Show Me Your Numbers
Here is a quick question I have for everyone out there that I can’t seem to find a clear cut answer for myself. For all of these sites looking to get users to register for their services how come more of them don’t publicly show you how many users they have on their system? Why must that always be a big secret so that when someone is talking about the service they can only guess at the amount of users they have?
Is it only safe to do after you have 50 million users? I know companies don’t want to be open about everything, but I never saw what was wrong with this. Even if there are just 100 people using the service it would be nice to know that I am not signing up for something where nobody is around. Even if you can’t give active users at least show registered users.
Maybe it is because you can never really give an accurate figure to the amount of people that signup for multiple or spammers looking just to be seen. In any case maybe someone out there has a better explanation than I do.
Related reading:
I wonder what that number actually means. How many users do there have to be before you sign up?
We (49sparks.com) have a user skills tag cloud where you can click through and see what’s going on… isn’t that more informative than a number?
By Chris Ritke on January 17, 2007 2:13 pm
From my experience, it helps a brand new site tremendously to *not* show how many registered users you have. It’s human nature for many to want to sign up and do what others are signing up for and doing. I have seen (admittedly) un-scientific evidence of this on many sites I’ve developed. Show a new user that only 5 people have signed up for your site and it appears stale and unworthy of their time: “Why only 5 users?”
By Mike on January 17, 2007 2:17 pm
Interesting. I wouldn’t mind seeing this either. Maybe I can get the Viddler team to open up.
By Colin D. Devroe on January 17, 2007 2:19 pm
I couldn’t agree with you more. That and a graph would keep me coming back to a service I like just to see how they’re doing.
By baron on January 17, 2007 2:33 pm
Here’s my theory on showing register information:
When you’re small, your numbers aren’t big enough that you’d want to draw attention to them so you don’t show them.
When you’re big, you’re big enough that you don’t need to show your numbers to prove that you’re “big”. People likely already know.
It’s purely marketing. You nail it with “if there are just 100 people using the service”… If there are just 100 people using it, odds are most people will be deterred from that fact (as opposed to your opinion, which I wish everyone had). Its exactly why people show up to the party “fashionably late.”
We’ve only done a couple limited tests on it, but we seem to attract more people when we don’t tell than when we do tell.
By Eric Caron on January 17, 2007 2:37 pm
Let’s say I have a service and you can see that there are 10,000 users. Why would you care about that number? The number that matters is the number of active users.
Let’s say out of the 10K only 1K are active? Paints a completely different picture, doesn’t it?
By Tyme on January 17, 2007 3:11 pm
Okay let’s step back and look at it like this.
You go to YouTube, but aren’t sure how deep the site is. All you see are the videos on the homepage. Showing me how many videos they have allows me to see how deep the site is and if its worth exploring further. Nothing more frustrating than hitting a content and searching when there is no point.
Same applies with your blog. Traffic numbers don’t matter to me as much as how much content is on the site. Is there a reason for me to search?
With social sites the same concept applies to me. If I’m friends with 100 people are those the only 100 people on the site or should I go around searching for more?
With 9rules it is important to know how many Members we have in the Network because you should know what you are missing.
When talking about active users that’s a different story and depends on what metrics you choose to use.
By Scrivs on January 17, 2007 3:15 pm
even though i only have 50+ RSS subscribers on my blog, im confident to say that some startup companies have less registered users than my blog subscribers.
some of them rely on techcrunch, digg, etc to get more users but after their 15 minutes of fame they go back from where they started, some of them are more likely to succeed though.
By Ralph Dagza on January 17, 2007 3:39 pm
I think they don’t have a “Currently registered” count because it is a little “Web 1.0″ everyone can remember how forums boast about their statistics “bla users, bla users active, bla users ever recorded at on point in time”. Maybe its just me that used to hate all of the “current statistics”.
By Eddie Sowden on January 17, 2007 3:43 pm
Here’s a perfect example of someone actually doing this. I just got done reading an interview at the Ricky Gervais site [http://www.rickygervais.com/stopsmiling.php] and at the bottom is this line of text:
“There are 159235 members signed up to Ricky Gervais.Com - 4 are signed in now and there are 62 people just visiting”
That’s a pretty small percentage of active users and there’s absolutely no positive reason I can think of to have this on the site. They should probably stop after “159235 members” and call it a day.
By Link on January 17, 2007 4:04 pm
It is a very common thing, not exclusive to the web.
Most companies will not reveal their revenue or turnover. They say that they it is to prevent the competitors to get an edge - a valid point. But most often it is because they do not think they are ahead of the game (most often they do not know where the game is, because their competitors do not reveal their information).
