I would imagine there must be several dozen Digg clones out there. Most would argue that with so much competition and a formidable runaway leader, it would be difficult for a newcomer to break through. Having said this, there was a ton of buzz surrounding Mixx at Pubcon so I spent this week checking out the site. In a nutshell, Mixx allows you to discover personally relevant media/news and interact within networks that you create based on interest and location.
This week I take a look at Mixx, by the numbers.
The Beginning:
Mixx beta launched September 17, 2007
Mixx is owned by Recommended Reading, Inc., a privately-held company based in McLean, Virginia
Fully launched in October, 2007
Chris McGill, CEO and founder of Mixx, had previously been the General Manager of Yahoo News and more recently the VP Strategy at USA Today.
Management team consists of industry veterans with deep Internet, news publishing and online content expertise including former executives from AOL, USA TODAY and The Associated Press
The Traffic:
The number of people visiting the site: 126,607, up 185.6% month over month
Of the total share of visits, only 8% are regulars
The number of pages an average person views on each visit; 7.0. This compares to 4.9 for Digg and 3.7 for Reddit
The number of minutes an average visitor spends on a site during each visit: 5:21. By comparison, its 2:25 on Digg
Percent of global Internet users who visit this site: 0.0095%
Alexa traffic rank:
oYesterday 5,504
o1 wk. Avg. 4,896
o3 mos. Avg. 16,852
Mixx.com users come from these countries:
oUnited States 50.8%
oUnited Kingdom 6.4%
oCanada 4.9%
oIndia 3.9%
oIsrael 3.3%
oAustralia 3.0%
oRomania 2.7%
Mixx.com traffic rank in other countries:
oUnited States 1,151
oAustralia 1,156
oIsrael 1,306
oSouth Africa 1,569
oSerbia and Montenegro 1,745
oRomania 2,092
oIndia 2,167
Top Mixxers include: LizBlaze, TunisianGuy, FatLester, Greg Davies, StandardsDT DiffeeOnlie, Webaddict, Chris789, Edith01
The Financials:
The company is almost certainly funded but wont yet disclose any details.
December 4, 2007, the Los Angeles Times announced it has taken a small equity stake in Mixx.
To date, there are no advertisements present
The Demographics:
According to Quantcast, The site attracts an average household income of $60k, slightly male slanted, 55+ crowd.
Only 19% of total users are in the sought after 18-34 demographic
16% make over $100K
14% attended grad school
75% of audience have Children Ages 6-17 in Household
Did You Know?
The site describes itself as taking the best features of Digg, LinkedIn and My Yahoo.
Techcrunch story on November 24, 2007 spoke about an unexpected surge of users began flocking from Digg.com to Mixx.com
Mashable have nominated Mixx for the Open Web Awards in the Social News & Bookmarking category
Mixx have a Twitter account
Users have created the mixxingbowl, a forum site for Mixx
According to Mixx, one month into the launch:
oMore than 10K tags have been entered into the system
oMore than 80% of users have set up YourMixx pages to keep up with the topics that matter to them.
oThe average YourMixx page contains more than 10 tags and categories
oPrivate groups, both personal and for business networking, are springing up by the dozens
Features Mixx is working on:
oToolbar
oFacebook application
oMobile Mixx version, to include an iPhone version
What Ive enjoyed most about Mixx is the clean look, extensive personalization features, tags (you can create your own if they dont exist), groups for both personal and business (this is such a time saver!) and the fact you can always see who voted against your posts. Theyve also given equal footing to all forms of content including photos and video. Mixx was clearly built by people paying attention to what Digg is missing. Im not sure what the future holds for Mixx but I really enjoyed the overall user experience.
What about you, do you enjoy Mixx? Tell me about your experiences.