Lackluster Growth of Yahoo's My Web

As I started down the path of exploring a new business this year, the idea of saving and sharing web pages intrigued me.  As I got more into it, del.icio.us was already creating quite a buzz, and messing with a visionary like Joshua Schachter didn't sound like much fun.  When Yahoo! announced its own version of saving and sharing pages around April, I re-evaluated my ability to compete with talent and distribution (Y! has both).  Perhaps Joshua and his then recently announced investors were nervous about Yahoo's distribution power too, but now it doesn't look like they needed to be.  For the last 12 weeks, I've tracked Yahoo's reported saved pages number posted on My Web's main page every Tuesday (I guess in honour of these smart guys).   Growth of My Web doesn't exactly look as viral as folks might expect.  Newly saved pages have averaged between 10,000 to 20,000 per week, with literally no growth in the number of saved pages week over week for 3 months!  In other words, only one page is saved every day for every 200,000 of Yahoo's users, and that's the same number being saved as when I first started keeping track.  Either the user base is not growing or, if it does increase, there seems to be a negative impact on the collective use of the service.  Oops!  I know we're impatient in the Valley, but as a Canadian I can still wonder if this is the bottom of a hockey stick or the start of a turtle's trip to nowhere.  (By the way, del.icio.us is the 11th most popular page saved on Yahoo's My Web, just behind this post outlining a complete and constantly updated tool collection for del.icio.us users).

Comments

[Aviator67]

After two years, del.icio.us's database statistics look suspicious: http://www.bookmarksync.com/press/041207_1