You do not reveal information about your company of fear that it will make you seem less important. So they wait until they know they in a better position than their competitors (your example of 50+ million subscribers).
By Thomas Baekdal on January 17, 2007 4:05 pm
Ricky Gervais is a good example of when not to do it. I’m not too versed on the site so I’m not sure what you get by logging in, but it doesn’t look to be a social site. I could be wrong.
With regards to revenues and all of that, I don’t see that being the same as how many people are using your service.
Now I don’t think every service has a need to point these numbers out, but I do see examples where it would be useful as I mentioned in previous comments.
By Scrivs on January 17, 2007 4:15 pm
> Let’s say I have a service and you can see that there are 10,000 users. Why would you care about that number? The number that matters is the number of active users.
By Nollind Whachell on January 17, 2007 4:16 pm
“Let’s say I have a service and you can see that there are 10,000 users. Why would you care about that number? The number that matters is the number of active users.”
I’ll take that a step further. The number that really matters are those who are contributing meaningfully to the conversation on your site or in your community. I’ve seen forums with many active users but only about ten percent of those people are truly contributing to the conversation, while the rest are just white noise actually making it much more difficult to have a meaningful conversation. In effect, I don’t think people decide to join a community based upon the number of people within it but more upon are they seeing the types of conversation they’d like to be a part of. I don’t think it matters if there is 100 people in the community or 100,000.
By Nollind Whachell on January 17, 2007 4:18 pm
Nollind: In your example yeah that works, but what about the YouTube example? You just don’t use numbers at all? What about social sites that don’t bother with content and the only purpose to build relationships?
No idea why I didn’t think of this before, but dating sites have no problem throwing numbers out because you want to be where the people are.
By Scrivs on January 17, 2007 4:45 pm
Joe Blow user doesn’t visit your site, contemplate your statistics, extrapolate the meaning and depth of your site, and perform a cost-benefit analysis. A web developer might. Joe Blow doesn’t care.
YouTube doesn’t provide statistics to Joe Blow. YouTube provides videos. Statistics are a distraction for Joe Blow.
Hell, statistics are a distraction most of the time for any situation in life.
By Anthony on January 17, 2007 5:57 pm
Dating sites aren’t a good example because they have to show the numbers. People go there to look for other people.
You Tube is a different example as well. People go to You Tube to see the movies they want to see. If they have the movies I doubt the average person cares about how many users they have. You Tube could have millions of users but the minute they stop having the movies people are interested in, the numbers don’t make a difference.
There shouldn’t be a blanket “show the numbers or not” - it “should” be a strategic move on whether or not there will be a benefit from doing so. For most companies (particularly startups) it is not a good idea.
Of course numbers don’t mean anything unless they are backed up. Just because a company says they have X number of users doesn’t make it true.
Usually the only people that care about numbers are those that have a vested interest. Advertisers, competitors, etc. unless it is something like a dating service. The average user could care less, there really isn’t any benefit for the company to show them, so why bother? Those interested will get a general idea via other methods.
By Tyme on January 17, 2007 6:03 pm
I agree:
http://wordpress.com/stats/
By Matt on January 17, 2007 6:14 pm
Scrivs, Tyme pretty much answered it for me. The video content is what is attracting people to YouTube not the conversations around the videos. Again the numbers don’t matter as long as the content is interesting.
As for dating sites, they’re not much different. Some friends of my wife have used them and you’d think the most popular sites with the most people would be the better ones. Untrue. The most popular sites actually have the most stereotypical bios. Therefore you have to wade through a load of BS to find someone who is being genuine about themselves. You’d probably have better luck finding someone through a blog search or tagging. I’m not saying it can’t be done, because some of these friends did have some good relationships, but again numbers don’t mean anything (except more to wade through). You just have to look at the type of bios in the dating network to see if it is going to be beneficial to you or not.
I think the only area where stats matter is if you need a certain number of people to do something. For example, if you plan on playing a MMO game and you see there are only 100 people in the game, you might think twice about subscribing because the world is probably going to be pretty uneventful, especially if PvP is a large aspect of the game.
By Nollind Whachell on January 17, 2007 6:45 pm
So like me you are saying it matters what we are talking about. We just seem to disagree on when that strategy should come into place :)
By Scrivs on January 17, 2007 8:05 pm
The reason they don’t publish numbers, especially as a small start up is the exact reason you stated. If you publish numbers and have a low number and as you yourself said, you no longer are that interested in the service because it is not heavily used.
If companies allowed this sort of behavior they would never get users. And so really you answered your own question.
