The fact that zebo.com only returns 382 results in google, the Isaac Z’s account only lists 1200 as you mentioned, and there is hardly any mention of this site anywhere else on the web, would lead me to believe that 4 million number is highly overestimated..and you could probably chop 2-3 zeros off of that number. This story does not add up. The high membership number is probably only being touted for marketing purposes..as a means of getting media attention.
Terrence
· 3 years ago
Both you and the Times are sourcing the 4m from one person, it seems.
And pretty much all evidence is to the contrary. I would be surprised if the 4m could be verified. But who knows?
mikey
· 2 years ago
ur a fukin dick ill kill u !! u morther fucker
Terrence
· 3 years ago
Just some other information, a myspace search turns up around 80 mentions of "Zebo" many of which are not related to the site.
HK
· 3 years ago
Sounds very suspicious. It might be possible, but I doubt it given that there are so few references to the site anywhere. If it's legit, it would be interesting to know how many users are active. In the case that it isn't legit, I bet they populated the site with a ton of fake profiles automatically.
Who knows whether the figure's true or not. Its probably not. To really have such popularity a site should provide something unique like Grupus.com is doing. Forming really exclusive private friend networks is something unique to me, not listing down my personal information which i have to do on every other social site.
Ivan Pope
· 3 years ago
I think a lot more cynicism needs to be applied to claims of large numbers. This is me from Om's blog post about Netvibes '5m':
‘Krim says his company now has five million active users and growing fast’ But maybe not as fast as it was. In March 2006 TechCrunch reported that ‘Over a million home pages have been created on Netvibes’ (http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/22/netvibes-t...) In June 2006 Nial Kennedy references Tariq quoting four million users, ‘Netvibes has amassed over 4 million users in its first 9 months of operation’ (http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2006/...) This month the number is five million from Tariq’s own mouth (above). So: 1 million in the first six months (average 166,000 per month) Then it jumps to around 1 million new users in April and over 1 million new users in May to get to 4 million in June. Then, inexplicibly, it slows right down, because over the next three months, they only add another 1 million users.
It looks very strange on a chart. Either the numbers they are quoting are wrong - or their growth is slowing down. Wonder which it is?
Pete Cashmore
· 3 years ago
Ivan,
I agree that the Netvibes numbers are also odd - I was told that 5 million figure back in August. The number we need to know is *active* users - the rest is meaningless.
WormInBuffet
· 3 years ago
I read this article in the NYTImes on Sunday and it was the first time I had ever heard of the site....and I am as web savy and "web 2.0" as they come. I went on the site and cannot believe that these people are real. The entire concept is "I own this...and I want to own this."
WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD BE JAZZED ABOUT JOINING A SITE LIKE THAT?
I do not believe the 4 million figure and the fact that this guy was a marketer does not mean he found some magic mushrooms to attract 4 million members to his site. If I have never heard of the site then how can his marketing be working? Where is he advertising? Google? Under which search words? I tried "shopping, clothes, electronics" and there is no zebo paid ad. Even their catch phrase "what do you own?" doesn't show up.
The genius of marketing is make other people do the work for you...and the NYTimes, Diig and Mashables have done just that.
Well, the point I was trying to make is that they may have owned another major property and notified the users of the new site via email - MySpace did the same with a dating site, reportedly.
I have heard that thisnext has amassed something like 30k users since launch. Compare their alexa with zebo.
Pete Cashmore
· 3 years ago
Terrence,
Yeah, but I've long since learnt that Alexa is bull, especially when it comes to comparisons. I do, however, think that Zebo's stats look odd enough to merit a mention.
Those stats are a good example - Mashable quadrupled its traffic this month, but I don't see that on Alexa.
Mark Devlin
· 3 years ago
Please do not reward people who lie about their numbers by giving them publicity.
Peter
· 3 years ago
Pete: Alexa measures unique page views per day. In other words if one user reloaded http://mashable.com 872 times in one day, it only counts as 1 page view as far as Alexa is concerned. So your traffic may have quadrupled because your loyal readers are each reading more and more often.
We've found Alexa to be a pretty good proxy of page views and reach. Comparing two different companies is definitely a challenge for a few reasons (use of Ajax and propensity for the audience to be early-adopter toolbar-installer types), but for tracking one company over time it's been pretty good by my observation. Certainly no worse than Hitwise or NetRatings! [Please don't get me started]
Pete Cashmore
· 3 years ago
Mark,
First, I don't think they're lying. What I suspect happened is that they had another property/email database and invited a bunch of users over. I don't think they have 4 million *active* users, but it's worth having the discussion to see if we can dig up any more info.
