eBay vs Amazon vs Argos Comscore Statistics

• eBay.co.uk has 22,224,000 Total Unique Visitors per month. All that maintaining a steady yearly growth of 1.3%.
• Amazon.co.uk has 18,640,000 Total Unique Visitors  per month. It’s worth mentioning here that at its current yearly growth rate of 11.7%, Amazon should be able to get as much audience as Ebay in almost 2 years. It is very interesting to see huge gap in page views between eBay and Amazon. The latter’s 605 (MM) Total Pages Viewed is actually only 16% of Ebay’s impressive 3,847 (MM) Total Pages Viewed.
• Argos.co.uk is currently at 7,818,000 Total Unique Visitors per month. It seems that for Argos hasn’t managed to retain it’s customers after December 2010. Traffic on Argos.co.uk fell considerably in January 2010.

It seems that Argos is slowly recovering , but it took over 7 months to get close to traffic volumes from June 2010. Could that be due to “no refunds” policy on many items they have? Also, after digging online you can see that there’s more and more complaints on poor customer service and overall declining quality of both service and products.

I found this review by James Venables to be spot on:

Prices are now at the best so so,the staff seem to think of customers as a burden to be shrugged off at the earliest opportunity and returns are made to be very difficult even though they often replace the item you have ordered with a ‘similar’ item the brand name of which you have never heard. Come on Argos,you still have a massive following,dont do what Marks & Spencer did some years ago, it takes a long time to get your name back once the usually meek customer turns and walks away.

Considering substantial number of online reviews that point out the same key factors: prices, customer service and returns policy, Argos at least shouldn’t have problems identifying reasons for their drop in traffic. It might be good time for some strategic changes as this Christmas could be a crucial season for Argos. Meanwhile eBay and Amazon will concentrate on their strategy of growth and trying to figure out how to devour our e-wallets.

A quick note on demographics: Argos, in contrary to eBay and Amazon, has more female than male users.

If you would like me to present statistics for specific websites or more general information, let me know and I’ll be more than happy to help.

*Comscore July 2011

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Started by Kevin Rose in 2004, Digg has been the most popular social bookmarking for years. It all changed in August 2010 when the new controversial layout was released. The company will probably be presented in the future as textbook example of “Why every business should listen to it’s customers (users)?”. Followed by controversy over “sponsored articles” on Digg, it seems it’s, unfortunately, a matter of time till Digg fades. Although, I have a lot against TechCrunch recently, I agree with Sarah Lacy’s article titled “RIP Digg“. It’s time for competition to take over their traffic and they haven’t been wasting their time steadily growing in audience. Let’s take a look at statistics.

Stumbleupon vs Digg vs Reddit – Comscore Statistics

*Comscore – July 2011.

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This week it’s Moneysupermarket vs Confused.com, and Comparethemarket.com. I chose those as they have been advertising heavily on TV in the last 2 months. With easy access, constantly increasing Internet penetration and decreasing prices from Internet providers more people can really save some money by taking advantage of online price comparison tools. Let’s take a look at three aforementioned providers on European market.

Comscore Statistics for Moneysupermarket vs Confused.com vs Comparethemarket.com

At first glance it’s obvious that Moneysupermarket is dominating European price comparison market (mainly UK and Republic of Ireland).

• Moneysupermarket.com has impressive 3,083,000 Total Unique Visitors* with slightly dropping YOY% change (-1.4%) which is mainly due to growing competition inspired by their revenues. To give you an idea how much revenue and profit they’re generating, see their financial report available here.

• Comparethemarket.com has over two times less Total Unique Visitors – 1,287,000* per month. Yet, their yearly growth (+37.5%) shows they are not only saturating the demand in this channel, but also might be one of the reasons Moneysupermarket.com has practically not grown in the last year. If you look closer on the graph, even though they’ve grown in the last month, they’re trying to regain market share they started loosing in August 2010.

• Confused.com is third in this comparison. I will take a closer look at them again soon as I’m genuinely interested myself how their website will perform in the long run.  Currently, according to Comscore, they have 1,132,000 Total Unique Visitors* with very high yearly growth (21%). Below stats from Compete.com aren’t that reliable as they provide better statistics to U.S.-centered apps and websites. Despite being focused on European markets they are still getting some traffic in the States.

  Have you been using any of price comparison websites recently? A couple of days ago I’ve used it myself for my future father-in-law as he was convinced he was getting quite good deal for his current car insurance provider. Turns out, we not only found a better company for his insurance (well known, established brand and very good customer service) but also saved over 100 Euro. Let me know if you’re interested in any specific dataor want to see more players on financial market. Please share this post if you found it useful.

