Quantcast agrees: we're at a million uniques a month

Of course, the real number for US uniques last month was 1.15 million, but I've noticed that QuantCast has gotten closer the bigger we've become.

http://www.quantcast.com/funadvice.com

Their estimate puts us at the 2,722 largest site in the US. Awesome. Well, we're even bigger than that (their estimates don't match their dashboard data, eg, they haven't updated the top site number list yet).

Ah, and for the 'bowl of cheese' guy, this is funadvice:
FunAdvice US. Click the link & off you go ;)

Pity: Compete hasn't updated their Feb data yet.

55K visitors on monday - we're thrilled

The reason this blog is seldom, if ever, updated is pretty simple: we're really busy. Case in point. Last month, we had 1.17 million visitors.

So far month to date for Jan, we've had 1.3 million, and on Monday, we had 55K visitors to the site. Thus the run rate for the month is 1.4 million, more than 20% above December (which was our previous record).

Thus any number of things change:
1) Gui needs constant tweaking (it can always improve)
2) "Minor" issues become bigger, faster, because of scale
3) Despite the team being larger than ever, and devoting more time to the site, there is simply too much going on for us to keep track of it all.

Though I'm very, very curious what'll happen in the next 6-12 weeks, mainly becuase for Jan, we'll finally be over 1 million US visitors for the month. A lot of the tracking services that people cite (comScore, Quantcast, Neilson, Compete, etc) leverage a US based panel, which means that despite having more than 1 million visitors a month since November, we've not shown up as a site with more than a million uniques becuase they aren't all in the US.

At least, until this month.

Looking back to January, 2007, we had 190K visitors for the month. That's a 736% increase over the last 12 months, which is great.

Tip for anybody who's ignoring us still in the media (yep, that'd be you, you, and most definitely, you):
fastest growing social sites a blog post I made after reading a list over at TC.

Given our growth rate & the knack panel based data has for being very wrong sometimes, I'll expect the reporting agencies to take another 6 months or so before we make such a list. :)

However, I'd have a ton more respect for all the mainstream bloggers if they didn't wait for flawed sample to give them an idea, and instead, actually report on the news as it happens.

Any bets on whether or not they finally notice us?

Fluther seems to be paying for blog spam?

Check this post out & you tell me if it doesn't read like a paid post about Fluther: flurther blog spammy post. Not that I'm saying paying for exposure is necessarily evil...it just reeks of "my product sucks" style desperation ;) And, the paid blogger didn't seem to do enough research, because we're bigger than most of the "competitors" they list. Wondir...I wonder where their traffic went, because FunAdvice is 100x the size of Wondir, according to Quantcast.com.

Yedda is approximately 25% the size of FunAdvice, also according to Quantcast, and Oyogi (the other site mentioned) is nowhere to be found. If you include Answers.com Wiki site (I don't generally, but some do) then FunAdvice is the 4th largest overall Q&A site on the web. If you exclude them (because wiki.answers.com is more wiki than Q&A site) then FunAdvice is 3rd.

The largest Q&A sites are Yahoo Answers (by a mile) and then Answerbag, who is about 3x the size of FunAdvice today, though growing less quickly from what we can tell. Our internal metrics put Answerbag at 3 million uniques per month, which is 3x the size of FunAdvice.

Last year, FunAdvice was 1/12th the size of Answerbag...however, from all reports I've read, FunAdvice is the fastest growing Q&A site out there. :) We're thrilled about that.

Ah, one other comparison thing - we have more international versions than any other site, except for Yahoo Answers. :) So, we're the second biggest player (imho) in the global market, which to us, is a huge deal, because our company is founded by one American & two foreigners ;)

Psst...we're hiring too if you're talented, savvy, and want to work for a start up that's growing like mad.

Monthly QuantCast Stats checkin: still growing the fastest

Every month now, I've been looking at these numbers:
quantcast funadvice stats. While they are light by a almost 50%...they do show our trend spot on. It's like the data they license is nearly 50% of the available data that we have from Google Analytics. Interesting.

Now, comparing on quantcast yedda, answerbag, and us. See who's growing the fastest? Yep, so do we :).