By Kyle Johnsono on January 17, 2007 9:16 pm
Not sure what you mean (on the second part). As others have noted, you only need a strategy for when to display your stats in relationship to attracting advertisers or maybe if you’re building to sell out / flip. In terms of the end user, you don’t need a strategy for when to display stats to them because it’s usually irrelevant to them (since as noted they come because of the content or conversation, not because of how many users are there).
Hmm, maybe I’m missing the boat completely on what you mean here. For example, are there some 9rules stats that you think would be meaningful to an end user. If so, what are they and how do you think they would be beneficial to them in terms of wanting to be more active in participating or interested in joining the 9rules community? Or was your question irrelevant to 9rules?
By Nollind Whachell on January 17, 2007 10:19 pm
Scrivs,
I wrote about this a few weeks ago in an editorial called “The Registered User Curve” over on Juxtaviews.
http://www.juxtaviews.com/2007/01/04/the-registered-user-curve/
My concern is with sites not displaying their “active” user numbers. It’s debatable of course, but I do think users deserve to know active user numbers versus registered users if you’re expecting users to give you their email, name, address, etc.
By kevin on January 17, 2007 10:42 pm
I’m thinking part marketing ploy in order to create the ‘pull’ of people to sign up. By eliminating any barriers or weaknesses after proposing the benefits of the service or product, they don’t want people to have to think that “oh, you’ve only got 100 users.” or “okie, so there are 100 users.”
By disallowing a hesitant action on the user side, they might be able to convert more customers.
Anyway, I’m running a hunch and a little of Steve Krugg here. :P
By Danny Foo on January 17, 2007 10:46 pm
[...] An interesting discussion is going on over at 9Rule founder Scriv’s blog Wisdump right now. His recent post “Show me the numbers” emulates similar sentiments I discussed in a recent post “The Registered User Curve”. [...]
By Juxtaviews - » Wisdump says “Show me the numbers” on January 17, 2007 10:59 pm
This might be obvious if you read the original post closely, but I think it’s worth clarifying…. I think what’s being discussed is the level of impact or relevance the number could have on NEW users, who is forming an opinion about whether or not to join the service. The number could be a factor because it’s an indicator of how many people find the service to be useful. Or in the case of YouTube or blogs, the number of videos/posts determine the size of the “pool” you can play in, which relates to the chance of you finding the site to be useful. Once you become a user, the same number is not as relevant, because you have your own experience to form that opinion. So when considering this question, it’s probably important to put yourself in a new visitor’s shoes.
It’s the same thing when people wouldn’t want to try a new restaurant if it’s empty!
By Minoru on January 17, 2007 11:05 pm
“I think what’s being discussed is the level of impact or relevance the number could have on NEW users, who is forming an opinion about whether or not to join the service.”
That’s what I thought the primary question was as well. Based upon that, my answer was stats are irrelevant when subscribing as a new user (for the reasons already stated above).
By Nollind Whachell on January 18, 2007 12:09 am
@Nollind - right on, didn’t mean to suggest that you weren’t on point. :-)
I do think the numbers/stats can have an impact, but only if other factors haven’t weighed in on the user’s decision making process. Like you said, quailty of the content/conversation/service have a bigger impact than the quantity. It’s just that people might equate bigger number with bigger chance of finding quality content. (I know that’s not true for you, but I’m saying other people might.)
So I should clarify that there are two types of stats you can expose. One is how many customers you are serving (as in my restaurant example earlier). The other is how many products you are dealing (to carry the restaurant analogy further, how many items on the menu). In either case, a greater number can seem like you, without having any other knowledge about the restaurant, could have a greater chance of enjoying your meal there. But once you eat there and experience the food, the numbers matter less.
In social networking sites, the number of registered users directly relates to the number of products. (Or they’re the same.) That’s why it’s interesting to see the impact of displaying the number or not… I think? Anyway, I’d say if the number doesn’t hurt the business (either by being too small or giving away too much to your competition), then display it.
By Minoru on January 18, 2007 3:20 am
“It’s just that people might equate bigger number with bigger chance of finding quality content. (I know that’s not true for you, but I’m saying other people might.)”
Minoru, true but that can be seen as a negative as well. For example, the more people, the more likely I’ll have to wade through a lot of junk to find the stuff I’m interested in (signal vs noise). It obviously depends upon how the system is setup though (i.e. ratings, tagging, search abilities, etc).
By Nollind Whachell on January 18, 2007 12:39 pm
Online games always report their numbers because they understand the value of having others to play with (and the disappointment of logging in only to find you are all alone). When it comes to websites I guess it depends on the community aspect… I want reporting from community sites like Flickr and Facebook.
By Montoya on January 18, 2007 3:46 pm