*Comscore July 2011

Technorati Verification Code:  NKG2K28DZRVH

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After watching some Instagram movies on YouTube, I decided to get an app like that on Android platform. After going through countless apps that promise same effect and are labeled “Instagram for Android” (they’re not even close), I’ve finally found Snaptastic. what looks like a really solid application. Finally, someone took their time and put some thought in development rather than mindlessly rushed in to create a clone and cash in quickly.  Let’s see what free version has to offer.

Snaptastic features (free version):

• Easy to apply presets with sample images as previews to give you better idea what to expect from specific filter.
• Custom photo adjustments using simple sliders with fast response times. This includes:
• Brightness,
• Contrast,
• Temperature,
• Tint,
• Fill light,
• Clarity,
• Saturation,
• Vignetting,
• Exposure,
• White level,
• Black level,
• Photo modifications that include the following:
• Rotate
• Crop
• Border selection (6 different borders)
• Possibility to set up and save custom presets for future use.
• High quality images up to 1280px (unless you have a dual core smartphone, I’d suggest going for smaller sizes which are more than enough for sharing on your social networks)

What I also like is the possibility to revert all changes made back to original, so that whenever you feel like you want to, you can start your editing from scratch.

Another thing worth noting is possibility to save each picture as many times as you like. After every change you make, just click on save and Snaptastic asks you if you want to overwrite the existing file or save new version. No choosing new file name, no additional prompts. Every step has been reduced to minimum in order to make application not only easier to use, but also faster and generally more user friendly.

Also, it might be worth mentioning that Snaptastic uses your phone’s built-in camera software which results in application’s smaller size, faster loading times and better performance.

What you will NOT be able to do with Snaptastic:

• add balloons,
• add kisses,
• add smileys,
• add glitter,
• add “funny” stickers,
• paste your face into Mona Lisa…

You get my point…

User Interface

The UI is very clean and intuitive. I didn’t find any of the application features hard to find. Options page lets you set up Snaptastic to automatically adjust levels, crop images to 1:1 aspect ratio, or simply set application to auto quit once you’ve shared your picture. You can also adjust image size and quality.

Force close! Oh noes!

As for reliability, I have had, so far, 2 crashes in 2 weeks, but that was clearly because I’ve set too big image size for my Nexus S to handle. This isn’t something surprising as developers are warning that this might happen (both in app description and in options when selecting image size). Nevertheless, I haven’t lost any of the original pictures taken after the app crashed so there’s not much to complain about as editing is fast and easy.

Overall

This is the best “Instagram for Android” app I’ve tried so far. I have tested PicSay (not exactly what I was looking for), Lightbox (sluggish and not very intuitive), Vignette (incredibly slow and not user friendly), and many more (possibly most of those available on Android Market). None of them were as fast and intuitive as Snaptastic. It’s not flawless, because it crashes due to excessive output file sizes selected in options menu (just test it and select file size that your phone can handle). This could be overcome by setting restrictions defined by phone model the app is running on, and I hope developers will find a solution to this.

If you’re looking for an app to apply simple, yet very effective effects in a quick manner and share them on your social networks then Snaptastic is the app to go.

If you, like me, were waiting for Instagram for Android, then grab free version from Android Market and let me know what you think about it.

UPDATE: Instagram team have officially announced they’re working on Android version of their platform. As much as I do not appreciate the idea of having to log in in order to add simple effects on photos, it’s still quite exciting news. More info on Androidcommunity.com

UPDATE 2: Instagram just released their official app for Android. Download it from here. The initial release was quite buggy but they’ve already released an update so hopefully more is fixed. Also, was hoping for a wider choice of photo effects, yet the app is stable and does what it’s supposed to.

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Statistics

Recent news on Pandora’s IPO were quite shocking to me. I found the valuation too high, especially for a company that’s not making any profit, and actually operating at loss. Still, it proves that potential is valued more than actual performance of the company. We can only debate what would happen to Pandora if not the IPO.

Anyway, I’m not here to discuss the economy and reasoning behind this IPO, but what is its the actual audience.

• Pandora currently has  16,763,000 Monthly Unique Visitors* and that is a 33,6% yearly change.
• At the same time, Last.fm has   12,202,000 Monthly Unique Visitors* and that is a -24,6% yearly change.
• Last of the three is, Grooveshark with  10,603 Monthly Unique Visitors* and -5,78% yearly change (according to Compete.com, as Comscore data is available only from September 2010). It will be interesting to see how numbers for Grooveshark will change after their recent integration into Boxee.net as music platform. You can read more details on TechCrunch.

I am still not 100% sure how reliable is the data from Compete.com, yet it shows that Grooveshark is the only service with positive monthly change in audience (+10.62%), in comparison to Pandora and Last.fm that have -3.98% and -4.76% monthly growth.

It’s interesting to see that Pandora, as opposed to other two players, has predominantly female audience.

