It’s time for an update on the personalized homepage wars – Netvibes and Pageflakes tend to get most of the press attention, and they are certainly pushing the envelope and trying to find new ways to make their services useful to users. But those two services have less than 4% of the market for personalized homepages between them (I have emailed both companies to see if their internal stats match what we have below).
About a year ago I posted the visitor stats for the big players in this space – MyYahoo, iGoogle, MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape. All of these services provide a drag and drop interface that allows users to put whatever content they like on their home page, through specialized modules or via RSS feeds. Most of them support third party widgets as well. At that time, Yahoo had significantly more visitors than all of the other services combined – 70% of the 72 million or so visitors to all of the sites combined. At the time, Netvibes and Pageflakes were not large enough to be tracked by Comscore. Now they are.
One thing to note on the data – it does not take into account duplications (where a user visits multiple of these sites, they are counted as users of all of the sites), so the numbers are really only to show relative size).
Based on January 2008 Comscore stats, Yahoo still leads the category, although they’ve dipped about 6% to 47 million monthly visitors. Their market share has dropped to 57%. Google, on the strength of homepage promotion of iGoogle, has tripled to 22 million monthly visitors, putting them in second place with 26% market share. MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape are next, with 10% and 3.3% market share, respectively. Then, at the end, Netvibes and Pageflakes.
Not on the chart is GlobalGrind, a hip-hop centric personalized home page that launched in September 2007. They now have 144,000 monthly unique visitors of their own. Not bad for a site that’s less than six months old.
A total of $20 million or so in venture capital has gone into Pageflakes and Netvibes. But without a major portal or search engine to feed them new users, growth is going to continue to be hard v. the big guys. And since all the big portals already have their own products, they won’t be looking to acquire these startups unless they get a lot of users on their site. It’s going to be a long haul.
I really love Netvibes. It has a much cleaner look than any other personalized homepage.
I prefer Netvibes personally.
I am surprised pageflakes has such a low count, seeing as they won a cnet award and whatnot.
I’d like to see an article on tabblo.
Why isn’t yahoo on crunchbase?
Hi Mike
At http://www.anycircle.com we have taken a different approach letting people create a home LINK page – a narrow focus _ with a simple UI
Some would say this is no more than mobile bookmarks – but we think our little drag n drop AJAX “link” function is a nice alternative to the “rich-content” approaches of the sites you have written about.
In our case the user can manage links in a browser and device independent interface, whereas iGoogle, Netvibes, and My Yahoo etc provide “content-management” on your page.
http://www.anycircle.com is more about ACCESS to content, and sharing links to content with friends …………
Our traffic is tiny! and our marketing smaller! but we think we have an approach which remains valid for many users, who just want thinks simple.
BTW _ “anycircle” is a shortened URL of http://www.type...rcle-of-six.com and refers to a set of shape-based URLs which we use but have decided are not core so are selling to the amusement and irritation of some posters here at http://www.site...e/auction/20994
Enjoyed your post – Cheers from New Zealand
Interesting know. I guess the others suffered slow growth because Yahoo had started the service way earlier? (though I never knew Yahoo had one too).
I personally don’t like personalized home page. It’s slow and packs too many windows together, which distracts ppl and I may even guess that the type of layout causes anxiety, since I get overwhelmed by that much news each time I try to use such things. Do ppl do that on ur desktop? For most of the time I will only work in one window, unless I am chatting with multiple person.
But it’s somewhat sad, hard (not as easy) to steal from “big bros”.
That also directly shows Yahoo! still has great assets (brand and reach)
RSS alone won’t make personalized homepages tick.. eg., the reasonably designed http://www.24eyes.com has been around for years, very rss-centric, but never seemed to amass users, dropping from 3.3K users to 10 or 20 users last month, according to Compete.. and protopage.com, from 250K users to 23K users over the past year… unlikely will matter, compared to the well-known players… until they make their service more agile with all these many 3rd party widgets…
Michael,
What do you use?
I am a teacher and use Pageflakes to post news about assignments and RSS feeds. I like it that these services are for free so that I don’t have to go through endless discussions to get funds in order to use them.
Regards
Samuel
Not on the chart is http://www.WireSeek.com better like ads integration etc..
I never understood why these services are useful in the first place. Simply placing everything in a box that I can move around doesn’t make digesting all this information any easier. In fact, I’d argue that a screen squeezed with 10 boxes all trying to show me the latest content (weather! blogs! photos! stock charts! more blogs! more more blogs!) on whatever sites I most frequently visit is a less intuitive and less convenient user experience than me simply visiting the original site to begin with.
