Silicon Valley based Tagged was a young-teen focused social network that, like Piczo, focused on security of its users first. It is part of a vague second-tier of social networks that assemble under the MySpace/Facebook giants and includes Hi5 (which is fast becoming a first tier player), Bebo, Piczo, Orkut and Friendster. They’ve raised two rounds of financing - $1.5 from angel investors in September 2005, and $7 million from Mayfield three months later.
Co-founder and CEO Greg Tseng told me today that the company has reached profitability on $600,000 in monthly revenues, and that user growth has spiked to 350,000 new users per day. That’s well ahead of MySpace, which is currently growing by 250,000 - 300,000 users per day.
Comscore shows Tagged spiking nicely compared to the copetitors (the last time we compared the networks was September 2005). Click the image for a large view.
There are at least a couple of reasons for the growth. In October 2006 Tagged went from an under-18 site, to allowing users of any age to join. Tagged still has tight security in place for users under 18. For example, profiles for 13 and 14 year olds cannot be viewed by the public or registered users over 16, and profiles for 15-16 year olds are private to non users and users over 18. Older users can still add these youngsters as friends, but they must know their email address or last name to request the friendship, and the younger user must also accept them.
Tagged is also very aggressive with signing up new users. At registration users are strongly encouraged to invite their entire address book as friends. It’s a highly viral, albeit controversial, way to quickly add lots of new users.
Lots of these new users are sticking around, too. Tseng says that half of their 40 million users are active and have signed in over the last month. Tagged is now generating 1 billion monthly page views (about half of what MySpace does in a day).
Tagged is getting serious about revenue growth. The $600k/month they currently generate comes mostly from a search deal with Ask.com and low CPM display ads. The Ask.com partnership may be on the rocks, however. Tseng says the deal is “not performing.”
Hi,
I think you missed out the biggest point about Tagged. THEY ARE THE BIGGEST SPAMMER AROUND.
I am from India and I am sick of all the spam emails that tag is sending all acroos. And all my colleagues and friend concur on this. In fact their email spamming is quite sophisticated and it shows that they have given a lot of time and effort to their spam factory
All its growth is on the basis of SPAMMING…
Its aboslutely disgusting how they are going about this…
Am I the only one skeptical about both MySpace’s and Tagged’s claims of 300K new users a day? Anyone know their 30-day-active numbers? How many of these signups are bots?
Congratulations to Greg and Johann, the masters of viral marketing!
Ah back to the ‘users’ vs ‘accounts created mostly by automated robots’ argument.
And anon has a point - a lot of these networks just spam the crap out of you.
Viral marketing does not mean that using tricks you obtain a short period success (in this case acquiring new users very fast). The success must be sustainable in the long term: viruses can be killed by antibiotics
Spammers. Agressive? No, they’re just on the border of illegality. I’m waiting for that someone sue them soon.
i would like you please text back
I have never been more annoyed by a spamming site in my life - I can’t believe the amount of spam emails I get from them. I once replied to a friend who had “tagged me” saying “dude, please, no” and he replied: “dude - i know - I’m so sorry, I just accepted from a friend in texas and it raped my f*****g address book…..can’t you destroy it with internet magic?”
The number of gullible masses out there who might click and accept, well, who knows, so this growth doesn’t seem genuine to me; I’d like to see official active users per week/month metrics.
“350,000 new users per day”
impressive number.. but is it real?
Tagged has got to be the worst website on the Internet right now. I feel sorry for anyone that was infected by its malicious e-mail address book stealing software.
Cmon guys I’ve used Tagged for over a year now and think it’s as good as any other social networking site out there. Yeah they asked me to import my Hotmail contacts but I think ‘raping address book’ is way overstating it and plenty of sites have this feature - hi5, Bebo, even Facebook just added it. Getting lots of Facebook and Tagged invites lately? Congrats you have lots of friends! Anyway, you should check out their new widgets feature - it’s probably the most advanced one of any social network… cheers!
