May was a good month for social-news site Mixx. At the beginning of the month, CNN.com put “Mixx it” buttons at the end of every article on its site. Consequently, the number of unique visitors to Mixx more than doubled from 380,000 in April to 904,000 in May.
To put that into perspective, only 2.4 million people have ever visited Mixx since it launched in September, 2007. In other words, more than a third of all the people who have ever gone to Mixx, went there last month.
Those numbers come from Mixx itself, which sent us a screen shot from its Google Analytics page (click on it above to see a larger image). That hockey stick you see at the end is the CNN effect. Third-party measurement services such as Compete, ComScore, and Quantcast only go through April right now, and are widely divergent on the numbers they do report for the site (168,000, 65,000, and 53,000 U.S. uniques, respectively). But they all do show a similar trend of flattish growth most of this year through April. When they include May numbers, we’ll see if they register the CNN spike as well.
Mixx still has a long way to go to catch up with competitor Digg, which had 6 million U.S. visitors in April, and 13.8 million worldwide, according to comScore. (Digg self-reports 26 million users).
How many of those visitors stayed less then 10 seconds? I challenge someone from MIXX to release that.
Great news for Mixx, congratulations.. The real question is how many of those 1m, created an account?
So, anyone who was conssidering buying digg.com should buy mixx.com instead and make their own mark early in development … and save about 250 MM
Don’t forget to check out our mixx application : http://www.sitepump.com/ecoSys.....bYeKF9DuRH
Congrats to Chris, Kerry, Joe & the entire Mixx team.
As a fellow former Yahoo, it’s great to see my once co-workers doing amazing things. Mixx is a pretty interesting product, and has it’s own “feel” to it that, to me, makes it more of a “large market” play than digg, which will always be more of a tech centric product.
So far Digg is more interesting when it comes to wasting time online.
Should have sent the bounce rate page as well.
Mixx generally seems better put together than many of its competitors. In this case, I would image that half the visits from the ‘CNN effect’ clicked on it out of intrigue and then immediately left after feeling impatient or confused.
mixx is a powerfull competitor for digg… Don’t forget the power tha CNN.com has…
Thanks for reminding me about Mixx. I have always enjoyed it, but forgot about it. Craving something, I went to digg today, and felt so dirty.
Nice deal maneuvering from this team. Amazing how one big breaks can put you right on the map.
so how is this different from digg?
Doesn’t the screenshot violate Google Analytics’s TOS?
http://www.google.com/analytics/en-GB/tos.html
“8.1 You will not associate (or permit any third party to associate) any data gathered from Your Website(s) (or such third parties’ website(s)) with any personally identifying information from any source as part of Your use (or such third parties’ use) of the Service.”
“5.2 Neither Party will use or disclose the other Party’s Confidential Information without the other’s prior written consent except for the purpose of performing its obligations under this Agreement or if required by law”
It’s not just CNN - Mixx links appear on the NY Times, LA Times and a bunch of other major sites.
The question is: how much (if anything) did Mixx pay for these links? I’d be pretty impressed if these sites added these links just because they thought Mixx was cool, but something tells me money is changing hands.
Erick - any info on the link deal terms?
Chris, short answer:
No
That has nothing to do with sharing anonymous info. Has to do with not matching Analytics info with “any personally identifying information from any source”.
“Those numbers come from Mixx itself, which sent us a screen shot from its Google Analytics page (click on it above to see a larger image).”
Erick Schonfeld is identifying it as Google Analytics data and as a screenshot pic in the article above. They apparently sent it to him with the intention of having it publicated as such?
How is that not violating the Google Analytics TOS?
@Chris - publicated?
@Imageco, lol, I was gonna leave that one alone…
Chris, quit whining about rules and violations. Who cares? You sound like a little tattle-tale bitch
Mixx is decent but doesn’t have enough to separate itself from digg, in my opinion. You might want to check out http://www.myprops.org/ which is sort of a Digg-Friendfeed “hybrid” (the first Digg type site I’m aware of that has ability to automatically import your 3rd party content and create a feed of all your activity for your friends to follow.) MyProps also gives uses the ability to create private “channels” - sorta like a mini digg that is restricted to only you and your friends. The only problem is most of these cool features have not been communicated to the outside world because there is no “About” page that lists all the features, yet.
All details about “publicated” aside, this is great news for Mixx, and even better news for its community. I admit to bias, as I’ve been a hardcore member of Mixx since Sep/Oct ‘07 (since being banned from Digg), and the growth is noticable in a positive light to mixxers.
I know some people are quite opinionated about social media sites and some commenters above do seem a little skeptic of Mixx; but my suggestion would be to give it a shot. You may enjoy it.
For anyone interested in giving Mixx a shot, you might find this post helpful
http://www.the-trukstop.com/ar.....ng101.html
Overall, and once again, this is great news for Mixx.
Mixx is nice but boring.