It’s easy to fall in love with the idea as a tech nerd, but in reality I’m not sure about the ultimate usefulness of a screen packed to the gills with all sorts of different content. I really wonder how many of the users of these services are actively engaged in it, and how many simply set it as their start page then ignored it after a week (but leaving it as their start page), skewing the user figures.
wait to the personalized home page wars begin that duncan was talking about, watch out iGoogle
I’ve been using My Yahoo as my personalized home page for
years and am very pleased with it. Netvibes and Pageflakes
make perfectly fine alternatives but didn’t offer a compelling
enough reason to make me leave My Yahoo.
iGoogle has done a great job re-inventing the personalized
home page and as such use it as my second favorite
destination after My Yahoo.
My Yahoo and iGoogle have lots of visitors, but not a lot of people that stay. When I used to use those, I’d click off to articles or use search and go somewhere else. With Pageflakes, which is what I use now, I’m CONSTANTLY on the page, and RARELY click off. User traffic is great but it’s only one parameter; only engaged users will make money. I’d love to see the stats for that.
Whoever came up with the idea to have a loading screen on Netvibes before you see your homepage was a retard. Probably the same person who invested 16 million into it lol.
No CrunchBase entries for MSN huh?
Pageflakes is by far the easiest and most fun to use. My Mom could never figure out the others, but she had no problem with Pageflakes and uses it constantly (as do I).
I think Netvibes has the best looking, but overall My Yahoo! seems still the best with its abundant contents from Yahoo! network. iGoogle does not look as good as Netvibes (actually it looks quite ugly) and not much contents either, kind between Netvibes and My Yahoo! in both regards.
@Ben I think crunchbase is for startups (and google)
@radio, so Google, a 18,000 employee company is specially treated as a start-up by Crunchbase?
what about my personal favorite, http://www.live.com? I’d like to know how it ranks vs the others and in particular vs MyMSN.
Pageflakes seems to moving into the most innovative direction. MyYahoo is feeling very dated and the biggest surprise for me is myaol. Obviously not an avid user of AOL (except for I guess AIM) but their start page is surprisingly powerful and easy to use. I always need a coffee after using iGoogle and Netvibes is all over the place.
Pageflakes, in my opinion, has the most potential to grow. Their support is outstanding and staff is friendly. Making themes is easy and fun, and pagecasts rule! My friends at school and a couple of my teachers use Pageflakes.
If NetVibes actually delivered on all the stuff they say they do, their product would way cool. The reality is that it delivers maybe 10% of what they promise. That’s why I use Pageflakes.
I am surprised to see Pageflakes’ number. I saw Pageflakes being used at my School and at my company as a nice team collaboration tool. It is pretty fun to use compared to others specially the ability to create shared workspaces. I am curious to know how Netvibes, being a personal startpage with no social feature, gets such large number of visitors?
I’ve tried all of the options and decided Pageflakes was the best. It has the most features and capabilities. I use it for personal use and we use their group features at work.
iGoogle fan since the beginning! Love Google’s simplicity and ease of use.
Cheers
I’ve used most of the sites listed above. About a year ago I tried Pageflakes at the urging of a trusted geek in my life and I haven’t looked back! The selection of “Flakes” to choose from and the vibrant community that supports them are great! Every time I search the Flakes to see what’s new, I end up adding a new one or two.
“14 Personalized Homepages Compared, Feature by Feature”, http://mashable...ized-homepages/
The Big advantage of Netvibes at the moment is that it is still independent :
1) They do not have interest in promoting Gmail over Yahoomail, Picasa over Flickr, MsnVideo over Youtube, Gmap over Mapslive ……
So you just choose the best one for you.
2) They do not think about “loosing positions on other markets they control already” because they do not have other markets.
3) They are much smaller and therefor more flexible
4) they could build an interesting and new MyContent/MyCommunity mix
17, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28 Pageflakes marketing team is always fun
What is the business model for these personal homepages? And what does a user generate in terms of income (average) per month?
31 – and so is the netvibes marketing team.
Netvibe is one of the pioneers, but MyYahoo is the BEST, with more options and more apps.
Pageflakes all the way. Have been using Pageflakes for over a year now and its far ahead of the rest. Whats best is the introduction of new features all the time and how user friendly every feature is.
Global Grind is no longer a start page. It’s now a bit of a Digg clone for the hip-hop set.
I love Pageflakes. It’s been my homepage for almost a year now. I love how easy it is to change the look if I want to. It’s just so versatile.
