I had a chance to visit music social network iLike’s Seattle offices yesterday to meet with co-founder Hadi Partovi. The first thing I noticed when I walked into the office was a flat panel display showing key real time stats for the company - see image to the right. I took a picture as Partovi looked on nervously. These stats haven’t previously been publicly disclosed, but he agreed that I could publish them.
iLike launched last October. In the nine months since they’ve gathered 3.5 million users (the orange stats in the picture), up from half a million in February. Not bad. But what’s really impressive is the fact that in less than two months nearly 5 million more people have signed up for the service on Facebook, where it is the third most popular third party application.
The difference will only become greater - 2,800 Facebook users are joining every hour, whereas the main site only gets 652 new users/hour.
Much of the popularity of the iLike Facebook application is driven by something called the iLike Music Challenge, where users try to guess songs or artist names based on listening to a 30 second snippet from a song. Users get points for correct answers (and more points for fast answers), and compete with their friends. It’s highly addictive and viral - Partovi says the average user session last a whopping 80 songs. Since points are public, I can see that a lot of my Facebook friends are totally addicted to this. See the screen shot below, and click for a larger view.
Two Sets Of Users
But iLike has a bit of a problem, because it has two distinct sets of users using two different products. There isn’t much overlap between the two groups, he says, because the Facebook application isn’t promoted on the iLike website.
The company is currently dedicating resources to merge the user groups and make the functionality between the products identical (or at least more similar). They’ll start by comparing cookies to find cross-users. If cookies from both products are on a user’s browser, they’ll ask if they have accounts at both and optionally merge them.
While they’re in the process of doing that, they continue to support the two products separately. All new beta features are released on both platforms, so its just the legacy stuff that needs to move. The most important features are the data gathered from the iTunes plugin - users want to show playlists and the music they are listening to on Facebook. All of that is coming soon, the company says.
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That chart should have another heading: Revenue: 0
Revenue, who needs revenue?
We got Vinod Khosla’s money baby!
Seriously, very impressive growth stats.
Now if they could only monetize.
Interesting stuff… yes, that game seems to be what iLike is really ‘about’.
I installed it on my facebook and I didnt see much in the way of live-shows data. The i-like comparison of recorded music is somewhat common on other sites…
Where does iLike get its concerts and bands data from, anyone know?
What would be interesting is if they could somehow sync with available music widgets on facebook to add plays from those wigets to their ilike account. For example, I listen to a song through a widget on facebook which then populates my iLike account.
I have (many times) thought it would be cool if there was a way to count for all music I listen to, vice only the music I listen to on my laptop (itunes). Ex. FM radio, HD radio, cd plays in my stereo, etc…
kinda cool to see the level of users online at the same time. I would love to see what would happen if all FB users and normal users decided to hit them at the same time.
@Alex, nice comment!
“While they’re in the process of doing that”.
“(the orange stats in the picture) ” ilike…wtf
Alex, for the win!
favorite music game for facebook? Surely we should mention moosak.com’s new change to the facebook platform.
Moosak took the plunge and went 100% facebook accounts, so no two groups. Some users were rather upset:
http://blog.flypublishing.com/?p=58
how are they legally able to stream music owned by record labels without paying the labels anything or may be they are paying the record labels .
@Alex: There’s a box advertisement that refreshes every song on the Facebook app. If the average person listens to 80 songs, that’s 80 pgviews a user. That more than constitutes revenue.
I have a similar story although maybe not on the same scale. http://globalsurfari.com Surf Forecasts has 623 users create an account since creation about 2 years ago. The Facebook equivalent http://apps.facebook.com/surfforecasts has had double that in 19 days. Amazing the power of Facebook at the moment.
LOL @ #1
what exactly does FB mean? is iLike directly related to iTunes?
For all i know, this application is probably the most noteworthy and fun aside from Graffiti on Facebook. The dumbest of them all would have to be the Horoscopes.
okay. “FaceBook”
I just started a facebook application, and I’d be ecstatic if I could get a tenth of that. I wonder how much bandwidth they use.
A screen like this is very useful for everyone working at a company. Also a World map showing users would also remind the company where their markets are!
Very nice looking stats indeed! Can I just say I’m addicted to FB?
@Dave
Do you really work at divshare? Cause if you do, I don’t think you would be so stupid.
80 “pageviews” for iLike at a outlandishly generous $11 CPM makes each users worth 88 cents.
80 songs * 3 minutes average = 4 HOURS!
