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March 7, 2008

Fubar Grows Over 3 Million Percent In A Year

Duncan Riley

43 comments »

competefeb08.jpg

New social network traffic figures released by Compete show that Fubar, billed as the “first online bar and happy hour” is the fastest growing social network, having increased its traffic by 3,272,217% over the 12 months to the end of February 2008, placing the network at 14th on the list of top 20 social networking sites (chart as shown).

Year on year MySpace hasn’t grown at all, managing to lose 1% of traffic compared to Facebook with 77% growth.

The other big gainers year on year include Ning at 4803% (sneaking in to 20th place) and Twitter with 4368%.

CrunchBase Information
Facebook
MySpace
Ning
Twitter
Information provided by CrunchBase
  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. some more [link] notes on social networks « Arnold Funken on social site building

    March 17th, 2008 at 9:17 pm

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  1. 113.com

    March 7th, 2008 at 10:43 pm

    Interesting math… presumably cannot divide by less than 1.0 (being 1 user).. 8-)

  2. tim

    March 7th, 2008 at 10:52 pm

    they are around for years and just renmaed them selfsagain… geez DO YOUR HOMEWORK

  3. Peter Harrington

    March 7th, 2008 at 11:06 pm

    Social networks need to figure out what to do once their user base peaks. If they can introduce a strong monetization strategy at that time, they could afford to introduce new developments to insure their don’t lose too many users as they “fall of fashion”

  4. Jonas

    March 7th, 2008 at 11:20 pm

    A growth from 202 visitors to 6 610 080 would give a percentage growth of 3 272 217% if I did the math right. In this case it would be more relevant to compare the absolute growth in no. of visitors, i.e. 6 609 878 people in “foo bars” case.

  5. Yakov

    March 7th, 2008 at 11:31 pm

    The chart should be for US-based visitors only, doesn’t it?

  6. Duncan Riley

    March 7th, 2008 at 11:31 pm

    tim
    these aren’t my figures. I’m simply reporting what Compete has release. What homework is there to do, this is what Compete have shown in their graph, I make NO assertions as to why or how this is the case.

  7. Jonas

    March 7th, 2008 at 11:35 pm

    To correct myself:
    A growth from 202 visits …
    … a growth in no. of visits, i.e. 6 609 878 visits in “foo bar’s” case.

  8. bboing

    March 8th, 2008 at 12:23 am

    i agree. its a stupid title to the post. from 0 visits to 1 visit you get infinite growth. it is interesting how any of the 3 digit growth sites managed to attract these visits. affiliation? banners? adwords? coreg? spam? that is a story not some funny % someone calculated.

  9. pink

    March 8th, 2008 at 1:20 am

    Glad to see Twitter is doing good too, fun and useful site.

  10. Peter

    March 8th, 2008 at 3:42 am

    Duncan, you’re right; they’re not your numbers. But it is *your* analysis of the numbers. Your statement that Fubar is “the fastest growing social network” is quite simply false. That statement didn’t come from Compete (from what we can tell) - that was just bad analysis on your part.

    By your logic, if I had a site with a single member this year, and grew to 5000 members next year, then that would mean I’m a “faster growing” website than Twitter!! Wow!

  11. amay

    March 8th, 2008 at 3:42 am

    I belive Social networks is a very nice and useful site, I agree Pink’s advise.

  12. Marcus

    March 8th, 2008 at 3:50 am

    Fubar were previously known as cherrytap up until mid July:
    http://tinyurl.com/3ymxxt

    their traffic has not been growing according to alexa.

  13. antje wilsch

    March 8th, 2008 at 4:47 am

    MySpace still has more than double monthly visitors and triple the monthly visits of the next one on the list. In fact adding almost all the others’ monthly visitors below MySpace passes it, but not by that much.

  14. Jonas

    March 8th, 2008 at 4:56 am

    Wow… I’ve never visited fubar before, and I think I never will again. How is it possible that people actually use this page? I’ve never seen such bad layout and composition of a site in the past 10 years or so. I don’t get it.

