Ramine Darabiha, the founder and CEO, of MySites blogged about their service growth statistics. He’s finally managed to get the growth curve to remind the commonly used hockey stick figure. In August 2009 they reached just a little under 2,5 million hits to their services and this has nicely grown through Q4 of 2009 to about over 6 million hits in December 2009. In January 2010, while the month is not over, they have managed to receive over 25 million hits to their services.
Ramine Darabiha talks about “hits” meaning that they might and most certainly aren’t all web visits to their service per se, but some sort of query of a file or a resource they’re hosting. He has narrowed down the growth to three reasons:
- MySites hosts some of the most popular Google Chrome extensions
- Partnership with Xihalife
- Significant increase in traffic from China
This yet again confirms the fact that when there is a match, it makes perfect sense for startups to co-operate on their efforts. XihaLife gets an effective way to share files while MySites receives more experience as a service sharing those files.
While startups are blooming, some of the older web companies in Finland aren’t doing too well. IRC-Gallery, one of the most popular sites in Finland is losing interest among its users. They have lost about close to 20% of their weekly user visits from Q3 last year. This only has one bigger meaning behind it: users are beginning to find other services more valuable with larger networks, meaning Facebook.
IRC-Gallery is now owned by Sulake, the company behind Habbo Hotel. One thing that strikes me is the lack of innovation that has been put into the company in the recent months. I haven’t heard of any big news coming out from IRC-Gallery in the last six months and yet, they still are one of the most largest sites in Finland.
Arch Red Oy
Lumi Group Oy
iasy
Nice growth on MySites, congrats! Anyway here’s just a quick note about the terms: I really hope that nobody uses the “hits” term anymore. It is – as Antti points out in the article – quite unclear figure. Now that we’re living the era of Google Analytics, everybody should be able to use common and unambiguous terms (page impressions, visits, unique visitors).
Indeed – or maybe in this particular case the proper metrics would consist of something like number of file downloads/uploads/streaming events. Anyways, congrats Ramine – well done!
Actually irc-galleria did a major redesign of their site in october, biggest it has done in five years. Their incentive behind the move was clear: to become more like facebook. It seems the redesign failed.
Congrats to Ramine.
Regarding IRC galleria the question is whether social networks are by their nature winner takes all businesses. I think they are for the obvious reason that most people don’t want to spread their contacts among several sites. IRC was always going to lose if it remained Finland and teenager focussed, just as MySpace was always going to lose if it remained teenager focussed (and ugly). The vision was too small.
Thank you for the surprise coverage and the kind comments :)
Regarding the hits:
We’ve tried using Google Analytics before, it’s not what we need: It only counts traffic to MySites.com. That would ignore all the embeds from bloggers, forums, the Facebook app, as well as the traffic from partners.
We need a way to measure what happens on the whole cloud, so this is the best rough overview of traffic at the moment, until we build more detailed stats on our backend. Can’t do everything at the same time :)
I don’t think it makes sense at all to translate the name of a service as has been done in this post any more than it makes sense to translate every english language product or company name to finnish. IRC-Gallery sounds kinda goofy too.
I met Ramine last night and congratulated, but can do it again here in public. Well done!
Mobile Brain Bank is a network established just after last summer, but growing in popularity. Our website is hosted at Godaddy, and their statistics talk about page requests. We’ve had 15,454 requests in January, reported last night.
This seems like an appropriate and knowledgeable crowd to ask how do you interpret a “page request”?
I’ve thought it’s one visit to one page, so I used it loosely similarly as a “hit” or “visit”.