I am expecting a continuous decrease in bodh user growth and audience for Last.fm as there’s recently haven’t been much new going on there, especially when it comes to strategical partnerships that would help business expand to e.g. on demand TV.

Aditionally, here’s extra data from Compete.com. Click here or on the graph below to get more detailed information.

In this battle, Pandora VS Last.fm VS Grooveshark, over all those dear music listeners that are willing (or not) to pay for music, which one do you think has the potential to win hearts of users and build a sustainable business model? Are you using any of the music streaming services mentioned here? What do you like most about them? Let me know in comments!

*(Comscore, June 2011)

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The reason for this is simple for me. When Google introduced Chrome, I was amazed by how fast it can be. Both the application itself and speed it was rendering websites with. I thought, with the new competitor in town, Mozilla will fix Firefox memory allocation issues and improve  browser speed. I kept using Firefox mostly for its addons and, I guess, trust that built up year after year of using it. It’s 2011 and what do I hear about Firefox 5.0 after it’s been released? Memory leaks. Here’s one comment from memory leak topic on Mozilla’s official forum that sums it up:

They did nothing to fix the memory leak. Just finished shutting it down after it consuming 1.475 GB of RAM even with only 3 pages open – three pages that only took up 120-140 MB under 3.6.18. There is no excuse for FF4 and FF5 to be using this much memory. None.

This just tells me that Firefox became what it was once fighting with. A browser that fails to listen to its users and improve. Most serious issues have not been fixed for years now. Even if memory leaks haven’t been happening to more than 5% of users, it’s still an issue that should have been addressed as most critical bug to be fixed. Why? Because it’s the most avid Internet users that keep 15 tabs open at the same time looking for information. And these users were Firefox evangelists. They were telling others to switch from IE for, back then, obvious reasons. I remember numerous occasions when I was telling people that just got their first home PC why they should use FF after I installed it on their machines. That were the times of good old Firefox 2.0.

Now I’m fed up. I’m tired of waiting for a company with such great history and resources to get things done.

Here’s why I abandoned Firefox today:

• Years of reported memory leaks bug that hasn’t been fixed. New Firefox versions keep having same problem.
• Firefox prides itself on its large community of extensions, but blames extensions for all its memory problems.
• Restart browser after each addon is installed. Funny, because everyone’s always been complaining about the need to restart Windows after updating system/browser.
• Application itself (without any addons – clear install) has longer loading times than Chrome and Opera.
• Slow page rendering in comparison to competition. Heck! even Internet Explrorer 9.0 loads faster and seems to have found a great way to get rid of all that clutter in UI.
• The browser itself, without any addons, offers no new competitive solutions or technological advancements. Yes, they do have Firefox Sync but the first time I set it up, it had problems merging bookmarks between 2 devices.. Resembles more of a third-party plugin integrated into FF rather than an integral part of the browser.
• Advertising browser with thousands of addons is like selling iPhone advertising apps only. Basically, you’re saying that your product is worthless without third-party input.

I will not wait another months for Firefox 6.0 that will supposedly be better, and have new “revolutionary” UI that will increase browsing space by extra 3 pixels. My secondary browser is now Opera that, unlike Firefox, has really improved a lot in the last year and is working great for me so far.

What’s your browser of choice? Which one do you think will become the most popular among casual interent users?

Please share this post if you enjoyed it.

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Rapidshare, founded in 2006 was one of the first services offering the so-called one-click file hosting/sharing. Users world-wide finally had possibility to share any files, large or small, in a user-friendly way. Being the most popular service for years, Rapidshare hasn’t changed anything only until recently. Forced by fast growing competition like Megaupload, Fileserve and Hotfile, they improved user experience and looks like they actually hired a graphic designer. Looking at aforementioned competition, they realized that file sharing doesn’t need the spartan look and feel of Google.com at that time.

Still, in May 2010 they were the most popular file sharing service world-wide with over 70 million Total Unique Visitors (Comscore). Seems a lot already, yet with ISPs providing faster access to the internet and global increase in the amount of petabytes being transferred online, there was still a lot of space for other players in this market. Between June and July 2010 Megaupload, founded in 2007, for the first time got more Unique Visitors than Rapidshare. Actually, from that month, Rapidshare has been constantly loosing its visitors. Over one years’ time they went down to  46,476,000 Total Unique Visitors and that is a 34.4% drop over one year.

At the same time (June 2010), Fileserve emerged and has been growing since then. In May 2011 it had 44,148 Total Unique Visitors (Comscore) and with its current growth, should become more popular than Rapidshare before September (see graph below).

I am looking forward to see how Hotfile.com, after growing steadily for over 2 years, will cope with recent drop in UV. Although, their YOY% change is +13.3% the number of Total Unique Visitors is dropping since January this year and currently is the lowest of all four players (40,633,000 Total Unique Visitors).

