Adam Penenberg of Fast Company got lots of well-deserved grief for his cover article about Ning last month, the one that focused on the Andreessen and Bianchini duo’s “viral expansion loops”.
The overly simple idea behind those loops is this: members join a service and then invite their friends. Rinse and repeat, and you’ve got exponential growth rates.
Things aren’t quite so simple and straightforward (factors like stickiness come into play), but there is a good deal of truth to the idea that users beget users, especially when a mass of them holds a certain value (the so-called “network effect”). So it would come as no surprise if one of Ning’s competitors decided to claim even stronger viral expansion loops.
Grouply, a broad social network divided into groups that are built on top of those found at Yahoo, is making such a claim. Assuming the concepts of groups and networks are tantamount, Grouply claims to have passed Ning, last reported to have 230,000+ networks, with its 300,000+ groups (see chart below). And Grouply is owing its success to the symbiotic (or parasitic?) relationship it has established with Yahoo.
When Grouply started off, it was mainly a tool for members of multiple Yahoo groups to keep track of their activities. It then evolved into a more distinct social networking platform by expanding the ways in which members could interact onsite, thereby bringing it into closer competition with Ning. But while networks on Ning are built from scratch, groups on Grouply must be identified from the start with groups on Yahoo.
This is a double-edged sword to growth. On the one hand, non-Yahoo users will fail to find Grouply as an appealing place to start their niche networks. But Yahoo groups users will find it exceedingly appealing to do so, and it’s that special appeal that boosts Grouply’s adoption rate.
During the Grouply setup process, members of a particular Yahoo group can be sent invites to the new Grouply group (a practice that has led many to accuse Grouply of spamming). Regardless of how enthusiastically Grouply users actually push their new creations, they benefit from the previously formed communities on Yahoo because they can invite members over to the new and improved party. Such well-targeted invitations are why Grouply can assert that it possesses superior viral expansion loops.
So great, Grouply claims to have one-uped Ning. But there’s still a concern over the actual quality of these networks and groups. How many people belong to them on average? How active are their users? How long do those users actually stick around? And what are they up to? No one really knows, outside of the companies themselves. What I’d like to see are companies divulging great levels of detail regarding their usage statistics. That way we can truly gauge the relative success of these social platforms, the proliferation of which continues every day.
Personally, I love my Ning site. Of course, it has all the features I’m looking for, but the big plus is the quick and effective customer service. If I have a problem, it’s taken care of quickly.
I love it……………………….:)
I wonder how people count distribution of its “vertical social networks”, and the total number of uniques using these networks. FB has 22000+ apps, but only 200 or so have a daily active user of 10%. But i got to say 350 000 networks in 7 months is still pretty impressive. Nice work.
I don’t get it. The traffic doesn’t add up when you look at their various metrics on other sites. I think this just means that they’ve had their end users touchor read 350,000 groups on Yahoo. Big deal.
thank you wery much…
Mark should you take a moment to look at compete or quantcast or any other traffic measurement site before writing it? What this number means is just how many different groups these people have spammed..
What #5 said. This is a bogus PR effort… i’m surprised you report it. (and also suprirsed grouply would be thinking that claim is impressive).
for anyone who wants to see the comparison between grouply and ning:
http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv
Grouply has 5K uniques; Ning has 1.6M unques. That’s a difference of about 300x.
I read the Ning article, I didn’t really think too much of it, the concept is cool, the monetization of social networks is still a problem that nobody has really solved yet.
So traffic is cool, but if it can’t be converted, then it’s still just traffic, even it sticks around and forms the community, there’s tons of those online, don’t even need new software for it (though it helps sometimes).
The biggest question asked since the beginning of the web 2.0 social networking scene has and still is: What do we do with it now?
I’d like to put all this in context. By releasing these numbers, all we’re doing is drawing a comparison along a metric that Ning emphasizes – the number of supported vertical social networks.
We agree with Ning that the number of supported networks is a relevant metric and a key asset. About a year ago, it appears that Ning had 60,000 networks and about 100,000 unique visitors per month, and now they have about 230,000 networks and 1.6 million unique visitors per month (Source: Compete.com). So over a year’s time, their networks increased by 4x while their unique visitors increased by 16x. As Ning has proven, networks fuel fast user growth. We are seeing similar effects with Grouply.
Except along this key metric – the number of vertical social networks – a direct comparison between Grouply and Ning is probably not useful today as we are very different companies right now:
* We’re approaching the market very differently. Grouply is going after existing networks whereas Ning is starting new ones from scratch.
* We’ve raised only $1.3 million whereas Ning has raised much more.
* We’ve been at it for only a few months, whereas Ning has been around for much longer.
Let me respond to a few points raised in the comments:
1. The numbers in the chart represent actual vertical social networks on Grouply, not simply “names” of groups we know about or groups that have been told about Grouply. What this means is that if you are a member of the network and you are a Grouply user, then you can login to Grouply, read an interact with past messages, post new messages, and view profiles of and communicate with other network members who are on Grouply.
2. To say that a social network exists on Grouply means pretty much the same thing that it means on Ning — that there is at least one person (though in many cases there are many more) who is using the platform to access the network. Over time, a network effect typically kicks in, with existing users inviting more users, and the number of users grows. This is why the number of networks is a relevant metric – it drives user growth.
3. Yahoo Groups alone has over 8 million groups and 110 million active users. These are successful, “real” groups – not “tire kickers” – and most have been around for years. So far, Grouply has upgraded over 350,000 of these groups into modern social networks.
4. We are currently experiencing a rapid increase in our user base driven by the rapid rise in the number of vertical social networks on Grouply. Unfortunately, Compete’s numbers are not current or accurate. As they say on their site, “We have little data for grouply.com, so these are rough estimates.” In this case, Compete is significantly underreporting the number of unique visitors to Grouply each month.
So in summary, we believe that there is great opportunity in vertical social networks, with many valid approaches. We are a young company employing a unique approach where we are getting some good traction along one relevant metric. That said, we do have a lot of work ahead of us!
Thanks for your comments.
Mark Robins
Co-founder/CEO, Grouply
I would argue that bald website statistics are often a poor indicator of value. Also trying to compare Ning and Grouply is a little like comparing chalk and cheese. They both look similar on the surface, but delve into them and you quickly end up in a plethora of incomparable features.
What matters is are they growing and with happy customers?
The concept sounds interesting and useful but my concern would be that this isn’t a business - just a new feature on Yahoo. If the service becomes popular enough whats to stop Yahoo from implementing their own version and out competing a third party.
This must be interesting, but I saw an interesting discussion in Yahoo Answers.
“Grouply is under serious scrutiny (appalled scrutiny) by YahooGroups list owners for a wide variety of security and list violation reasons. (I know, I’m one of them and am involved in the discussions.)”… read more
The fact that Grouply calls “getting a member of Yahoo’s already existing network to give them their password, and therefore using that member’s Yahoo ID to access their already existing Yahoo group”, does not make that member/group matrix a separate vertical social network unit.
What it does do is make more and more animosity, suspicion, and distrust of Grouply among the members and owners of closed non-public Yahoo groups.
Having so many savvy entrepreneurs thus gunning against Grouply automatically puts Grouply in a bad situation for any new Public Relations campaigns. With any possible re-direction changes in Grouply’s future strategy (even if they should rightly determine that giving up pirating of non-public groups is in their interest) they have already lost the kind of trust needed for the public to feel good about giving them all their personal access codes and passwords. Hence, the comparison with Ning is invalid.