Peter
· 3 years ago
I should have probably quoted from Alexa's help page to make it more clear:
Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.
Peter
· 3 years ago
Pete: re #19 there is no way that 4 million registrations generated so little traffic and reach. It just doesn't work that way. Anyone reading this article that runs a consumer facing web site can vouch for the fact that 4 million registrations will generate some measurable traffic.
Wishful thinking? Misquote? Who knows. But it's not reality.
Pete Cashmore
· 3 years ago
Peter,
Well, there's a fatal flaw with Alexa that I've noticed recently - after discovering it, I realized just how inaccurate the stats were, and I no longer mention Alexa here (except this one time). Anyway, that's a whole 'nother rant.
Pete Cashmore
· 3 years ago
Peter,
Oops - commented before your last one came through. Yes, I agree - even with Alexa's inaccurate stats, something isn't quite right. However, it's now my policy to hear the company's side of the story before making any judgements.
Mark Devlin
· 3 years ago
Peter,
So what your saying is that if a company says they have X number of users you will just take that for granted? A quick search on popular items from Zebo's tag cloud reveals the following:
car - 10,521 users bike - 3312 users dvd - 4752 users shoes - 9560 users clothes -11254 users
It is impossible that they have four million users. They might have maybe as many as 20,000 users (and how many of them are fake remains to be seen).
From the NYTimes article:
"Yet some four million people have joined the free site since January, during its private beta test, according to Roy de Souza, Zebo’s founder and chief executive."
Mr Souza is lying. I doubt they even have four million page views.
Pete Cashmore
· 3 years ago
Mark,
No, what I'm saying is that I won't call someone a liar until the facts are in.
Nathan Kaiser
· 3 years ago
I interviewed Roy a while ago. It provides some interesting insights into the company.
It appears I'm very much in the minority, but I think Alexa actually does a good job for site comparisons, especially when the sites are very closely related. Comparing two wildly different sites doesn't work, but comparing two sites with the same target demographic has proven to me in the past to be fairly reliable (for example comparing client sites that I have developed which are very similar, and having the hard numbers to compare that to).
Pete, I love this site and rely on it daily, but I think you got snowed here. Not your fault, of course, and you did inject some skepticism, but perhaps a better title of the post would be "Zebo claims 4m users rather then how did they get those (supposed) 4m members. I think it's always important to remember that business people lie about unprovable stats all.the.time.
Nathan, that interview is with a firm called "Zedo", while this post is about "Zebo".
Terrence
· 3 years ago
Oh, and never mind, Nathan, just realized Zedo and Zebo are the same company. Zedo.com does have much more healthy Alexa (no, not them again!) numbers:
Perhaps Zedo has served 4m people through their banner ads :)
Mark Devlin
· 3 years ago
Pete,
No disrespect intended, but what more facts do you need? Simple searches show that the site does not have anywhere close to four million users. Alexa charts, and the broader websearch chart (http://ranking.websearch.com/TrankTrend.aspx?ur...) also show that the site is not popular -- if anything it's popularity is declining.
Mr de Souza is an web advertising specialist. If he made a mistake with his numbers he is incompetent. If he insists on the four million number then he is lying. He can't have it both ways.
As a Web 2.0 consultant and leading blogger in this space it puzzles me why you were not able to determine whether Zebo's numbers were reasonable or not on your own. Thank god for reader comments ;)
Pete Cashmore
· 3 years ago
Terrence,
Nathan is correct - Zebo is owned by Zedo. Confusing, huh? (Update: wrote this before your other comment appeared.)
BTW: the reason I'm rarely skeptical about these sites is because I get snowed under with hate mail if I say the slightest negative thing. Injecting skepticism is about as far as you can go, unless you enjoy the death threats, comment spamming etc.
Mark,
The title of this post if "how the heck did Zebo get 4 million users". Disbelief is kinda implied. But I also know from Mashable's stats that Alexa isn't to be trusted - I look at the graph and compare it to my internal stats, yet see zero correlation.
steve_ray
· 3 years ago
Ditto on alexa stats.
The zedo = zebo revelation is the important fact. This makes it very reasonable that zebo has 4M unique email addresses - I'm sure I saw a few zeDo popups every day in the popup days. they probably wanted to diversify and hop on the SN train... Notice their huge spike @launch.... my bet is that was just excess inventory, then they steadily just sent it less traffic?
