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Is Mixx Growing Fast Enough?

Posted by Nick O'Neill on June 2nd, 2008 9:32 PM

Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a relatively scathing review of traffic growth to Mixx.com since the beginning of development one year ago. Since its launch in October the site has grown from 31,000 to over 903,000 monthly visitors, a 2900 percent growth rate. Last month alone the company grew a whopping 238 percent. If that’s not substantial, I’m not sure what is.

Marshall argues that these numbers are extremely low considering that it is currently integrated into “USATODAY, LATimes, CNN, NYTimes, Reuters, NPR, Slate, Weather.com and an unknown number of blogs.” With the launch of Yahoo! Buzz, it appears as though other social bookmarking sites are fighting for a small piece of the pie. Initial reports confirm that Yahoo! Buzz can send millions of visitors thanks to a homepage link on Yahoo! in comparison to a comparable link on Digg which sends less than 100,000 visitors to a site.

No matter how small the pie is, it is still big enough to fight for given rumors that Digg was being acquired for $300 million. The source of Mixx’s spike in traffic last month? According to Techcrunch it was CNN.com which last month added a link to Mixx.com from each of its articles. One important test will be whether or not growth continues through next month.

Is it surprising that Mixx.com’s traffic has not surpassed 1 million monthly visitors? Not really. Most readers of mainstream media sources probably don’t know what Digg, del.icio.us or Mixx is and what their purpose is. Regardless, the site has gained traction and generating a popular story on the homepage now requires close to 40 votes in comparison to 3 or 4 when the site first launched.

A featured story on the homepage of Digg typically requires at least 150 votes. The company only launched 8 months ago and if it can continue its growth rate I think it has a great chance of becoming one of the leading social bookmarking and news aggregation services on the web. While the site may not have broken 1 million users yet, a 2900 percent growth rate is nothing to sneeze at.

Alexa Screenshot

Mixx Google Traffic Stats

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 9:32 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 6 Comments

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    :) I wish Mixx nothing but the best, I really do. Going from nothing to something and then calling it a 3000% increase doesn't mean much, though. 1 million uniques in a month would be a dream come true for a typical startup, but Mixx isn't a typical startup. They are placed prominently in these very high media properties. Put that next to the traffic and one would conclude that "Most readers of mainstream media sources probably don’t know what Digg, del.icio.us or Mixx is and what their purpose is." That sounds like an implementation problem to me. I'm sure that they worked hard trying to figure out how to convert that placement into clicks and it hasn't really worked very well - for whatever reason. That's what I'm saying. I'm going to stop saying it though because I feel like I'm being a jerk. I stand behind my post though and think that early numbers on the clickthroughs point to problems in implementation.
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    @Marshall, I agree that there is a serious implementation problem. Putting a link alone doesn't really help if you don't know what it's there for. I also agree that from nothing to something isn't fair but I gotta give support for the local startups :)

    It doesn't mean your a jerk for writing the post, I just think that a balance analysis would have been nice. Then again, perhaps my post isn't completely balanced.
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    big media = passive consumers .. so those connections won't help community feel

    and what is on the front page? useless time-waste crap, reminds me of yahoo front page 2002
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    I totally agree with gregory. Digg's front page articles are the same trash and propaganda put out by the media. And the Yahoo front page still sucks.
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    I think that placement on those big media sites is just seizing the high ground, so to speak. Social news is still young. I would say it's definitely still well on the left side of the bell curve of adoption. As usage moves over to encompass more of those later adopters (bearing in mind there's probably a large slice of the population who'll never adopt it) I think Mixx will be well-positioned to grab that audience, but at this point I think their strategy for growth probably needs to be convincing existing social news users to migrate.

    As gregory says, the front page is a mishmash... but on Mixx, I almost never visit the front page--I land on my personal homepage, which is pre-filtered to have only the stories most likely to appeal to me. Which is, ultimately, what I think will convert more people to using social news.
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    Well, I think the whole environment of Mixx is a LOT better than Digg... and the people at Mixx are a lot friendlier as well.

    Jay

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