At its core, Delicious is simply a bookmarking system. Its a place to store all those links that are too much to be in your "Favorites" folder. What makes it so useful is its one of those technologies that has a simple interface. What makes it so compelling is it's ability to do so much more; keep, discover, share, research and collaborate from any computer.
This week I take a look at Delicious, by the numbers.
The Beginning:
Joshua Schachter started del.icio.us in 2003 as a hobby however it stemmed from a single-user creation he started in 2001
Began developing Del.icio.us at night and on weekends, before finally leaving Morgan Stanley Equity Trading Lab where he worked as a programmer
Went with the two dots to be funny and nothing else
Initially, Schachter tagged all the links himself with the subjects they touched on. His personal list of bookmarked Web pages grew to more than 20,000 entries before he opened it up
Was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, and grown 250% since the acquisition or roughly 53 million posts on 25 million URLs
Today there are 29 employees based in Sunnyvale, California
The Traffic:
Delicious picks up more traffic in a day than it did in its entire first year.
There are over 1 million registered members
US Reach: 1,018,860
Alexa traffic rank:
oYesterday 471
o1 wk. Avg. 453
o3 mos. Avg. 388 compared to 5,843 for furl.net
US Monthly Traffic Summary
oPage Views per Month 11,825,958
oAverage Page Views per Visit 5.95
oVisits per Month 1,988,196
oAverage Visits per Unique 1.75
oUniques per Month 1,138,518 compared to 43,479 for furl
50% of visitors are considered to be regular and/or addicts
Percent of global Internet users who visit site: 0.305% - down 16% over last 3 months
The number of unique pages viewed per user per day: 3.3, up 3%
Delicious users come from these countries:
oUnited States 31.8%
oUnited Kingdom 6.0%
oGermany 5.5%
oSpain 4.2%
oCanada 3.7%
Traffic rank in other countries
oUnited States 167
oUnited Kingdom 172
oSpain 172
oGermany 226
oCanada 273
The Financials:
Internet speculation has the purchase price around US$30 million.
Schachter's share is approximately $15 million.
The Demographics:
Delicious is a top 5,000 destination that reaches 1.1 million U.S. monthly uniques.
Caters to a slightly more male than female audience.
The typical visitor reads ahajokes.com, visits EZ.Tracks, and watches heavy.com
10% of visitors are over 65
45% have no college education
20% earn more than $100K
Did You Know?
Delicious pioneered tagging and coined the term "social bookmarking"
On September 6, 2007, name change to "Delicious"
Schacter is also creator of geoURL and co-creator of Memepool
Before the end of the same year Schacter left Morgan Stanley, he had sold Delicious to Yahoothats a great ROI!
SEOMoz research claims 800 links are created on average after 14 days going popular on Delicious
v2.0 is rumored to be ready in two weeks
Schacter last entry in his blog was October 30, 2007
Do not allow nofollow links because, as Schacter says It's too much of a spam target otherwise and It's not collective voting when someone registers 1,000 accounts and votes. There's no easy way to enforce that. We're not about building links, so we don't care
theyve grown from twenty servers at the time of the acquisition to over 100 today
As with all social media, there are many bookmarking competitors. How do you share? delicious, ma.gnolia, furl, yahoo, google..which is your favorite?