The latest from TechCrunch
- Six Apart's Vox Heads To DeadPool
- How Tagged Found A 100 Million User Path Post Facebookocalypse (Video)
- Visual Website Optimizer: Another Way To Run A/B Tests On Your Site
| Six Apart's Vox Heads To DeadPool | Top |
| When Six Apart launched Vox , a blogging/social network platform with strict privacy controls, in 2006, investor D avid Hornik had high hopes. Vox is an “amazing blogging platform,” he said, because “Finally I have a place where I can post pictures and video of my kids without concern about who is looking at them.” Vox will be shut down on September 20, says Six Apart. What they’re not saying is why. Part of it is likely cleanup for a merger that the company continues to flatly deny – CEO Chris Alden will have fun explaining his way out of that one if it actually happens. But it’s also that Vox is just pretty much a ghost town. The site has just 5.7 million monthly uniques, says Comscore. And if you really want to show family pictures to your friends, you’ll probably make the effort to just wade through Facebook’s privacy settings quagmire. As for private blogging, well, it just isn’t all that SEO friendly. WordPress ate their lunch, and they do private blogs, too. We’ve put Vox into the TechCrunch DeadPool . | |
| How Tagged Found A 100 Million User Path Post Facebookocalypse (Video) | Top |
| Heard of Tagged ? Back in 2005 it was a teenager-only social network, catering primarily to U.S. high school students as Facebook charged through the college crowds. By 2007 they were profitable and worth over $100 million . Just one problem though. Facebook eventually started letting high school students in, and then everyone else . Tagged responded by opening up to everyone, too. But by mid 2007, CEO Greg Tseng tells me, Tagged knew it was in trouble. “Facebook beat us,” he said. “We were just another social network…but not in the top five.” So Tseng and team decided to reach out to users and ask them what they wanted. “The most important thing we learned was that people were using our site to meet new people.” Bingo! Facebook isn’t big on helping you meet new people. You can search by name, and you can click on friends of friends, but you can’t just find new people you aren’t already connected to via someone else. At Tagged, people were using filtered search to meet people. For sharing activities, dating, or whatever. “We focused on being the best place to meet new people for any social reason,” Tseng tells me. Dating is obviously a big part of this. Facebook doesn’t have dating profiles. And there’s a stigma associated with Match.com and other dating sites, at least for some people. But on Tagged people can meet and date or engage in other activities. “Going to Tagged is like going to a bar with friends, and you will probably meet new people. Going to Match.com is link going to a singles event, and there’s a stigma with that.” Users definitely agree. In 2007 Tagged had 20 million active users. Today they’ve hit 100 million. 1/3 to 1/4 visit the site each month and the site has 5 billion monthly page views. And they’re spending money. Virtual gifts. VIP accounts that let you do things like see who’s viewing your profile for $20/month. Revenue has grown to $30+ million, and Inc. named them one of the 500 fastest growing companies two weeks ago. 2011 revenue should be $50+ million, says Tseng. CrunchBase Information Tagged Greg Tseng Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Visual Website Optimizer: Another Way To Run A/B Tests On Your Site | Top |
| A/B testing, which entails running multiple versions of a site at once and tracking which one performs best with users, is a key part of launching a new version of any website. Visual Website Optimizer , which I’ll just call VWO from here on out, helps users manage this often complex process. The service shares some similiarities with a Y Combinator-funded startup called Optimizely , which launched in July. Among some of VWO’s features are multivariate testing (you can adjust more than one item on your site and VWO will run them in various combinations to determine which ones have a positive effect), heatmaps showing off where users are clicking (which are useful for visualizing where your visitors are clicking for different variations of a site), and split URL tests, which gives you the option to redirect traffic to two alternate versions of your website. The site also has WordPress, Drupal and Google Analytics plugins, and allows testing of pages which are behind login/signup wall and enables segmentation and running targeted tests (say, for example, you want to test only new visitors who came to your site searching for ‘Techcrunch’. Customers can use VWO’s API to integrate the data and management into their own dashboards. And VWO will track conversions across different domains via third party cookies, send email notifications of test results, and will send automatic screenshot generations of variations for archiving and reporting, The bootstrapped startup is also seeing significant growth in traffic handles by its severs; its servers are now handing 540 million pageviews per month, a 500 percent increase in month-to-month traffic. And VWO’s platform is being used by a number of well known companies including Microsoft, RackSpace and Vendio. CrunchBase Information Visual Website Optimizer Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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