“@Imageco, lol, I was gonna leave that one alone…
Chris, quit whining about rules and violations. Who cares? You sound like a little tattle-tale bitch”
I of course meant published. I recently spent years in the Siberian cold of Quebecia speaking the indigenous Franconadian language, so you will have to excuse my temporary lapses in English from time to time.
As for being “a little tattle-tale bitch”, I actually used my power seller status to get the rocketboom twitter account auction delisted on ebay. That was my real time in this sun as an internet tattle tale bitch.
I don’t even honestly think this is a story.
“Company puts X on popular site, gains popular site’s traffic.”
The headline may as well read, “man gets hit by 18 wheeler truck, and dies.”
IndiaSphere was getting more visitors than Mixx before it got listed on CNN!
http://indiasphere.net/blog/20.....-visitors/
CNN’s visitors come from China in recent two month ,because it report false news about Tibet .To be media, it lost it’s objective report.
Well done CNN!
May was a good month for Mixx;)
CNN say about http://www.techcrunch.com/ =))
mixx is all fake!!!!!!!!!
If you watch all activities on Mixx for couple of days….you will come to know..most of them are Mixx employees. They also have a automated script that increases your story votes.
Its utter shit!
As a happy mixx user I think this is great news. The only advantage digg has over mixx is a larger user base. Mixx has breaking news, groups, tags and attentive people working on the site who actually respond to email. Ever try sending an email to Kevin Rose? Get a response? Me neither.
As for the question of money, a recent article in the Washington Post stated that no money changes hands in mixx’s partnerships. My guess is that old-school news networks want in on social media and they chose mixx because of Chris McGill’s clout. Also, unlike digg, there are no ads yet on mixx at all (therefore they’re not making any money yet).
As a pre-public beta user of Mixx.com and an avid alpha/beta tester in general; I believe the reason is Mixx is gaining in popularity and industry cred is, among other things, the fact that these people really know what they’re doing. The bugs that occurred 6+ months ago have been fixed and the interface is pretty much seamless nowadays The development team has always been great about feedback.
I drop services that become unreliable (Twitter, I’m looking at you) but Mixx has never given me a reason to do so.
BTW, DiggBorg - the “average” Net user (your mom) doesn’t even know what the hell Digg is.
@Trademanufacturer - there are objective media outlets??? I want what you’re smoking.
The Washington Post had an article about Mixx on the front page of the Business section today (June 2nd) — you can see it at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....20_pf.html.
I thinks it’s a good news. I just noticed that a guy mentioned this also at his http://www.Richromances.com blog where I found some celebs’ profiles ovre there. A related hot discussion is taking place… Amazing!!!
Congrats to everyone from Mixx. Good to see they are doing great, more luck to them in the future!
http://mikesmoneyclub.blogspot.com/
I run Clicky (a web analytics service) and we monitor the digg/slashdot/TC/etc effect on sites’ traffic. Our data tells us these visitors are fairly worthless, unless you are running ads, in which case you may make a few hundred extra dollars. But otherwise, 95+% of them never come back to your site, ever.
Visitor engagement is much more important. I’d like to see the difference in global bounce rate from April to May for Mixx. My guess is it went from ~50% to ~80%.
Calling one data point a “hockey stick” seems a little bubblicious.
It’s interesting I just started getting referrers from Mixx today in volume. They must be adding blogs. I never got a referrer from them before.. now i’m seeing lots and lots
Although this is great for Mixx you would think the mainstream media outlets would look at more targetted social news sites such as http://wingcolors.com for politics.
As mentioned though this is probably to do with the clout that the founders of mixx have than anything. Would be interested to see the proof of the scripts that increase votes on stories as I can almost believe this with the dubious stories that make it to the frontpage there.
Now I’m not one to toot my own horn, but doubling your traffic isn’t that great.
We went from 1 to 7 visitors over a single month period… thats nearly a 700% increase in traffic.
700%!
Take that Mixx!
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P.S. Congrats to the guys over at Mixx! Lets hope you guys can keep that momentum up!
I thought Mixx was far bigger than it is considering all of the press it has gotten on TechCrunch. Is anyone else surprised by the low visitor numbers?
Erick,
When a social networking site or SaaS provider takes off like Mixx has in the month of May, how do these companies manage such rapid growth? How do they know what features users are enjoying? And, how do they capitalize on there success? Meaning, how do these companies make money?
I have explored this topic a bit and found that there are a few resources/companies that help SaaS or social networking sites grow, track user activity, and monetize their ideas, one such company is eVapt (www.eVapt.com). Do you know of other resources or approaches social networking sites utilize?
Thomas, et al.
Re: money
Mixx (Recommended Reading, Inc.) was allowed to offer equity in the company to certain media partners. I confirmed this with on of the VCs that invested in the company. Don’t know if that was the case w/ CNN, but given the more established alternatives to Mixx, I’d guess that was the guess.
http://www.TechMediums.com