They’re making less than a quarter for EACH USER EACH HOUR!
As mentioned here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....it-a-shot/
The licensing fees alone are 17 cents! Factor in bandwidth and design/programming fees and it’s a dead loss.
LOL
This is all hinging on the fact that they’re even able to get $11 CPM considering how worthless a box is for a music player.
This is a great post because it points to the core of where real innovation may start happening with the Facebook API.
I don’t know if those stats are accurate considering the fact that Facebook just published a blog post that said they have reached 30,000,000 (30 million) users. - source
However, I could be completely wrong.
It says right in the facebook apps page that they have that many users
I don’t think having two different sets of customers using varying products is particularly a problem. This situation almost reminds me of how companies have to manage markets in different countries - but in more of an internet way. Many companies have this issue where they have distinct groups of people with distinct behaviors. Ford in Europe makes completely different cars than are in the U.S., but they manage. Pizza Hut is actually a place people go to take a date in China; a drastically different experience than what you have in the U.S. So even though their basic service/market is the same (music et al), they have to serve two sets of users with a presumed small overlap.
But much like in the other examples I gave, this isn’t really a problem, just an additional challenge for a company that may have come prematurely. The real problem seems to be generating revenue. It would be interesting to see which population is more profitable.
@Alaska - before you go insulting Doug, you might want to take a reading comprehension course.
The 80 songs / session comment is clearly in regards to the iLike Music Challenge, not in the average number of songs played. The iLike Music Challenge has a :30 second timer, so at max you’re talking about 40 minutes, not 4 hours. However, since the goal of the game is to respond as quickly as possible, most people are probably responding in under 10 seconds, which would mean that you’re generating 80 page views in around 13 minutes. I was at 3.4 seconds average response time before I uninstalled iLike on my facebook profile because my computer got kind of screwed by it.
Your 4 hour assessment is WAY off.
The growth is great but the old adage of ‘easy come, easy go’ can be applied to see that it’s easier to get users through FB then to keep them. Even the fact that they say “users ever” suggests that they’ve lost users.
Regardless, they’re in a great position to build on this. The challenge is a great way to turn the copyright limit of 30 second previous into an advantage.
Revenue opportunities abound. A simple “Buy This Now” might be all they need. But it will come back to retention.
@alaska -
You are way off. Why don’t you re-read the post or better yet use the service before calling people stupid. The songs used in the game are 30 second samples and they can be licensed from someone like MUZE on different terms than you quoted.
The stats look very impressive especially when they are starting to get more 600 sign ups per hour.
mark stop is u naught, filthy rich bastard. You don’t need to showoff on TC! >:O
Revenue: 0
Future Revenue: 0
Value Added to the World: 0
Expenses: a lot - the licensing fees are huge
If internet radio is really in trouble, these guys have to be the top of the list.
iLike would be good on FB, if it allowed UK users to make use of all the features, such as concert tagging.
Wow… 8 million users in 9 months? Doesn’t seem like a problem to me
I’m sure other start-ups would kill for numbers like that. But as others have mentioned, it will be interesting to watch revenues. My guess is that they’ll probably just try to get bought over - the typical web 2.0 revenue model, HA.
Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
@ Alex you are the best!!!!
Well I think they should go non profits.
So this is what this Web 2.0 and Facebook hype is all about. A name-that-song game.
we can all agree these are staggering stats; Congrats - RB
facebook is growing fast, in general the future of communication is in control of the social mobile networks. Their growing past each one attaacts a different audience, peekamo hit their audience on a more persoanl level through text, facebook is hitting everyone through pics, groups. Networking is now a business itself.
i don’t see any problem here
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What strikes me is the attrition rate that’s north of 25% in such a short period of time. Please keep us apprised of when this thing flames out or rather dies a quiet death without much notice.
@Marc: 25% attrition rate? Where do you get that??
Definitely impressive growth numbers. It seems like iLike is great for FB for two reasons: 1) cleaner alternative to the music aspect of MySpace, 2) iLike’s all about community as well. The challenge bit is a great idea.
Still, I feel like the music interface could use some help other than just “here’s what else my friends like”. Can we get some more specific recs? I like what launch and pandora do, and there’s the recommendations from apps like additune and stores like itunes, etc. What’s a better rec system? AI engine using everyone’s data, or just you looking at your friends’ data? I say the former. So really, this is more about page views than selling music. In that, I’d say FB and iLike groups are actually competing…
Wow. Thats amazing. I like the idea, though not a big music fan - so this app. isn’t for me.