Yahoo Answers, the clear winner, is also flat over this time period...which, honestly, I'm not suprised at. The signal to noise ratio is extremely low, and their large community size makes the sheer scale of the thing difficult for new users to adopt, understand, and embrace.

How do we stack up versus Amazon & MSN? Again, we're winning. Not only are we bigger, but we're growing faster, too.

That's my take on the Q&A market. Are you listening, Mike Arrington?. No funding, part time employees, and we're taking over this category. Still, no techcrunch write ups.

What about you, Om Malik?. We talked about six months ago, and we're nearly 3x the size we were when I did a phone interview. Still, no write up. Oh, well.

The social networking guru himself, Pete Cashmore. Obligatorily, you covered Yedda, AnswerBag, etc...however, not one mention of us. ;)

And, my hommie at Startup Squad. We exchanged email, but, I'm sad, still no write up :(

Now, what does my pointing out the growth stats, and the teir one blogging public have in connection with FunAdvice?

Easy: To build a big, huge, and fast growing site, you can forget (to some degree) about the a list bloggers. They aren't the audience for FunAdvice, and frankly, more than likley never will be. However, it'd be interesting if they *did* write, simply because, like it or not, by the end of the Year, FunAdvice will be the 2nd largest in the category.

(shhh...bold prediction). By the end of 2008, we'll be the largest. We're already the best ;)

Quantcast stats for June Year to Date Q&A services compared

My last post (boy, we've been busy!) was on this same topic, and unfortunately, I've not had time to blog here as much as I'd like.

quantcast q&a stats for june. I left out yahoo answers (they are the clear winner) and Askville by Amazon (they are nowhere) to compare just four others with FunAdvice.

When we're winning (growing faster than anybody else) it's always amazing to me that more people don't write about us. Consider the idiots at ReadWrite web for a moment that didn't list us, even after somebody pointed their gaff to them.

FunAdvice is the most feature rich, fastest growing q&a site online, and the only truly international q&a site (by that, I mean we use the appropriate TLD's for other countries).

Bold prediction: in six months, everybody in the main stream will be wondering "where we came from" and "why they hadn't heard about us before". I saw Time Magazine's list of top websites, and those sites suck. Balls.

When our engineering team finally takes the cover off of the new & improved FunAdvice, the growth rates you've seen so far will pale in comparison to what we're doing next. Stay tuned.

QuantCast Monthly Stats: Updated

Every month, I love it when QuantCast updates their monthly stats charts. The reason why? Because it shows we're kicking a$$, of course. Yes, the most recent post I wrote just before this was also about web statistics and showing how fast we were growing.

It's intersting that you don't see any of the "main stream" blogs picking up on the fact that we're #3 in the space, and by the end of the year, we will be #2, behind only Yahoo Answers. By the end of 2008, we will beat Yahoo Answers as well and become the world leader in Q&A.

Take a look a this chart: quantcast Q&A comparison. Now ask yourself: who's growing the fastest? According to that chart, we're only about 50% of the size of Answerbag today...however, that chart also under reports FunAdvice's own numbers by as much as 60%...so given that large discrepency, it could be that Answerbag is still about four times our size, which is what our internal estimates say.

New GUI coming in a few weeks, and a series of big infrastructure fixes that will make the whole FunAdvice experience more fun than ever. We can't wait.

Compete web stats: we're still growing the fastest

Yes, this blog is more about self promotion than anything else. Sure, we have feature announcements and other posts about the industry at large but mostly we want to convey our sense of purpose, goals, and milestones along the way to becomming the best and largest question answer site around.

Compete just recently updated the stats on answerbag, funadvice and yedda . You can guess who's growing the fastest, right? It's a pity that so many people use & rely on Alexa because I can't fathom why it shows us as behind Yedda in particular especially because we monitor their metrics: in real life, we're four times larger than they are.

Ah, and one other thing: when you go to sign up on FunAdvice now, we've automated a few numbers, specifically, those with the number of members and number of answers we have on our site. Previously, I'd go and update those every few weeks, or month, or more depending on my schedule. The problem was that we recently hit 20K members, and I hadn't update the page for a while. And we're over 50K answers now, which isn't nearly as big as Yahoo Answers, but growing, fast.

