I attended the Social Search seminar, presented by WebGuild, at Google. The seminar was done by a panel of:
Kevin Rose, Founder & Chief Architect, Digg
Michael Tanne, Founder & CEO, Wink
Joshua Schachter, Founder, Del.icio.us
Garrett Camp, Co-Founder & Chief Architect, StumbleUpon
Moderated by: Matt Marshall, VentureBeat
(Some facts: Digg is now worth about $200M and Kevin still owns between 30-40% of it. Delicious was bought by Yahoo! before they had any revenue, at about 300K users, for about 30M. StumbleUpon is profitable)
It was a good seminar and a lot of interesting things were discussed. Specially, there was some interesting numbers that the panel shared with the audience. Here's a summary from my notes for those who are interested:
- Statistically, 5% of the user community actively contribute, 95% only use. The more you make it easy for people to contribute, the more they do so.
- Quality of the content contributed is mostly due to "satisfaction", and not monetary reasons. Contributors enjoy the credibility and reputation.
- StumbleUpon has 1.25M users, and they are handling about 2.7M stumbles a day.
- Digg is currently at 500K users with 10M page views a day served by 90+ Linux servers.
- Wink was in private beta for six months and went public last week. They are in "tens of thousands" users now (no exact number).
- Everybody was agreeing that the site UI is extremely important, and is one of the factors that heavily impacts your number of users.
- Neither Kevin nor Joshua have spent money on advertising. It's been pure word of mouth.
- The key thing in word-of-mouth for them has been to:
o Make it as easy as possible to use the service, one-click
o Each feature should have a clear value, so that people want to use it
o Each feature should be valuable enough for people to want to mention to others
- Joshua was very keen on running your UI by actual users. He said instead of spending money on expensive user groups, go to a starbucks, buy people lattes, and ask them to spend a few minutes on your site with you watching in exchange for the free drink. You have to really tune the UI to make it dead easy.
- Also, use analytics to distinguish between people who have not visited your site, people who have visited only the home page, people who have played around a little bit, people who have returned, and people who are regulars. Create reasons and incentives for each tier to convert into the next tier.
- For scaling, all of the larger sites have run into limitations with SQL databases that they have had to deal with. Look at:
http://danga.com/words/2005_oscon/oscon-2005.pdf
http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/uploads/flickr_php.pdf
http://jeff-kubina.blogspot.com/2006/03/etech-2006-session-scaling-fast-and.html