Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter just posted to the del.icio.us blog that the service has registered its 1 millionth user. Schachter says that number has more than tripled in the last 9 months. The company was acquired by Yahoo! ten months ago, in December of 2005.
Digg, by comparison, reported last month that it has a half million registered users. While del.icio.us came online in late 2003, Digg launched in December of 2004. That means that del.icio.us had 300k users in its first two years and Digg has 500k in its first two years. The impact of the Yahoo! acquisition has also been big, though – with del.icio.us gaining more than 600k in the last 9 months.
In other words, for all its high profile expansion, the impact of being acquired by Yahoo! may have brought more users to Del.icio.us than everything Digg’s done for itself so far. In some ways the sites are very different and used for different purposes, but the comparison is interesting.
All of this can be compared as well to Yahoo! acquired (in March 2005) Flickr with 2.5 million registered users. Flickr is regularly referred to as the small upstart innovator in the photo sharing space, but it has twice as many users as the venerable Del.icio.us and five times as many as the precocious Digg.
This tells me that there is plenty of room for more services to provide these types of services, despite the exhaustion some of us feel every time a new one emerges. It also indicates that there is something far more interesting about Digg than the size of its contributing users.
Regardless of all of that, congratulations to Schachter, del.cio.us and Yahoo! for passing this milestone in social bookmarking.
Yahoo should stop ALL R&D and just snatch up good ideas before they become much of anything and let the Yahoo name balloon the site to success. Brilliant!
It is interesting you mentioned “exhaustion” … I felt exactly this way tonight when I saw yet another niche myspace clone. It would be interesting to track these sites over the long haul and periodically post their status. I used to like f**kedcompany because they tracked the demise of companies which can be interesting.
didn’t understand this (as Digg was not acquired by Yahoo!, but Del.icio.us was):
“In other words, for all its high profile expansion, the impact of being acquired by Yahoo! may have brought more users than everything Digg’s done for itself so far.”
Should read like this no? (or am I missing the point):
“In other words, for all its high profile expansion, the impact of being acquired by Yahoo! may have brought more users than everything Del.icio.us has done for itself so far.”
thx
Do you have any numbers for other bookmark services, like furl and magnolia. 1million is very good, but how far is the competition?
in my mind, delicious is nowhere near the success that digg is. perhaps that period that delicious was down (for like 4 days!) right after they were acquired by yahoo really hurt them. the yahoo boost should have catapulted them, but they haven’t shown the true viral growth of a myspace or youtube at all. and alexa puts digg way ahead.
MySchizoBuddy: take a look at http://www.read...ing_faceoff.php for some numbers.
Now it’s clear that the starting numbers were wrong. The numbers they have there for Simpy are also off.
Exhaustion? I think it’s fabulous how many great companies have emerged and evolved in Web2.0. Remember the old software days where it took $5 million and over a year in development with 10 engineers to do anything? The fun has just begun. Building and consuming all this great new stuff is truly fun.
MySchizoBuddy might enjoy this post which attempts to put a number on each of the social bookmarks registered user base. The estimate places Ma.gnolia at 3,300 members and furl at 19,600, a far cry from anyone discussed in this article.
fitz: Both are true. I think the original quote is what was intended, though. The point being, del.icio.us has acquired more users merely since the Yahoo! acquisition than Digg has acquired at all.
Maybe Del.icio.us has more users than Digg simply because it’s a higher quality service, which is easier to use and has far less noise???
Maybe thats because with Delicious and Flickr you have to have a user account to actually use them while you can use Digg without having one.
I actually don’t think the acquisition had that big of an impact on growth. It just hit the hockey stick, in my opinion, and would have anyway.
I think there is a need for a few more services, especially to bring the news content in the social arena.
Flickr had 2.5 million on February 19th of this year. It now has a little over 4.9 million – will be over 5 million next week.
I think there may be another reason for del.icio.us to have more users than Digg: You don’t need to register to use digg’s primary feature (discover new stories), while Del.icio.us is very limited without being registered.
So i can guess many people use digg without creating an account.
On alexa, Digg has twice the traffic of del.icio.us… It confirms
I agree with Michael that there is room for plenty more services like this, especially, since Digg and Del.icio..us have benn slow to internationalize their efforts. (Which would be easy for Del.ico.us to do, actually). So I suppose that foreign counterparts / copies of these services, like Mister Wong in Germany, stand a reasonably good chance of survival.
I think ckd and Ioan are partially right about the fact that you can use digg without an account but that the other two (delicious and Flickr) are much more useful when you have an account.
I think the other issue is that Flickr is much more geared towards the masses than delicious and digg – everyone loves (and understands) photos, right? And for now I think even delicious is more geared towards the masses than digg (everyone needs and understands bookmarks, right?).
I think a lot of the regular people out there still don’t get digg – or they get it and they’re not that interested in it. In our community there’s a lot of talk about digg and people have enjoyed using it for finding interesting technology articles. It will be interesting to see how well the model works with other topics and if it can really make it into the mainstream.
I’m a big fan of delicious. I use it all the time. But with all this growth, its servers often tend to get bogged down. It becomes a way too slow process to move around in delicious. They really need to improve this if they are going to continue to expand.
1 million users is a great milestone. When and how do del.icio.us plan on making money? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge del.icio.us fan. But to sustain growth, doesn’t Yahoo need some discernable revenue model?
I would like to see Yahoo dump their old bookmarks service and put Del.icio.us into the My Yahoo page. Not really interested in an RSS feed of my Del.icio.us bookmarks and I would not want to see this as the sole way to use Del.icio.us, but just as another way to access the bookmarks.
You can’t compare Delicious and Digg on the # of users metric. Delicious is moderately useful if you’re a not a registered user, but it’s very practical when you do. Digg is immensely useful even if you don’t sign up.
I agree with David Quiec about the # of registered users metric being a useless comparison of Digg and Del.icio.us. To compare the two of them is like comparing oranges and tangerines. They’re similar in some ways but they are not the same.
You can track statistics of the two sites until you’re blue in the face, but the simple fact is del.icio.us acts more as a useful tool to store bookmarks and discover popular new links while Digg is more of a news/bookmarking social community focused on the discovery and discussion of popular/new links. Therefore, you’ll see more registered users of del.icio.us (so they can store their bookmarks) but more traffic on Digg (as users, registered and not registered) visit links, vote on them, and discuss why they did or didn’t digg them.)
Now, a metric that seems more interesting to me is the comparison of Digg’s traffic versus Digg’s registered users. As a user must be registered to ‘digg’ a posted link and post comments, the difference between these numbers will paint a picture of how many people just visit the links versus how many people actually participate in the community aspect (or, in another commenters words, they just don’t ‘get it.’)
Hey Stewart, John in Vancity here, if I remember correctly (almost never do!) your inspiration for tags @ flickr was from Del.icio.us was it not ? Now that is an interesting story! Anyhow congrats on breaking 5mln and I sure hope there are no meetings to see if all can attend a meeting now that your so huge!
a good post – http://mintr.co...mier-than-digg/
I’m not sure I’m following you all, sorry if I’m “going the wrong way”, but if you’re discussing social bookmarking, I can’t see how Delicio.us outdoes Blinklist, which I see nobody has mentioned so far… After reading you, I’ve peeped into Diggs, but is it for exactly the same purpose? I found lots of stories reported, not personal collections of links…
Designers have been big on delicious for awhile. Those kind of links are always in the popularrecent areas