Mark Devlin
· 3 years ago
steve-ray:
Alexa statistics may be of variable quality, but they will certainly tell the difference between a site with four million users and one with no users.
The site owner said that "four million people have joined the site since January". That is very different from them having four million email addresses. Even if ZeDO had four million email addresses it does not mean that ZeBO has four million users. To add them into PR for an unrelated site is misleading at best.
Peter:
the reason I’m rarely skeptical about these sites is because I get snowed under with hate mail if I say the slightest negative thing. Injecting skepticism is about as far as you can go, unless you enjoy the death threats, comment spamming etc.
That's got to be one of the most spineless comments I have ever read. Are you afraid that the Web 2.0 mafia will force you to put rounded corners on your site? As a consultant I suppose it pays to be nice to everybody, but it's not really journalism, is it?
captain obvious
· 3 years ago
there is no possible way this site has 4 million users- it sucks way to hard.
Peter
· 3 years ago
first of all, its very unlikely that the site has so many users.. secondly no one in their right minds wud want to list their things. whats the point of listing? User1: hey i have got an ipod(or whatever) User2: hey i have one too. is that how people really make friends?? come on, the site's owners are bluffing..just ignore them.
Kevman
· 3 years ago
This site is hideous
Khadijah Russell
· 2 years ago
yall need to start letting us get on zebo!
Sarah Jane
· 2 years ago
*..heyyy....jus wanderin lyk how du make ur sell a zebo hme pg...*
wbzzz [x] [x] [x] [x]
*...Sarah Jane..=D..
· 2 years ago
heyyy...im in skull soooo bordd....hehe..=D...x o x o x o x
*...Sarah Jane..=D..
· 2 years ago
heyyy...im in skull soooo bordd....hehe..=D...x o x o x o x
sherwin
· 2 years ago
wanna be my friend?
sherwin
· 2 years ago
wanna b my friend?
sara avery
· 2 years ago
ok
mlain
· 2 years ago
good frinds with all human ok that is ok
sara avery
· 2 years ago
whats up this ya girl sara
sara avery
· 2 years ago
whwats up whats up
sara avery
· 2 years ago
how want to be my friend
Melissa Naughton
· 1 year ago
The reason I got here is that back in 1988 or 1989 I went to a party in Rome, Georgia. There was this drunk guy that kept repeating the word ZEBO over and over. Who are you, where are you and what the heck does ZEBO mean? For all of this time I have wondered about that and thought today that I would plug the word into Google. I found this surprising website.
All Comments
And pretty much all evidence is to the contrary. I would be surprised if the 4m could be verified. But who knows?
http://digg.com/tech_news/How_the_Heck_Did_Zebo...
‘Krim says his company now has five million active users and growing fast’
But maybe not as fast as it was.
In March 2006 TechCrunch reported that ‘Over a million home pages have been created on Netvibes’ (http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/22/netvibes-t...)
In June 2006 Nial Kennedy references Tariq quoting four million users, ‘Netvibes has amassed over 4 million users in its first 9 months of operation’
(http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2006/...)
This month the number is five million from Tariq’s own mouth (above).
So:
1 million in the first six months (average 166,000 per month)
Then it jumps to around 1 million new users in April and over 1 million new users in May to get to 4 million in June.
Then, inexplicibly, it slows right down, because over the next three months, they only add another 1 million users.
It looks very strange on a chart. Either the numbers they are quoting are wrong - or their growth is slowing down. Wonder which it is?
I agree that the Netvibes numbers are also odd - I was told that 5 million figure back in August. The number we need to know is *active* users - the rest is meaningless.
WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD BE JAZZED ABOUT JOINING A SITE LIKE THAT?
I do not believe the 4 million figure and the fact that this guy was a marketer does not mean he found some magic mushrooms to attract 4 million members to his site. If I have never heard of the site then how can his marketing be working? Where is he advertising? Google? Under which search words? I tried "shopping, clothes, electronics" and there is no zebo paid ad. Even their catch phrase "what do you own?" doesn't show up.
The genius of marketing is make other people do the work for you...and the NYTimes, Diig and Mashables have done just that.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_detai...
Well, the point I was trying to make is that they may have owned another major property and notified the users of the new site via email - MySpace did the same with a dating site, reportedly.
I have heard that thisnext has amassed something like 30k users since launch. Compare their alexa with zebo.
Yeah, but I've long since learnt that Alexa is bull, especially when it comes to comparisons. I do, however, think that Zebo's stats look odd enough to merit a mention.
Pete can tell us the truth ;-)
Those stats are a good example - Mashable quadrupled its traffic this month, but I don't see that on Alexa.