Last, but not least, it’s Megauplaod.com with over 80,298,000 Total UV and +20,2% YOY% change and currently growing audience. Looks like they have recovered from the drop they experienced in February this year and have chosen the right strategy to maintain their business. We will see over time, if having to chase Rapidshare for 3 years and finally becoming the most popular file sharing service world-wide, has given them enough experience to withstand enormous growth from Fileserve.

Important to note is that all four services have very similar user base when it comes to location and age distribution. Hotfile dominates in Middle East and Africa, Fileserve in Asia and Pacific Region, Rapidshare in Europe, while Megaupload dominates in both Americas. All of them have same target audience, males aged between 15 and 24.

Below, you can find some additional information from Compete.com on number of visits per month for Megaupload, Rapidshare and Fileserve. If you wish to see more detailed information, including total referring sites, click here.

If you have any thoughts where one-click file sharing services are heading to and how it might evolve, let me know in comments below.

If there’s any specific information you’re looking for let me know and I’ll try to get them for you. Share if you enjoyed this post.

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Both provide, basically the same service, file synchronization between as many devices as you like/need. There are certain differences that distinguish those two. At first sight, you can see that Box.net is showing at their website is their corporate clients. And that seems to be their aim – companies rather than individuals. Both players operate on freemium business model, giving free service and possibility to expand it to paid plans.

Read more to see the summary of freemium plans and Comscore 13-month stats for both services.

Dropbox:

• 2GB free space
• unlimited file size
• possibility to get more free space by referring Dropbox to other people
• public file sharing

Box.net:

• 5GB free space
• files up to 25MB
• public file sharing

5GB from Box.net is really nice as for a free plan, but even sharing an archive file with e.g. your photos from holidays seems to be a problem already. It’s very unlikely anyone (apart from companies) has more than 2GB of documents, presentations and spreadsheets. When it comes to individual users, Dropbox has a clear advantage here. Yet, for corporate solutions, thanks to numerous features including, Google Apps integration, Salesforce integration and analytics, Box.net is a more appealing solution. It’s definitely worth trying out which service works for you best depending on your expectations.

Comscore Stats Dropbox VS Box.net

Now, let’s have a look at how popular those both services are using Comscore data.

Last year, May 2010, both services were in the same place with approximately 2 million unique visitors per  month. In June 2010, though, Dropbox started growing rapidly meeting the growing popularity of file synchronization and storing files in the cloud.

May 2011, Dropbox is at 5,364,000 Unique Visitors while Box.net is at 2,728,000 UV.  Dropbox is at 133.2% YOY change and Box.net only 15.3%, yet it will be interesting to see how Dropbox numbers will change this month after their recent security issues. Again, this reflects the difference in business focus both companies – Dropbox: small studios, individuals and home users against Box.net large businesses and international corporations.

For both services, dominant group of users are males, but the age varies a lot: Dropbox 45-54, while Box.net 15-24. Who is filling that huge gap for active internet users aged 24-45? Is that Sugar Synch, or any other of their competitors?

Dropbox is more popular in Europe, and has slightly more visitors (27.1% against 25.1%) in North America. Again, this might change after recent security issues. On the other hand, Box.net is more popular in Asia and Middle East and Africa.

The amount of competitors that emerged in the last year or two (e.g. Spider Oak, Wuala, Microsoft SkyDrive, and SugarSynch,) shows that there’s still a lot of potential customers out there that those companies will want to provide their service to. Personally I am a bit surprised that Microsoft is not promoting their SkyDrive as it has huge potential with closer integration into Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Are you using Dropbox and/or Box.net, or any other file synchronizing software? You feel like one is much better than the other? Feel free to share your opinion in comments below. If you want to see comparison data for any other service of this kind, let me know.

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Tumblr with a huge rise in the last year 198.5% growth in Unique Users compared to Posterous 43,9% in the last 13 months translates to almost 32 million Unique Visitors per month for Tumblr and a little over 3.5 million for Posterous (worldwide trend).

There is one interesting fact that should be pointed out here. Tumblr aims at much younger, perhaps socially aware audience. Main audience for Posterous are males 55 and above who perhaps look for more mature perhaps more professional audience. Tumblr with its huge young audience might not be the right place for them. The latter seems to be reaching most users that are female aged 15-24.

This is the main statistic that differentiates these two services. Although, Posterous is implementing new themes and enabling some social sharing, these are not the features they are and perhaps shouldn’t be focusing on. As long as they are growing in number of users and delivering high quality service with very good up time (which was a problem for Tumblr twice already) they shouldn’t be endangered by Tumblr’s impressive growth. Perhaps, they shouldn’t be perceived as competitors with their different audiences.

What are your thoughts on Tumblr and Posterous? Are you using any of them and what do you like about them? Feel free to comment.

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