As a social network aimed at helping you meet new people – don’t mention the phrase ‘hooking up’ – Tagged’s vice president of sales and marketing Steve Sarner claims other companies are only now catching onto ‘social discovery’ and the site is “by far the largest” in the social discovery space. Ex-squeeze me?
I’m afraid we’ll have to balance this, and perhaps educate Mr Sarner a little, in case he hasn’t heard of a little site called Badoo.
Ok, so Tagged says 2011 was its fourth consecutive profitable year, and that its revenue grew 35 percent to more than $43 million. It’s also rolled up other companies such as Digsby, WeGame, Topicmarks, and hi5, taking its registered user base from 100 million to 330 million. Active users are at 20 million. Good numbers.
Tagged was originally a teen-only social network in 2004 and opened up to all ages 13+ in October 2006. The company pivoted to its current social discovery focus in late-2007.
But let’s have little balance here shall we? Badoo, based in London , is also in social discovery and networking, but it started in 2006.
Currently it’s on 135 million users in over 180 countries who are using the site and smartphone apps in 36 languages.
Badoo says it also has way more active users than Tagged: 35m+ on a monthly basis.
As of 2012 It’s also claiming annual revenues of USD $150m+ (to remind you, Tagged claims $43m), and Badoo has been profitable for the last 24 months after 64% year on year growth, according to comScore.
Some more numbers: There are 2.1 million photos uploaded daily (as a comparison, roughly 2.7m photos are uploaded to Flickr daily), and there are 50 million chats per day on the Badoo platform, across mobile and web. We could go on, but you get the drift.
So let’s just have a little more balance in the discussion about this market, shall we?