  15. Richard Dale-Mesaros

    March 8th, 2008 at 5:10 am

    Hi Duncan,

    I’m intrigued to see how 2008, “The Year of the Niche Social Network” shakes out as far as these huge generic sites are concerned - will they be able to compete with the newer, niche social networks like Bode Miller’s http://www.SkiSpace.com etc? We’re currently talking with potential advertisers for a site we just launched for the real estate investment community,
    http://www.BlackWidowNetwork.com and they’re psyched to gain access to a very targeted membership base.

    Burn your TV…. go find a deal,

    Richard :)

    Chief Deal Weaver

  16. johnF

    March 8th, 2008 at 6:28 am

    Great list of social networks

  17. james

    March 8th, 2008 at 8:24 am

    Yes, it must be great to average 4 page views per user per month. Something to be proud of!

  18. james

    March 8th, 2008 at 8:25 am

    Not page views, but visits, but even still, once a week is poor no?

  19. Charlie Prince

    March 8th, 2008 at 8:33 am

    Can we get a few things straight before we get another idiotic post about the “amazing growth” of some random social networking site.

    1. The approximate cost of purchasing 4 million “monthly visits” using the marketing tactics that all of these me-too social networks use is on the order of $10,000. $10,000 is more than worth the price of the PR that you get from gullible blogs who then post about how your site is getting huge and should be purchased by News Corp for $10 billion (or at least then allows you to raise money from gullible VCs).

    2. Fubar was formerly CherryTap was formerly LostCherry - http://tinyurl.com/3xbg5k - if you look at pageviews their numbers are actually down over the past year.

    No doubt these guys are currently running around to VCs and buyout guys trumpeting their amazing non-existent growth, now validated by TechCrunch.

  20. Hella

    March 8th, 2008 at 8:35 am

    http://girlongirl.ning.com/
    “i want to*****and **** her lips also touching sexy her ****s”

    wow!

  21. Scott Rafer

    March 8th, 2008 at 8:55 am

    Though it’s fandom, not sel-interest, I need to ping Jay over there and see if MyBlogLog qualifies to be added. I think they’ve got enough monthly visits to bump somebody off the list.

  22. NotABug

    March 8th, 2008 at 9:30 am

    OMG, that site looks worse than MySpace,
    side scrolling images, thuosand banners, black background, looks like a 1.0 site made by a n00b.

  23. Steeltrap

    March 8th, 2008 at 9:43 am

    @ Charlie Prince your totally correct. I know for a fact “foo bar” buy pops from a well known spyware dealer Adon. Ive gotten their pops several times and traced them back to Adon. Its extremely easy to dupe Compete, Alexa etc with “fake” traffic using pops.

  24. bob cobb

    March 8th, 2008 at 9:53 am

    Is it fair to include ning in listings like that? It’s more like thousands of crappy social networks set up on one domain :?:

  25. Richard

    March 8th, 2008 at 10:03 am

    We are a little smarter than this, aren’t we. 32,722,17% growth rate is a USA today number (which is a initial membership of 51 members). At this growth rate they will have 1 quadrillion members (1* 10 ^15) NEXT YEAR!

  26. Food Bar

    March 8th, 2008 at 10:18 am

    Anybody heard of a real bar or going out side into the sunlight and talking to what is called a human?

  27. Charlotte

    March 8th, 2008 at 10:22 am

    A year in the life of these generic social networks is a lifetime and I think we know that in a year’s time, many of these growth numbers will be negative - although perhaps not fubar - which despite sounding like a children’s TV show - will rule the world by then.

    As the proud owner of a specialist social network, one that guarantees privacy by encouraging anonymity (www.bigwhitewall.com), I agree with Richard - here come the social networks that are actually useful…..

  28. Still Rob G

    March 8th, 2008 at 1:01 pm

    So compete isn’t listing imeem in the social network category any more (if it were it would be just above friendster in that table)? just 6 months after naming them the fastest growing social network what is compete.com classifying them as now?

    never mind, I’m going back to quantcast.com

  29. Social Networks

    March 8th, 2008 at 1:14 pm

    What is so great about Social Networks:

    http://yooflix.com/ShowVideo.a.....3206355474

  30. lawrence

    March 8th, 2008 at 5:05 pm

    interesting, to say the least

  31. Black Web 2.0

    March 8th, 2008 at 8:44 pm

    It’s great to see Black Planet in the top 10.