Here in Brazil Tagged is considered SPAM. Everybody feels trapped by this “viral” way of spreading, and wanna know how to leave this so-called social network.
My coverage about this spam-like behavior:
http://www.techbits.com.br/200.....de-social/
Jonathan, the difference in Tagged is that when you use the invite feature and give them your password they automatically take ALL of your address book and send them all emails saying you’ve “tagged” them, then repeat the process every few days (even when you are no longer a member), WHILST pretending you have a choice over who you invite/tag.
I.e. you (stupidly) give them your username and pass and a list of ticky boxes come up asking you to choose who to invite, then it invites them all anyway. Even people you don’t even know who you’ve maybe emailed once. And it does it, again, and again, and again.
I had been receiving countless emails from friends supposedly “inviting” me to Tagged for a while now, and it was just last week I finally gave in and decided to see what the site was actually like. I left the same day and sent them an emailing complaining about their activities, which I am sure must be illegal.
Stay clear of this site. Or at least do not give them any of your email account details.
i hate tagged and i’ve visited it yet.
it is almost 80% of the spam i delete every day in my email acount.
“michel has tagged you!!” fuckkkkkk
i hate so much this kind of service where some stupid friend put his pass and email and spam all the contact list…
Jonathan, yes, other services have this feature, too, and it’s a cool feature. But other services gives you a good interface what you cannot misunderstood. They may have the most advanced widgets on the net, I won’t visit their site anymore, because they’re using unethical, illegal tools. Sorry.
Rob, I was definitely able to select which friends to invite or not and those that were not selected did not receive any emails from me. It definitely does not just invite everyone in the address book (which would be horrible), in fact you can click unselect all and invite nobody.
But Barthazi, I guess I agree the interface could be improved so people don’t misunderstand what they’re doing - hope someone from Tagged is reading all this!
i hate tagged and i have NOT visited it yet. sorry
Ehi Michael, in Italia Blogosphere there are many posts about Tagged spamming: if u search with Google “tagged” you can have this post by Andrea Beggi and the key “tagged è pessimo” (tagged is bad). It isn’t a google bomb but a suggest of Tagged behaviour .
I have to agree with the other posters, Tagged is subhuman scum. They are little more than a spamming site and I have lost count of the number of apologies I’ve recieved from friends for the crap they accidentally allowed Tagged to send me.
Wow, you haters are missing the point, you little pile of 16-30 webmasters here that keep hating uselessly while the guy makes half a mil per month. Hate all you want, you’re just a bunch of whiny tards that can’t see that this guy’s plan WORKS, whether ethical or not. And since when did anything unethical had success? org domains are ethical but in most cases you don’t make profit , so stuff your BS ethicality down ur own throat and get with the program here, what a bunch of whiny , blind , hating crowd.
300,000 new signups a day? If your going to fudge your numbers please try making it a little more believable.
Tagged’s traffic is primarily international. Last I checked, if you are over 35 you are not allowed on the site. It has some cute unique features like ‘tagging’. The interface is very simple enough for MySpacers.
I don’t get how their e-mail is not blocked. If people are complaining this much, generally the mail providers lock you down. Whomever is doing e-mail delivery for them is earning his pay.
And at what point does Yahoo and Hotmail shut down these address book importers. It seems relatively easy to do, just track the IPs.
spammers. period.
@marc
so who are you? how much do you get paid by tagged? the only good thing that tagged did was engineering their spam software.
for every batch of emails they sent, i am willing to spend hours tagging it as spam.
So what is so great about F******* Tagged anyway? I hope they fry in hell. What they do is tottally of the scope and pure harassment, laying to the User. I do not even understand why TechCrunch gives them such a feat. Does not speak for TC if you ask me!!!
As an anti-spam vendor, we have been receiving hundreds of thousands of spam reports/complaints against Tagged. Personally, they’ve hit me with a few spams early on. Spam the CEO of an anti-spam company? Yeah, that’s smart.(!)
