has full time staff reviewing all complaints and takes swift action to protect its members.
Piczo was founded in early 2004 as a paid service. Based on early user feedback it was relaunched as a free service, and founder Jim Conning sent out 100 emails to Canadian teenagers announcing the new site. That is where Piczo’s marketing efforts began and, until now, ended. The result of those 100 emails has been a massive viral spread of the product.
Piczo brought in a high powered CEO late last year, Jeremy Verba. Verba was previously GM and Vice President of AOL’s Voice Services division, which he grew to over a million subscribers. In addition, he was co-founder and president of E!Online, a joint venture of CNET and E!Entertainment Television, now a part of Comcast. Piczo is well funded after pocketing a total of US$7 million over two rounds of financing from Sierra Ventures and Catamount in 2005 and 2006.
The Social Networking Space
I thought this was a good opportunity to look up Comscore numbers on the largest social networking players and see how things are evolving (these are U.S. numbers only). MySpace is still the king, with over a billion page views per day, 100 million registered users and 56 million unique visitors per month. If anything, their lead is growing over competitors.
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be other winners in this space, too. Facebook continues to dominate the college and high school markets, and their recent decision to open themselves up to anyone will almost certainly increase their userbase and page views. Bebo, Tagged, Piczo, Friendster, Tagworld and Tribe all also show very nice growth rates, with little or no marketing spends.
There’s still room to grow internationally as well. Bebo and Piczo both have a strong presence in the UK in particular. Of course, the argument that these companies will be successful in non-English speaking countries v. local competitors isn’t nearly as certain. We expect consolidation to occur in the next 12 months, and the largest independents (Facebook, Bebo, etc.) to be acquired by the big guys (Yahoo, Microsoft and Viacom in particular seem to be actively looking).
hey, i really like it – and i’ve already got a 7th grader who really does not like myspace, and has never used it…also of particular interest if you can get them to open up: http://www.clubpenguin.com – no joke, this is a ridiculously popular PAID service (free and paid, but many pay 6 bucks a month) and community of virtual avatars (penguins) for primarily the even younger group: 8 to 12 year olds…and it’s also heavily policed and moderated…ever checked up on it?
it’s not just about page views, but the quality of its members. This site seems to definitely “get it” when it comes to having a well defined niche, and protecting the integrity of that niche. There are enough people in this age group to make this website massive, and should be a good fit for youth oriented advertisers. As this site grows, I think MySpace will lose some members.
Mike:
Obviously, at Bolt we’re fairly bullish on the social media space, but I have to disagree that this has been a growth period for competitors of Myspace. Closer scrutiny of these numbers show that really only Bebo has had a good six months. Tagworld has gone nowhere since it raised capital and the only time it does it when it spends money marketing. Tagged has an impressive pg view/user number but very few uniques. Friendster doesn’t have American reach and Tribe has almost no traffic. Piczo has not move domestically but obviously has value in Europe. Even Facebook has leveled.
Bolt is listed by comscore as a video site so we don’t turn up on this list. If we did we would be third in unique users and sixth on page views. Our uniques have surged from 2 to 6mm in five months, but page view growth has been harder to come by. The truth is the myspace imitation game is a losing proposition and if there is going to be consolidation it’s going to be around Myspace not yahoo and viacom.
The only way to compete with Myspace is to differentiate not imitate. At Bolt, we plan to take our own advice.
Aaron, it’s a good point. I’ll pull up the comscore data for the last year and do a graph. The comscore data isn’t anywhere near perfect but it’s the best that’s available.
With regards to Bolt and the previous comment about them, for a company whose site is a watered-down copy of flickr and myspace functionality, it is particularly interesting that it’s CEO would publicly claim that the market they’re in is a “losing proposition” and the only way to compete is through differentiation, despite the fact that for the past year they have been doing nothing but imitating.
page view growth is stagnant because people have alraedy collected their friends and don’t surf profiles as much compared to when they were a new user. This will only trend down in the future as well, as most socnets now are basically web-email accounts.
good luck bolt.
Check out this great trail my friend posted on trailfire.com about Web 2.0 startups! Here is the link –
http://www.trai...st/trails/12251
Mariam
Wow, Piczo raised $7 mil in VC. This is the bubble all over again folks. Time for me to quit my legal job and start a .com.
By the way, I’m not an expert on the issue, but I believe running a website for children is very difficult in the U.S. I believe laws are even more stringent for such websites than they are for porn website. I guess in addition to quitting my job, I should also plan on moving to Puerto Rico.
Okay, back to doc review
Safety first !
Business plan work time!
I see the social networks leveling off, but myspace has the capital behind it, and tribe has made a nice comeback. Don’t count tribe totally out, as they went back to the original look basically, and have got rid of the people with a head up their you know what. Look for at the end of the day – Myspace – Tribe still around.
The others will do fine, but as I said at the top — biz plan time! I just missed the first dot com boom… so…
Rex
Technically Speaking – http://rexdixon.wordpress.com/
7 Minutes with Rex Dixon – (cyberears.com) – http://www.cybe.../Show/audio/157
7 Minutes with Rex Dixon – (clickcaster.com) – http://www.clic...r.com/rex-dixon
i luv piczo i use it all the time it is also a gd way 2 communicate coz like wen ur signin guestbooks and shoutboxes check out mi site it is http://www.-x-l...am-x-.piczo.com
I use piczo….
http://www.picz.../septemberchild
i love the individualism. …but feel kind of dirty for looking at the above two sites.
overall it look fantastic!
curious to see how bolt winds up……
I don’t understand how you can say this: “It is virtually impossible to browse user pages on Piczo. There is no search or browse feature. Users must share their page URL with others for it to be found…”
I clicked the link you offer for Piczo and right on their main page was a selection of photographs – a clicked one of them randomly and got to a blog page where after two clicks I’d arrived at a page listing the bloggers personal information, like full name, address, parents’ names, etc.
AMAZING………..
WELL I HAVE A SITE ON PICZO…….
PLEASE VISIT ME…………………
AND ADD A COMMENT……..THANKS
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