It would be very interesting to compare this number to the number of portal users.
Do we know whereas the comscore data is US only or worldwide ?
Very good post / interesting subject
I wonder how active usage versus non active is examined. I am a big yahoo user, used to use myyahoo, but visited like once a week or two — mostly to read some comics or check local weather, since I was already on yahoo reading mail, etc. Pageflakes has become a daily often twice a day destination for me. While Yahoo was a nice to have occasional convenience, Pageflakes is an essential business tool for me.
Curious about other’s thoughts.
Having someone start on your homepage is huge! Not quite the same, but why do you think photographers give you a link to your wedding photos or engagement set? Because you send it to your friends and family and they come you your site too. It drives traffic and potential new clients. For Ft Myers Myers photographers this is very helpful.
The sites reviewed are all very slow to load over my EVDO modem. Yahoo! has the most configurable content, offers integrated mail and is the fastest to load. In addition to being required to find your own content, the problem with simply adding bookmarks to a page is authentication. You can add a link to webmail, but then you must authenticate. You can add a link to your webstats, but then you need another authentication. Etc. Web single-signon is just a theoretical dream at this moment in time. Do I want to trust all of my passwords to a web application running somewhere in New Zealand? Not here. So storing the passwords related to each bookmark is not a viable option either. A futuristsic portal would 1) discover my favorite content dynamically based on semantics, 2) discovery my identity from a dynamically changing key and 3) use and store my personal data and preferences on my own mobile storage device (mobile cookie).
I am both using Netvibes and Pageflakes. Pagesflakes is now my new start/homepage. I got Pageflakes as the default page when I got my new domain name.
To #5 Simon of AnyCircle.com. Thanks for the tip. I have created my own link page on 43WSDR.com. (I will remember the URL in the following way: The “time management system” 43 folders + World Site + DRive.)
I don’t think any of these sites will ever really break into the “mainstream” crowd, ie the less advanced average surfer. I think the concept will gain traction as more people use it, and see niches being the future, some others you have failed to mention are niche home pages / aggregators..
Sports News – http://www.sportsnipe.com
Social News – http://www.popurls.com
Tech/Many Niches – http://www.originalsignal.com
To me, I would rather have the best sources automatically updated so I dont have to worry about rss – and I think the normal web user cares very little about adding tons of rss feeds..
plus the ones you list are so clunky…….
I feel so ol’ skool. I still use MyYahoo as my home page. I signed up for iGoogle and Netvibes. And they are cool services. But they haven’t caused me to switch my homepage yet.
MyYahoo’s dominance of personal homepages is an example of Harvard professor John Gourville’s 9X thesis, which describes consumer adoption of new products. Here’s my blog post on that: http://tinyurl.com/yomt6l.
And I do see that the Pageflakes cult? employees? have been busy here. I’ll have to check it out.
I find it hard to believe that Protopage.com isn’t on anyone’s list. I tried literally every single site available and while yourminis.com stuck for a bit, Protopage is the hands down winner for me. I don’t use it for RSS or photos or anything too distracting – mainly as a repository for all of the many links I use throughout the day – grouped by topic, as in all financial links in one module, all client links in another, etc. The big boys just don’t allow for enough customization – Netvibes locks you into their ‘boxes’ layout and you can’t have more than one bookmarks widget (unless you like having duplicates). Just my $0.02…
So these are for the guys like you and me, but what about the mainstream?
People in generel that do not have advanced skills on the web.
Are there any pages that just let people sign up and guide for an easy and intuitive startpage solution?
The flakes are great. They fall right into a sweet start page–Pageflakes is just getting better and better.
Hi Martin #42
re: # Martin Lindeskog …………. To #5 Simon of AnyCircle.com. Thanks for the tip. I have created my own link page on 43WSDR.com. (I will remember the URL in the following way: The “time management system” 43 folders + World Site + DRive.)”
Of course you can just use any circle URL (hence http://www.ANYcircle.com) so whilst you can remember one circle as in your creative way! – you can just use:
wedxza.com
34rdsw.com
43wsdr.com
45tfde.com
67uhgt.com
and any of 259 other circle URLs
(we have a little cookie system going so it doesn’t matter which circle you type/enter they all finish at the web function you are after)
Cheers
Simon
Hello? The sign outside says this is the Northern California PageFlakes User Club luncheon. Does anyone know where they moved our Narcotics Anonymous meeting?
Flashhomepage.com just recently launched. Although it might not have the most features, I’d say it has the most attractive interface and is the simplest to use.