We've found Alexa to be a pretty good proxy of page views and reach. Comparing two different companies is definitely a challenge for a few reasons (use of Ajax and propensity for the audience to be early-adopter toolbar-installer types), but for tracking one company over time it's been pretty good by my observation. Certainly no worse than Hitwise or NetRatings! [Please don't get me started]
First, I don't think they're lying. What I suspect happened is that they had another property/email database and invited a bunch of users over. I don't think they have 4 million *active* users, but it's worth having the discussion to see if we can dig up any more info.
Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.
Wishful thinking? Misquote? Who knows. But it's not reality.
Well, there's a fatal flaw with Alexa that I've noticed recently - after discovering it, I realized just how inaccurate the stats were, and I no longer mention Alexa here (except this one time). Anyway, that's a whole 'nother rant.
Oops - commented before your last one came through. Yes, I agree - even with Alexa's inaccurate stats, something isn't quite right. However, it's now my policy to hear the company's side of the story before making any judgements.
So what your saying is that if a company says they have X number of users you will just take that for granted? A quick search on popular items from Zebo's tag cloud reveals the following:
car - 10,521 users
bike - 3312 users
dvd - 4752 users
shoes - 9560 users
clothes -11254 users
It is impossible that they have four million users. They might have maybe as many as 20,000 users (and how many of them are fake remains to be seen).
From the NYTimes article:
"Yet some four million people have joined the free site since January, during its private beta test, according to Roy de Souza, Zebo’s founder and chief executive."
Mr Souza is lying. I doubt they even have four million page views.
No, what I'm saying is that I won't call someone a liar until the facts are in.
http://www.npost.com/interview.jsp?intID=INT00095
Pete, I love this site and rely on it daily, but I think you got snowed here. Not your fault, of course, and you did inject some skepticism, but perhaps a better title of the post would be "Zebo claims 4m users rather then how did they get those (supposed) 4m members. I think it's always important to remember that business people lie about unprovable stats all.the.time.
Nathan, that interview is with a firm called "Zedo", while this post is about "Zebo".
http://www.alexaholic.com/zebo.com+zedo.com
Perhaps Zedo has served 4m people through their banner ads :)
No disrespect intended, but what more facts do you need? Simple searches show that the site does not have anywhere close to four million users. Alexa charts, and the broader websearch chart (http://ranking.websearch.com/TrankTrend.aspx?ur...) also show that the site is not popular -- if anything it's popularity is declining.
Mr de Souza is an web advertising specialist. If he made a mistake with his numbers he is incompetent. If he insists on the four million number then he is lying. He can't have it both ways.
As a Web 2.0 consultant and leading blogger in this space it puzzles me why you were not able to determine whether Zebo's numbers were reasonable or not on your own. Thank god for reader comments ;)
Nathan is correct - Zebo is owned by Zedo. Confusing, huh? (Update: wrote this before your other comment appeared.)
BTW: the reason I'm rarely skeptical about these sites is because I get snowed under with hate mail if I say the slightest negative thing. Injecting skepticism is about as far as you can go, unless you enjoy the death threats, comment spamming etc.
Mark,
The title of this post if "how the heck did Zebo get 4 million users". Disbelief is kinda implied. But I also know from Mashable's stats that Alexa isn't to be trusted - I look at the graph and compare it to my internal stats, yet see zero correlation.
The zedo = zebo revelation is the important fact. This makes it very reasonable that zebo has 4M unique email addresses - I'm sure I saw a few zeDo popups every day in the popup days. they probably wanted to diversify and hop on the SN train... Notice their huge spike @launch.... my bet is that was just excess inventory, then they steadily just sent it less traffic?
Alexa statistics may be of variable quality, but they will certainly tell the difference between a site with four million users and one with no users.
The site owner said that "four million people have joined the site since January". That is very different from them having four million email addresses. Even if ZeDO had four million email addresses it does not mean that ZeBO has four million users. To add them into PR for an unrelated site is misleading at best.
Peter:
That's got to be one of the most spineless comments I have ever read. Are you afraid that the Web 2.0 mafia will force you to put rounded corners on your site? As a consultant I suppose it pays to be nice to everybody, but it's not really journalism, is it?
secondly no one in their right minds wud want to list their things.
whats the point of listing?
User1: hey i have got an ipod(or whatever)
User2: hey i have one too.
is that how people really make friends??
come on, the site's owners are bluffing..just ignore them.
wbzzz [x] [x] [x] [x]