Double Up on del.icio.us
Despite recent reports pointing to the contrary, del.icio.us traffic numbers have been climbing steadily ever since Yahoo purchased the social bookmarking site in December 2005. Here's the latest data from respected analytics site Hitwise:
According to Hitwise data from its sample of 10 million US Internet users, the market share of visits to del.icio.us was up 122% from January 2006 to July 2006. This is impressive growth, but social bookmarking has a ways to go before reaching the mainstream - in July del.icio.us ranked at number 6,793 among all sites in terms of visits.
The report was published today on LeeAnn Prescott's blog at Hitwise. This information follows last week's news that del.icio.us traffic was faltering or leveling off, depending on who you listened to. According to Hitwise's data, del.icio.us skews young, wealthy and male. The site's regular audience is almost 60% male and over 40% twentysomething or young thirtysomething.
Why aren't the kids using del.icio.us? For one thing, Yahoo isn't effectively marketing the product to them. They understand that del.icio.us serves a very specific market, and they probably also understand that the best thing they can do for the brand is to take a hands off approach to its image. I think the larger reason is that it isn't "facey" enough. Granted, del.icio.us offers a particularly nuanced view of what your friends — and complete strangers — are "into" on the web, but there are no photos, no preferential information, no Flash audio players loaded with Arctic Monkeys MP3s. It's tough to cruise personalities on del.icio.us. That's what the younger audiences are looking for in a social network.