They can claim massive growth, etc. but trust me, it’s NOT going to sustain. They’re going for the quick flip - ie. attempting to showcase phenominal growth and attract a cash flush comany to buy they’re “hot Web 2.0″ company out. Total scammers.
Its quite dipressing to note that Techcrunch has given a good review of Tagged without mentioning one word about that seems to be the public verdict about them- spammers.
At this rate, I am losing faith in Techcrunch…seems like a sellout by TC…last week they went ga-ga over silverlight because Michal was invited on stage to interview the Microsoft top brass…
Techcrunch…your credibility is at stake
Tseng says that half of their 40 million users are active and have signed in over the last month.
Is this a photobucket “sign in” where they count anyone that happens to grab a pixel off of their server?
And $600k a month in revenue? I highly doubt that.
They just released a press release regarding one of their other revenue sources this week.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/r....._id=249439
yeah it said on their site that the average user spends … 20 minutes a day
http://corp.tagged.com/statistics.html
Is this not a bold lie?
Also I see Myspace and Facebook dominating YOUR OLD GRAPH, from last time you reviewed them; this is some spin for sure.
http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....18&y=7
Tagged is without doubt that most annoying website I’m NOT a member of. Why? I keep getting invites from same couple people EVERY few days! WTF.
You guys are missing one of the most key details here — Greg Tseng is a known spammer
http://www.xbiz.com/news_piece.php?id=14085
Yeah!! Viral!. This growth has lot to do with Orkut too. This virus has got into Orkut and spamming lots of users, at least in India where Orkut is huge. I am surprised with this report that shows they are profitable. Just shows that spamming has become more sophisticated and has come a long way.
Tagged is fun stuff–and definitely faster and way easier to use than godforsaken MySpace. For the whiners: How about clicking “unsubscribe” and getting back to the rest of your life?
The most important thing here is what Rob M posted above. If you didn’t read the filing, go back and click on his link.
Enough said. There is a fine line, one in which Tagged clearly crosses.
But, gotta give them credit, they prove time and time again that they can grow a database and take advantage of it.
Greg Tseng is the KING of spam. I have met angels who have advised me to meet Greg and told me that he can tell you the tricks of “viral” growth.
I dont understand this article - they make 600K/month which mostly seems to be from Ask.com and that relationship is on the rocks!!
TC - its not about acquiring users its about keeping them engaged. BTW, another example of VC firm Mayfield that is no more the tier 1 VC firm it used to be.
Tagged has 1-click unsubscribe that is easiest of any site out there. Of course they send a lot of mail - they’re huge. Haters here must be jealous.
ok - so i just went through the sign up process.
step 1 - enter your information
step 2 - provide hotmail address and password to import your contacts (you can skip this, but it’s not labeled well)
step 3 - select contacts to invite (default is all contacts selected, but unselect does work)
step 4 - contacts emailed
honestly, i don’t get what all the complaints are about. if you don’t want to import your contacts, don’t give them your hotmail password. and, by all means, don’t leave all your contacts checked if you don’t want everyone to be invited.
seems to me that the complainers aren’t paying attention to what they’re doing. plain and simple.
regardless, tagged should take steps to clear the confusion. it’s only going to hurt them long term.
verdict: people stop whining and tagged start being more responsible
$600k/mo for spamming…
The only legit soc. networking sites at this point are (in brackets = traffic): myspace (90%), facebook (10%), linkedin(x%), hi5, friendster, xanga, livejournal(1%),some tiny others.
spammers: myyearbook, tagged, … these sites either spam or heavily use popups, pay for signups etc. 99.9% of the ’signed up users’ join but never really use these kind of sites (and if they actually use them it’s usually just them without friends)
mm… a social network run by a spammer which claims to be a secure place for kids? That’s err… ironic.
