07/02/2007

Netvibes has 7 Milion users says Chappaz (co-CEO)

Hi,

In a statement made by Pierre Chappaz, co CEO at Netvibes, during the Web2 summit in San Fransisco - Netvibes say they are going to integrate the use of Google gadgets, of which there are 1,531 (although it can be discussed as to whether or not some of these qualify as widgets & not just RSS feeds) but also that Netvibes has over 7 million users, up 2 million since september. Half of those using Netvibes are in the USA.
Numbers are confirmed in the French Blog of Pierre Chappaz.

In a new post in his Blog, Chappaz talks of "nearly 10 millions users" and refers as a source to... Alexa. As I already posted, Alexa data seem ridiculously inaccurate ...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

if you clear your cookies and go to netvibes and then look at your cookies you can see how many 'users' netvibes has. last time i check this morning my user ID was: 7736007. If you clear cookies and try again it will increment by 1 or 2 or 3 - depending on how long you wait.

a.) netvibes clearly uses an integer for its user IDs

b.) netvibes creates an account automatically when a new visitor (i.e. someone without a previous cookie) visits.

so indeed they have at current time 7.7mil 'users'... but the number of these that are actually registered i would imagine is far less. for example, even if you already have an account at home and then visit netvibes from your work pc, netvibes will create a temp account for you (a 'user') which is basically lost in the void (but not deleted and still in that 7.7mil figure) once you sign in with your existing ID.

i'd put their actual figures at a far far lower number - at a guess somewhere between 1 and 2 million total registered, and then actual proper users (people who come back again and again), perhaps 10% of this - its anyone's guess.

You can draw your own conclusions, but I think that Chappaz is risking damaging his credibility by stating such high numbers if this proves to be the case.

JAC said...

Hi,

Thanks for you insight.

I will check myself.
DO you have numbers for other Homepages?

Netviber001

Anonymous said...

I believe all of the other pages either encrypt user IDs or just use a GUID which is a unique, non-incremental hex number - so therefore its not possible to find out in the same way. I wouldn't be suprised if netvibes realise this and switch to this method soon.

Its really easy to check any of these things if you download Firebug (www.getfirebug.com)

JAC said...

Thanks!

I checked myself:

the userID goes up and down 7.000.000
(ex: 7.041.021 or 7.927.351)

and but my active userID is always : 3.700.000 something

is this the same for you?
bye

Anonymous said...

you need to make sure you clear your cookies - use 'tools -> clear private data' and make sure cookies is checked. Then close your browser and re-open to make sure sessions are cleared. Then you'll see that the user ID always goes up.

Indeed like you say, 7.927.351 and 7.041.021 are examples of two of the user IDs which is lost in the void since your actual user ID is around 3700000.