Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Melissa Naughton — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:35:48 -0000

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.

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

mikey — Fri, 25 May 2007 10:51:19 -0000

ur a fukin dick ill kill u !! u morther fucker

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

sara avery — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:19:39 -0000

how want to be my friend

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

sara avery — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:17:05 -0000

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

sara avery — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:15:42 -0000

whwats up whats up

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

sara avery — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:14:49 -0000

whats up this ya girl sara

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

mlain — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 07:32:30 -0000

good frinds with all human ok that is ok

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

sherwin — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:37:26 -0000

wanna b my friend?

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

sherwin — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:36:41 -0000

wanna be my friend?

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

*...Sarah Jane..=D.. — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:56:28 -0000

heyyy...im in skull soooo bordd....hehe..=D...x o x o x o x

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

*...Sarah Jane..=D.. — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:56:24 -0000

heyyy...im in skull soooo bordd....hehe..=D...x o x o x o x

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Sarah Jane — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:54:53 -0000

*..heyyy....jus wanderin lyk how du make ur sell a zebo hme pg...*

wbzzz [x] [x] [x] [x]

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Khadijah Russell — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 08:37:59 -0000

yall need to start letting us get on zebo!

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Kevman — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:56:26 -0000

This site is hideous

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Peter — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 09:41:41 -0000

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.

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

captain obvious — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:26:58 -0000

there is no possible way this site has 4 million users- it sucks way to hard.

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Mark Devlin — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 02:02:16 -0000

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 Iâ€™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?

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

steve_ray — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 23:21:44 -0000

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?

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Pete Cashmore — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:12:00 -0000

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.

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Mark Devlin — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:11:42 -0000

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.co... 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 ;)

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Terrence — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:09:35 -0000

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:

http://www.alexaholic.com/z...

Perhaps Zedo has served 4m people through their banner ads :)

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Terrence — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:08:08 -0000

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".

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Nathan Kaiser — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:58:50 -0000

I interviewed Roy a while ago. It provides some interesting insights into the company.

http://www.npost.com/interv...

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Pete Cashmore — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:15:28 -0000

Mark,

No, what I'm saying is that I won't call someone a liar until the facts are in.

Re: How the Heck Did Zebo Get 4 Million Users?

Mark Devlin — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:09:43 -0000

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, Zeboâ€™s founder and chief executive."

Mr Souza is lying. I doubt they even have four million page views.