Social media network Buzznet today announced the closure of a $6 million round of financing led by Redpoint Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners.
Buzznet is the largest social network site you’ve possibly never heard of. The Sunset Boulevard based company was established in 2003 and was last covered by TechCrunch in June 2005.
Buzznet has an extraordinary presence given it only returns a page and a half of results in Google News (at the time of writing). Buzznet ranks in the Top 1000 sites online according to Alexa and the Top 500 according to Compete. The company boasts of having over 6 million users and is the fastest growing social networking site according to data from Hitwise.
To put that into perspective (Buzznet is the blue line):
The site launched with an initial focus on music and has evolved into something like Flickr meets MySpace. BuzzNet is primarily a photo-sharing community with a much stronger pop-culture focus than similar services. Users share news, participate in community groups, vote on polls, keep journals…and yet it’s not like MySpace, it’s hard to describe.
The pop culture/ music focus is working well for Buzznet. Fall Out Boy, AFI, Cartel, up-and-coming indie artists and “internet celebrities” such as Jeffree Star now call Buzznet home.
Obscurity though seems to be working for Buzznet and the traffic and ranking figures speak volumes for the service. Hitwise ranked Buzznet at No. 17 on its list of Top 20 social network sites in March, Buzznet having the same market share as Windows Live Spaces and not far away from Friendster and Google’s Orkut. With $6 million in the bank it’s a company that is not only going places, it’s unlikely to ever return to relative obscurity again in the future.
the largest, never heard of it before
the logo
that was my exact point
If not an avid Iam a regular internet user and at least try to keep track of whats new on the tech front but somehow I come to know of the big bangs of new social networking sites when either they have million subscribers or got million in venture funding… always curious to know how the word of mouth spreads
While the SN market isn’t saturated, the days of massive growth are over. The strength of a SN is in its user numbers, “they” don’t care about features or anything else. This is a footnote in the story of the social network fad, but mid-market players always are…
Duncan,
I realize you posted the link to LeeAnn Prescott’s blog post @ Hitwise as a reference for the “fastest growing social networking site” claim, but wouldn’t it also make (more) sense to link to this blog entry from May 21 (compared to March 14 of the other post):
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/lee.....nce_o.html
I know it doesn’t specifically talk about Buzznet, but it does show updated rankings, even listing Buzznet on rank 16 (compared to #17 in march) with a 0.19% market share (compared to 0.18%).
Onkel
but for others reading this, the May 21 link on Onkel’s comment does show Buzznet at 16 moving ahead of Windows Live Spaces.
the Hitwise reference was mentioned in some of the briefing stuff I received, I Googled it and came to the March piece, wasn’t aware there was later data…it’s difficult to keep up at the best of times
More and more startups are getting big funds, while more are joining the TechCrunch DeadPool !
Amazing, the growth of web 2.0 enterprises, isn’t it? Won’t they ever care about the risks involved? I mean, only 1 in 20 or something are even getting low losses.
Now, every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to have blogs!
@ bdb, networks are starting to specialize successfully. The big general networks might all be built, but smaller, focused ones will keep popping up for years.
According to
http://www.buzznet.com/community/online/
there are only 450 people “online”.
Their forums are fairly unimpressive (in terms of number of posts) as well.
For a myspace-like site that boasts top-1000 traffic(?) and 6 million members it doesnt add up.
Kinda like second life.
buy a million uniques per month for $129 with popunder exchanges etc…
similar to the tagged case: there are genuine social networks with real social action going on and those with 5% action and 95% search engine / bought / partnership traffic. Amazing that investors fall for all this haha
I’m glad buzznet continues to do well. We recently added buzznet support to FrameChannel using their image RSS feeds (I actually wish they would upgrade to Media RSS) but still they have great content on their site and their open feeds enable our users to incorporate buzznet feeds into their image streams for use with wireless picture frames and desktop widgets. Go Buzznet!
Do we know which partner at Redpoint funded them?
Buzznet has some excellent content for the 18-24 crowd. I think it has languished in the background and obviously Repoint feels it merits funding given its current stats. Congrats Buzznet. Take comfort in the number of haters because they just wish they had a viable business plan to warrant such success.
Buzznet is fairly big in Monterrey, Mexico, where I’m from. So is Fotolog.com (8 million members) and Hi5. MySpace started out slower but picked up. Facebook is everywhere since three weeks ago and Flickr still doesn’t register.
I’m curious how this differences happen.
By the way, here are some recent figures on Internet services usage in Mexico (but I think they’re way off).
Arg! So they are now just bigger than me, and have $6M?!?!?!
For 15
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