Photo-blogging Site DailyBooth Raises $1 Million | Hacker News Reader

Photo-blogging Site DailyBooth Raises $1 Million

blogs.wsj.com

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How can it have 6 million monthly active unique users, when

Compete shows them having only 144K uniques: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/dailybooth.com/

Quantcast shows only 15K uniques in USA: http://www.quantcast.com/dailybooth.com

Why such a huge discrepancy?

Biased samples?

I doubt they're lying about their numbers, I think this shows how inaccurate compete + quantcast can be.

Which other sites show such a large discrepancy between self-reported and quantcast/compete/alexa numbers?

It's one thing to be off by a factor of 2 or 3, but 15K --> 6MM is an error of 400X! Is there something different about how DB is built?

Is there something different about how DB is built?

This strikes me as being akin to saying "Gallup surveyed all people in Patrick's kitchen last night and estimates Obama's approval rating as 0%. Talking Head, this number is clearly in error. What do you think is different about Obama which makes it so difficult to poll about him? Is it that he is black?"

No, its that biased samples bork results. (I'm using the statistical, not pejorative, usage of the word "biased".) There are a million things that could be happening here: a userbase primarily outside of the cooperating ISPs coverage areas, a younger userbase who disproportionately do not install toolbars, etc, etc.

>Which other sites show such a large discrepancy between self-reported and quantcast/compete/alexa numbers?

I can expect a pretty small overlap between web users who have, say, the Alexa toolbar installed on their computers and the kinds of early adopters who would use a service like DailyBooth.

I think you're probably right. The number of tech-savy early adopters who are going to have the Alexa toolbar installed is quite low I would say.

they have GA graphs to prove it

Does anyone know how Compete and Quantcast get their data?

i think they buy ISP data logs

I think they have people to install their browser toolbars, which monitor the sites they visit. Their statisticians then extrapolate the trends to the entire population.

I believe "quantified sites" embed a line of code and that becomes public on quantcast ie- public google analytics. Not sure what else they mash the data up with.

I have a good friend who's site shows just about 100k monthly unique on Compete, yet when I looked at his Google Analytics (yes he gave me access to prove it) he had north of 40k daily uniques every single day, and growing.

Based on our usage of these services, this is the range of correctness:

Google Analytics >> Alexa >> Quantcast >> Magic 8 Ball >> Compete

Analytics is off by over 100% on some of our sites compared to the logs.

Yeah its not terribly accurate, but for us, more accurate than the others.

Try GetClicky. They are pretty solid. I started using it on a site, and did not go back to GA for days at the time.

It seems as the market for content-creation expands, there is room for infinitely more products simply by taking the mid-point of any two existing products. e.g. Twitter, the mid-point of blogging and IRC. Tumblr, the mid-point of blogging and Twitter. And now DailyBooth, the mid-point of Twitter and Flickr (?). There's also 12seconds.tv, the mid-point of Twitter and YouTube, but I think that's a really stupid idea (Robo.to is also in that space).

So logically, the next product should be the mid-point of Twitter and email... oh, Google Wave.

Content is no longer king.

Content creation is the new king.

If I'm not mistaken, this is called "market segmentation", rather than "blue ocean" stuff, which is where you create an entirely new market.

A description of DailyBooth that I like is 4chan with completely different context.

So I wonder what other applications can be created from changing the context. Hacker News is reddit with a different context.

Congrats to Dailybooth! (I'm in too, but only for a little.)

Kudos to Ryan and Jon!

When I first looked at DailyBooth, I thought: "OK, it's Twitter with pictures, so what?". It wasn't until I saw the growth and love of their user base that I realized how much potential they have.

And respect to Ryan, who spent the summer in the engine room keeping the site up through tremendous growth.

Congrats, Ryan! Your product is pretty awesome, I'm really looking forward to seeing where you take it next!

"WSJ: How do you plan to make money?

Mr. Wheatley: Scaling is the most important thing at the moment."

This is not criticism on DailyBooth but the answer above is basically a "we have no idea" and it amazes me that I and everyone here on HN kill themselves to build in legitimate business models into their apps and there are still folks who get funding who (seemingly) have no plan at all.

Or is the revenue idea super secret?

A better answer would have been:

"Exactly the same way twitter plan to make money!"

From the outside it appears that many of the YC companies try to stake out a territory, amass a user base with a free service, and then sell or find some other way to make money.

It seems like we don't hear much from those guys--they must have some valuable, hands-on experience to share.

I don't think that answer is necessarily "we have no idea" ... could just as easily be "we have some ideas/plans but most of our resources are going into scaling"

I'm assuming this is their first round since the YC money. In that case, it's not like they could have gone out and hired a VP of sales or had time to integrate an ad platform into the site.

I have no clue what they're doing, but there are several off-ramps between "here's our marketing plan" and "uh, we have no clue"

The demographic that DB seems to draw is highly valued. It seems to attract a younger group than Twitter and (just from my limited browsing) seems to attract a good % of females. I probably would have tossed $25k into that initial round if someone would have invited me :)

If you're going to edit his response you should say as much.

The full response (which actually sketches some ideas) was:

Mr. Wheatley: Scaling is the most important thing at the moment. We have a few ideas around media-based businesses, premium offerings and offline distribution like photo-printing.

Just a reminder, DailyBooth.com is a YC summer 09 company, and hiring PHP hackers right now. Their growth looks to be faster than Twitter's at an absolute relative rate.

I've been trying out DailyBooth for about a month now. I like it. As a common user, and not a celebrity, I find dailybooth more valuable than twitter. I guess "a picture is worth a thousand words."

I'd say a picture is worth a thousand words for person perception and impression formation. It takes a dozen tweets to figure out if you like someone, but only a few milliseconds of seeing his or her face. DailyBooth leverages that very well for dedicated community interaction.

Congrats guys. You certainly deserve it!

This could easily grow into a dating business.

go team

good luck Ryan!

curious to know what's their business model, or will be?

This is a classical example of a typical startup - simple and obvious idea - instant photos, instead of texting. But I think this will not last long.

For example, an easy, deep integrated tool for upload photos right from mobile phones (they have a 3-5 megapixel cams nowadays) seems like next step in that direction, and Nokia's Ovi might gain the ground very fast.

Anyway, they probably should think about mobile apps to evolve.

Also how do you really make much money at it?

Seems like something facebook/twit could easily add as a simple feature.

Simply adding a feature is very different from the feature taking off and allowing for a community to form. The latter is not as guaranteed--no matter how big you are.

Biggest example is classifieds. People thought facebook could take on Craigslist overnight. Didn't happen. Facebook Classifieds for the most part failed.

I think that's for different reasons though. Facebook is about communication with friends, and allowing for quick and easy photo blogging fits well with that.

Personally, I don't want to look at classifieds on facebook, because it's not really a 'community' type of thing to do.

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