  32. Tammy

    March 8th, 2008 at 9:20 pm

    Ugh, I tried “Fubar” I hated it. Was just way too busy for me. And it seemed pretty unstable at times.
    I am thinking about getting a Facebook account for my blogs though.

  33. Toffee head

    March 9th, 2008 at 4:52 am

    I can get you a solid 5m uniques / month with appropriate reflection on compete and alexa for $13K @ 5 page views per unique on average. Hit me up

  34. Stefan

    March 9th, 2008 at 5:46 am

    Lets keep in mind that Compete tries to triangulate US data only. Many of these networks such as Bebo (which would would probably come in third worldwide) and Xing (a weird ommission on the list) have their prime userbase outside the US. Not to mention Orkut etc. of course.
    So from an outside of the US perspective this list is rather pointless :)

  35. Jugo

    March 9th, 2008 at 9:09 am

    Duncan wrote “these aren’t my figures. I’m simply reporting what Compete has release. What homework is there to do, this is what Compete have shown in their graph, I make NO assertions as to why or how this is the case.”

    If you’re not doing your homework and just blindly reprinting information from another website, why don’t you just put in a link and leave it at that? You are redundant.

  36. DC Crowley

    March 9th, 2008 at 9:40 am

    If those results had been stacked by visitors instead of visits Orkut would have made a real bad showing. As for Fubar! In Holland we have a lot of ‘real’ twitter meetups up and down the country. Real beer with real buddies. We call it twitterborrel and it rocks! Funbar leaves me cold :D

  37. product man

    March 9th, 2008 at 10:46 am

    Wow, that’s f**ked up beyond all recognition! (never heard of it)

  38. Wade

    March 9th, 2008 at 8:08 pm

    Can someone explain to me how classmates.com is #3 ? I thought they died years ago….

  39. ineedhits

    March 9th, 2008 at 9:46 pm

    @Wade, I see a banner ad for classmates on just about every second website I visit.. so i’m guessing they are still alive and kicking

  40. Larry

    March 10th, 2008 at 6:09 am

    33. Toffeehead; 19. Charlie Prince - like to hear how you guys think you can deliver that kin dof traffic to a sight for 10k….we are all ears.

  41. CompTIA A+ Certification Training

    March 10th, 2008 at 9:48 am

    Classmates is still alive and strong, and it appears that they’re getting a bigger percentage of people signing up (that have been out of school 10+ years) I’m guessing because of reunions, etc.

    That’s my totally unscientific analysis, simply because I see the numbers from my high school steadily increasing (I get e-mails every so often saying 30 new classmates joined… 50 new classmates joined). In years past it used to be drips and dribbles (a couple people at a time joining).

    So perhaps the 30+ gen is joining up there to keep in touch old classmates. The crappy thing is though, they give you an e-mail form, so you can e-mail friends, old school mates, etc., with no mention of having to upgrade to a paying subscriber. Once you go through the trouble of typing out an e-mail and hit send, it takes you to a screen asking you to upgrade to a Gold member so the person can actually read the e-mail you sent.

    That’s deceptive to me, and an instant turn off. If I had thought of joining, that will never happen now… put that information up front.

    …Just my two cents

  42. Linda

    March 10th, 2008 at 2:11 pm

    Duncan–You’re congratulating the wrong site. The increase on Fubar is bogus. This spike in traffic was due to a series of back-end server calls that had nothing to do with user-requested content. At comScore, our first look at the data showed a dramatic increas also, but our QA systems automatically investigate big swings and removed these as part of our standard data production process. Once these were removed, we actually show Fubar as declining, not increasing. Compete and Quantcast have similar issues in this regard–there is a big difference between measuring server calls and measuring an audience. It the intent is to measure the audience, they have this and many other challenges ahead of them. You might want to ask Compete how they handle this issue. While you’re at it, ask them how they handle cookie deletion, another key difference in our two measurement techniques.

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