Netvibes' Ginger upgrade will give "serious" numbers on active users

As the public Ginger release of personalized homepage Netvibes is going smoothly (thanks guys ;) ), the upgrade by invitation only will give a "serious" number of active users of the service.

In the previuos versions you could register with a fake email as no check was made.

Now, not only you need a previuos inscription to Netvibes but a dobble check by email is needed to open your public page (Universe).

This procedure will reduce the number of users but will define the active ones.

WHO IS THE AVERAGE NETVIBES USER ?

The Average Netvibes user can be described today (before full upgrading to the Netvibes Ginger release with its new social approach) and accordingly to the poor public data available (my own poll) as:

• Mainly Male (87%)
• Aged 25-35 (47%)
• Working or studying in the Internet and/or Technology field (65%)
• Logining to Netvibes more than once daily (92%)
• Using Netvibes at Home (95%) and at Work (87%)
• Looking to be part of a “Wide Netvibes Community” (59%)
• Have more than 6 Tabs in their page (68%)
• Using widgets for :

1. Checking Emails (81%)
2. Reading Feeds (76%)
3. Checking Weather (66%)
4. Writing WebNote (58%)
5. Checking their Facebook account (53%)
6. For other uses (52%)

That result is consistent with my experience visiting other users' Public Universes already available: a vast majority of Males users, a lot of WEB 2.0/ TECH tabs, a lot of feeds and blogs of the Universes owners.

At the moment, in what is still a beta testing, quite a large group of users seems coming from France but that is not surprising as Netvibes is based in Paris.

But consider that for the month of January 2008, according to Compete.com, Netvibes had 600.000 unique visitors just for the US market with a total of 4,2 mln visits from unique visitors while competitors Protopage and Pageflakes are at a much lower level.

(To have a global view, Compete.com for the same period gives the following numbers for Myspace.com (67mln visitors with 1,021mln visits) and Facebook.com (31mln visitors with 352 milions visits)).

If Netvibes Team has better and more reliable data, we would be pleased to publish them ;)

New estimates for Netvibes unique internet users.

Hi,

new estimates from COMPETE.COM give 207.638 unique "US internet users visiting the site" for August 2007.

As you can see from their graph the growth is important since December 2006.

The Compete.com definition for "people visiting the site" is:

"People Counts are also known as unique visitors - they only count a person once no matter how many times they visit a site in a given month. People Counts are typically used to determine how popular a site is.
Recommendation: To best understand the popularity of a site, you should consider additional metrics beyond People Counts.
For instance, Site X could drive up its People Count by buying a lot of advertising across the Internet. However, many of these people may leave the site immediately. Use Engagement metrics to understand how much time people spend on a site and how many pages they look at on average during each visit to more fully understand the site's popularity."

French site LA VIGIE also estimated in April 2007 the NETVIBES UNIQUE VISITORS just for France at 150.00 (measures by Nielsen Netratings)

In August 2007, Compete.com counted 2.350.817 visits made to the site (a person can be counted as one person in the month (see previous count) but can make multiple visits).

A rapid calculation 2.350.000 visits/208.000 users gives an Average of 11 visits by person or 1 every 3 days for Netvibes.