Tagged Turns Profitable - May Be Fastest Growing Social Network

May 10th, 2007 at 12:11 am

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?

May 10th, 2007 at 12:28 am

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.

May 10th, 2007 at 12:48 am

Spammers. Agressive? No, they’re just on the border of illegality. I’m waiting for that someone sue them soon.

May 10th, 2007 at 1:16 am

“350,000 new users per day”

impressive number.. but is it real?

May 10th, 2007 at 1:32 am

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!

May 10th, 2007 at 2:16 am

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.

May 10th, 2007 at 2:32 am

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.

May 10th, 2007 at 2:51 am

i hate tagged and i have NOT visited it yet. sorry

May 10th, 2007 at 3:26 am

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.

May 10th, 2007 at 3:32 am

300,000 new signups a day? If your going to fudge your numbers please try making it a little more believable.

May 10th, 2007 at 3:57 am

spammers. period.

May 10th, 2007 at 5:54 am

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!!!

May 10th, 2007 at 6:11 am

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

May 10th, 2007 at 6:55 am

They just released a press release regarding one of their other revenue sources this week.

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/r....._id=249439

May 10th, 2007 at 7:13 am

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.

May 10th, 2007 at 7:43 am

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.

May 10th, 2007 at 8:20 am

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.

May 10th, 2007 at 9:03 am

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.

May 10th, 2007 at 9:45 am

$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)

May 10th, 2007 at 10:00 am

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.

May 10th, 2007 at 10:14 am

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.

May 10th, 2007 at 10:39 am

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!

May 10th, 2007 at 10:53 am

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.

May 10th, 2007 at 11:08 am

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)

May 10th, 2007 at 12:19 pm

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.

May 10th, 2007 at 12:45 pm

These guys are dirty dirty spammers. Their signup tactics are ugly, and they shouldn’t be rewarded or complimented for them.

May 10th, 2007 at 1:46 pm

Stop blaming these websites. Members still have the option to select (uncheck) who they want to invite. Blame your friends for being lazy!!

May 10th, 2007 at 11:35 pm

Anyone that puts that “Content Link” crap on their pages obviously does not give a shit about their community in the long term. Ramp up uniques via spam, capture some revenue via those dirty links and all the graphical ads, sell it and run.

By the way, I have never got any e-mails from myspace, bobo, friendster and the like. Add liars to the list.

May 11th, 2007 at 4:06 am

“After registration, we allow you to check your email address book to see which of your friends are already on Tagged. You are not required to do this but many people choose to because it’s a quick way to connect to existing friends.”

Really? It’s not optional - post registration, I am required to enter the password for the mail id i provided during registration and see who in my address book is already on tagged. There is no link or button saying Skip this for now.

Your unsubscribe link doesnt work - I got so sick of trying to unsubscribe that I finally set up a filter to send all emails with tagged.com’s classic content to trash.

Most sites make harvesting contacts from existing address books optional - Tagged does not. It’s so supremely annpoying to receive spam from people who have been tricked by a system designed to fool people.

May 11th, 2007 at 7:17 am

I’ve used Tag for over a year now and LOVE it. Yes, it did ask if I wanted to import my address book but easily allowed me to uncheck those contacts that I didn’t want to invite.

I think people just go through the registration process too fast and click that ‘next’ button before reading EVERYTHING. Hasn’t anyone ever told you to read the directions before you proceed?

Anyways, Tagged has helped me keep in contact with my family and friends from all over the country.

May 11th, 2007 at 9:25 am

Looking at Alexa, you can see that magical day when they turned on their little spam factory:

http://tinyurl.com/2892kj

September 9th, what a glorious day!

Also check out the country distribution - obviously hitting a lot of international lists…

May 11th, 2007 at 9:27 am

Mr. Marat Bruk “Marc”
1560 Victoria #102
Greenfield Park Quebec, CA j4v1m2

May 11th, 2007 at 9:38 am

“Marc” said:

“… you little pile of 16-30 webmasters… you’re just a bunch of whiny tards that can’t see that this guy’s plan WORKS, whether ethical or not…. so stuff your BS ethicality down ur own throat and get with the program here, what a bunch of whiny , blind , hating crowd.”

“hating”, yea, dont let me find you with your door unlocked.

May 11th, 2007 at 12:02 pm

Shame on you, Michael, for not doing even 10 seconds of research to find out what has overwhelmingly been made clear in the comments. These are spammers, plain and simple. That you would claim they are “focused on security of its users first” is irresponsible to put it very, very mildly.

I believe you owe your users an apology for lending credibility to this spam factory, and a follow-up post warning your users about these bottom feeders.

Their ToS suggest that they are simply building a giant marketing database. I’m sure they expect to be out of business shortly, but they’ll make plenty of money selling people’s information to similarly slimy types. Unfortunately, they’ll have made the Internet worse off in the process.

“One new social networking site is a poster child for the abuse of social networking.”

http://www.eweek.com/article2/.....675,00.asp
http://www.symantec.com/enterp.....eb_20.html

May 14th, 2007 at 2:43 pm

Jesus, little children. . . Are your sensibilities really so delicate that you want the Internet sanitized so that you never receive a single piece of e-mail from a marginal friend trying to connect with you?

Tagged isn’t using botz, zombies, or any other dastardly e-mail techniques; this kind of lazy conspiracy-mongering in the age of CAN-SPAM just makes you look retarded.

Here are the facts: Tagged has a full-time compliance officer with a Columbia J.D., their unsub links work great, and they aren’t interested in unhappy users.

Calm down, click unsub, and consider adding a better photo to your Nerve profile.

May 21st, 2007 at 8:05 am

Just close the browser when you are asked for your email id and password.
than restart the browser clear cookies and you can use tagged bypassing having it rape your address book. tagged should have a skip it now button for greater democracy on the signup process

May 29th, 2007 at 2:16 am

Many companies are realising how much potential these kind of sites have, so they’ll stop at no means to get the traffic - even if it means harassing their users with spam and even their users contact lists!

I hope people begin to realise and not encourage by signing up..

Facebook seems to be the only site which doesn’t ‘harass’ their userbase

June 3rd, 2007 at 7:36 pm

This looks like an ideal scam — a legitimate-looking or actual service that takes advantage of computer users’ goodwill, naivete and/or unsophisticated computer skills to reach a far different goal with, of course, profits as the real but unstated primary purpose.

To the naive: Grow up. No one’s saying it doesn’t have great features and real uses, only that there’s a hook in with the bait. The big world is full of scams, where someone is trying to con others out of something valuable. The more legitimate it looks, the more effective it is. The complaints here are from people who are feeling the hook. The internet is a con artist’s paradise, partly because of the lack of sophistication of many of its users, and partly because of the possibilities of using advanced, mass technology to run scams on millions of people at the same time. It gets harder and harder to avoid being a victim.

The ability to make money can be an admirable thing, but it loses its shine if it’s done by preying on unsuspecting people. And the kinds of information that Tagged is apparently gathering could come around and really hurt people.

What’s the best way to get the word out about this wolf in sheep’s clothing? Email everyone we know and start a warning going around with websites to back it up? (Two posted by NoSpam above, and also look at

http://www.intuitive.com/blog/....._what.html )

I’ll start by doing that, but is there a more effective way to get the news out?

If you’re someone who likes the networking Tagged provides, at least tell all your contacts what to watch out for and how to accomplish signing up without giving the service your address book. Please, don’t be a sap and play into the hands of a big outfit after more than pleasant friendships online. And you know, it’d be real nice if you’d ask your friends first if they want to be included in any invitation before you let any program send out anything.