GJ
http://www.60in3.com
ignoring all the spam issues for a second, let’s look at the numbers:
40 million users, of which 20 million are “active” in the last month. but of those 20 million, at 350,000 new/day, that means 10 million have signed up in the last month.
so before this month there were more like 30 million total users, and out of people who signed in this month, only 10 million were from that set of 30 million. which means they only retain 1/3 of those 350,000 a day beyond the first month, and their current number of active users is at best more like 13 million.
1 billion page views a day out of 20 million users in a month is also pretty pathetic for a social network - 50 page views a month per active user.
all of the above just seems to lend weight to the claims that they’re not really getting many real users and are mainly just getting big numbers via a clever registration flow that encourages you to spam your contacts.
these guys are god damn spammers. I keep getting invites from people I don’t know.
Good analysis, Ari. It does seem like they’re skilled at getting people to sign up, but that is very different from being skilled at getting people to stick around.
I worked for Greg and Johann for over a year. And yes they are Spammers in a past life, and in this current life. They also depend heavily on social manipulation. Little things like sending out emails saying, “Joe Blow thought you were their friend..”. And so people are shamed into signing up, and have their email addresses skimmed, and those email addresses get spammed, etc…
Meanwhile Tagged has a habit of alienating employees, working them into the ground and either firing them or forcing them to resign when they get burned out. Huge, huge turn over of very good people there at Tagged. And it all comes from Greg Tseng, who lists Hiring and Firing people as one of his tasks at Tagged.
Bitter? Perhaps.
Greg will get rich off of this endeavor.
eVilEngineEr
Sounds like the same bunch of whiners who claim that MySpace was started by spammers. Get a life! These are the soon-to-be moguls that are inventing the future. Congrats Tagged!
20 million active users? Funny comscore only shows them at 2,452 for the month of April. (Just under 2.5 million). Guess the other 18 million are non-US which means the traffic is probably not worth much. But probably more true is that they dont have anywhere near 20 million active users. The site is generating traffic from its out of control addressbook, not from people using it. Ask around, kids are either on MySpace or Facebook (or in many cases, both).
I signed up and none of my friends received any invites. I guess I was smart enough not to give my Password to my Email account. LOL
I hate it when people get mad for doing stupid stuff like giving out passwords and then blaming somebody else. I should start a site that targets all these guys above that will ask for their credit card information or get them to sign over their deed to their house. LOL
Stop bitchin, you are the one that obviously messed up.
Don’t forget, this is a Social Network and people normally want to be social with friends. The entire idea for social networks to capture more people to be social with.
And why sign up to a Social Network with an email account that you use for business. Thats just stupid, when you can create an email account for free.
Guess Michael Arrington is the only guy out here who has not yet received a SPAM mail from Tagged..
Michael, you use email??
Michael..I think you wrote the entire post in a hurry..Here are some mistakes I found:
“If” is part of a vague second-tier of social networks that assemble under the MySpace/Facebook ( you mean, It, right?)
Comscore shows Tagged spiking nicely compared to the copetitors (that’s competitors)
but they must know their email address or last name to request “the” friendship (what do you mean by THE friendship?)
At registration users are strongly encouraged to invite their entire address book as friends. (That’s ON registration)
When you have 30mil users and you still have to be SO agressive in acquiring new users, it says something: your site itself isn’t that useful.
Why is it that I am not receiving invitation to join facebook yet I have invitations to join Tagged on almost every email account? Why is it that almost everyone I know on facebook logs into their account daily?
Tagged folks should go back to the blackboard, make their site more useful, THEN focus on getting faster growth. Unless you specialize in the bubble method of getting valuations based on # records in your tbl_members
-Zaid
These practices are not new by any means. But, when you look at the numbers, you clearly see whats going on.
I am curious how these deals with AdKnowledge, etc. are working out given that they are only making $600k. I can say for a fact that Greg has done much better then this in the past. The guy knows how to make a coin and from what I hear his investors are pretty happy with him.
eVilEngineEr, what are you up to know…might as well try to recruit your services.