I’m up to my eyeballs in technology reviews and evaluations as I wrap up the Social Technology in HR and Recruiting Report. (It will publish on the 15th of October). Interviews with 70 companies, 40 industry leaders and a heap of research are turning it into a real gem.
Last week, I told you about the fact that BeKnown‘s basic facebook traffic had caught up with Branchout. (Those links point to the best source of measurement data) I was surprised to discover that BeKnown was very effectively leveraging the Monster brand and traffic to surge to a level that Branchout has been building for a year. It’s a pretty amazing feat.
Today (Monday, September the 19th), the numbers look like this.
| Branchout | Beknown | |
|---|---|---|
| DAU |
50,479
|
65,792
|
| MAU |
1,216,055
|
1,661,824
|
| Ratio |
4.1%
|
4.0%
|
- DAU = Daily Average Users
- MAU = Monthly Average Users
- Ratio = DAU/MAU
A TechCrunch article talks about understanding these figures:
“Real retention numbers for other people’s products are notoriously hard to come by, but in Facebook there is good 30 day retention data called the DAU/MAU Ratio – which can also be called Stickiness. This is the ratio of Daily Active Users to Monthly Active Users. For example, a DAU/MAU ratio of 50% would mean that the average user of your app is using it 15 out of 30 days that month. It turns out this simple metric is enough to predict, with a high level of probability, the success of a product..”
In other words, the average user of both BeKnown and Branchout is there one day a month. It might even be reasonable to suggest that visitors go to both sites and find little to return for. (By comparison, the Cityville ratio is 19.9% or about 6 days a month.) There is no history from which to judge the effectiveness of a career oriented professional network. It is worth noting that LinkedIn claims that their users average about 3 days a week month of usage on LinkedIn (which would be a 35% 9% ratio if LinkedIn measured that way)
I seem to have stepped on some sort of hornet’s nest.
After last week’s piece on the subject, I got a breathy piece of email titled “error on your article today” from one of the other analysts. He went on about the fact that these numbers (MAU) were not the most important part of the story. According to the analyst, Branchout is something like “1,000 times the size of BeKnown”.
That afternoon, I had conversations with him, the team at BeKnown and the CEO of Branchout.
While the folks at BeKnown were extremely matter of fact about the news, the analyst and the Branchout team wanted to be sure I had the whole story. They claimed that that after 14 months with an average of 2,000,000 MAUs, they’d managed to accumulate “tens of millions of registered users” while BeKnown had only “350,000”. I was never able to pin down the claim that Branchout was 1000x larger than BeKnown. Tens of millions of registered users seems like a bit of hyperbole.
It was a weird set of conversations.
At this point, both Branchout and BeKnown are very interesting ideas with a lot of miles to go before they are useful. As I understand it, the point of the various stories I received was to illuminate the difference between registered users and visitors to the site. The best explanation I can offer is that users means traffic to the app while registered users is roughly equivalent to the number of resumes in the resume database (or, if the resumes are on LinkedIn, the number of profiles).
In the early days of the job board business, lots of money was made by people who substituted braggadocio for substance. That’s often how emerging markets work. In those days, it was Monster and HotJobs battling to make their assertions seem true. It was a little like visiting the past.