Our service is about to take a quantum leap forward, as well. Last week, we finished up the visual design of our latest version, and to complete the vision, we're building a few new pieces of technology that will make it easier than ever to get good, fast, and relevant answers to your questions. It'll also make it easier and more fun to browse, read, and discover interesting people, photos, and content that's important to you and your specific interests.

As always, let us know if you have any feedback. Thanks!

Fifteen thousand unique visitors on a Sunday with 44K pageviews

Gosh, can you tell I love statistics? Especially when they're going up and to the right ;). While I haven't been one to brag, FunAdvice is clearly the FASTEST GROWING Q&A site on the internet.

Check out this chart: quantcast comparison of FunAdvice, Answerbag, Askville, and Live QnA. The chart shows clearly that FunAdvice is growing the fastest. Sure, we're not the biggest (yet) that'd be Yahoo Answers. However, our growth rate is much higher than any other site in our category.

This is the chart from QuantCast to compare FunAdvice to Yahoo Answers. The problem is the massive size of Yahoo Answers makes any chart by comparison look tiny. So, you have to calculate the growth rates: FunAdvice with 140% (per the chart, the real number is higher) vs Yahoo Answers growth rate of 60% or so. AND, Yahoo Answers is slowing, according to that chart.

We'd like to thank our visitors, our partners, our employees, advisors, and everybody who signed up to use our service.

As usual, if you have any questions, comments, etc, let us know! Tags: funadvice, askville, qna, live qna, yahoo answers, yahooanswers, web2.0, and wondir.

320,000 visitors and 900,000 pageviews in March - thanks!

The title says it all. In March, FunAdvice received 320,000 unique visitors, and 900,000 pageviews. We'd like to thank everybody wrote about us and all the sites that have encouraged others to check us out, and most importantly, we'd like to thank our wonderful community, where anything is possible, questions get answered, problems get solved, and friends are made.

We think about the future a lot - and we have little time to execute as much as is on our minds about how to evolve the site. Time and again, we come up with "great idea number 542" or number 543, etc, and haven't had time to execute on it, becuase number one is still on the list and won't be built till next week.

One thing I've been thinking a lot about (and the implications for the direction of our unique site) is about adding value to members, and the idea of network effects.

If you check out the chart, borrowed from this amazing blog about communities it evokes some interesting thoughts, especially when you're heavily involved in community building. What we discussed yesterday, Ericson & I, was the idea of network effects, and how the value of the whole increases greater than the value of a single addition to the network, because of the increase in possible connections between the nodes.

So, I came up with an idea: the viral value of your site (if it's a community) is directly proportional to the immediate value that joining provides to your network. Eg, if I join FunAdvice today, all I'm asked for is interests, gender, email, and date of birth. I'm not required to add my interests, that's only on the thank you page, and only if you didn't ask or answer a question before you signed up. So, you might not even get the "thank you" page today.

However, what if when you sign up, you always get the "thank you" page, and a specific list of valueable actions you can take to deepen the experience with a minimal amount of effort? Then, your friends will get an even bigger value out of you joining the site, even if they never sign up themselves.

That's where we're headed.

Growing strong for the last six months

In the spirit of being open, I thought I'd share a few stats with some folks.

1) unique visitors for the last six months


April so far puts us about 20% above March, which is fantastic, as our growth has accelerated somewhat.

2) pageview metrics for the past six months

We all know pageviews only tell part of the story - given our extensive use of ajax since we relaunched in September, if we had the "old" method of doing a few things, pageviews per user would be 40% higher. However, our current model, we believe, is much better for end users.

Obviously, I blurred out some of the specifics for competitive reasons. Given the growth rate above, is it any wonder why people say Alexa stats suck? Yep, their charts in no way reflect our growth rates. And, the actual numbers are higher than these (these were from Google Analytics) because a portion of the time, any web based beacon will not work, responsd, drop something, etc.

We're happy, but as we've not (yet) crossed the million page view per month number, we definitely have work to do. Based on my calculations, we'll get there at the current rate of growth by the end of May.