At its core, Delicious is simply a bookmarking system. It’s a place to store all those links that are too much to be in your “Favorites” folder. What makes it so useful is its one of those technologies that has a simple interface. What makes it so compelling is it’s ability to do so much more; keep, discover, share, research and collaborate from any computer.

This week I take a look at Delicious, by the numbers.

The Beginning:

• Joshua Schachter started del.icio.us in 2003 as a hobby however it stemmed from a single-user creation he started in 2001
• Began developing Del.icio.us at night and on weekends, before finally leaving Morgan Stanley Equity Trading Lab where he worked as a programmer
• Went with the two dots “to be funny” and nothing else
• Initially, Schachter tagged all the links himself with the subjects they touched on. His personal list of bookmarked Web pages grew to more than 20,000 entries before he opened it up
• Was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, and grown 250% since the acquisition or roughly 53 million posts on 25 million URLs
• Today there are 29 employees based in Sunnyvale, California

The Traffic:

• Delicious picks up more traffic in a day than it did in its entire first year.
• There are over 1 million registered members
• US Reach: 1,018,860
• Alexa traffic rank:
o Yesterday 471
o 1 wk. Avg. 453
o 3 mos. Avg. 388 compared to 5,843 for furl.net
• US Monthly Traffic Summary
o Page Views per Month 11,825,958
o Average Page Views per Visit 5.95
o Visits per Month 1,988,196
o Average Visits per Unique 1.75
o Uniques per Month 1,138,518 compared to 43,479 for furl
• 50% of visitors are considered to be ‘regular’ and/or “addicts’
• Percent of global Internet users who visit site: 0.305% - down 16% over last 3 months
• The number of unique pages viewed per user per day: 3.3, up 3%
• Delicious users come from these countries:
o United States 31.8%
o United Kingdom 6.0%
o Germany 5.5%
o Spain 4.2%
o Canada 3.7%
• Traffic rank in other countries
o United States 167
o United Kingdom 172
o Spain 172
o Germany 226
o Canada 273

The Financials:

• Internet speculation has the purchase price around US$30 million.
• Schachter’s share is approximately $15 million.

The Demographics:

• Delicious is a top 5,000 destination that reaches 1.1 million U.S. monthly uniques.
• Caters to a slightly more male than female audience.
• The typical visitor reads ahajokes.com, visits EZ.Tracks, and watches heavy.com
• 10% of visitors are over 65
• 45% have no college education
• 20% earn more than $100K

Did You Know?

• Delicious pioneered tagging and coined the term “social bookmarking”
• On September 6, 2007, name change to “Delicious”
• Schacter is also creator of geoURL and co-creator of Memepool
• Before the end of the same year Schacter left Morgan Stanley, he had sold Delicious to Yahoo…that’s a great ROI!
• SEOMoz research claims 800 links are created on average after 14 days going popular on Delicious
• v2.0 is rumored to be ready in two weeks
• Schacter last entry in his blog was October 30, 2007
• Do not allow nofollow links because, as Schacter says “It’s too much of a spam target otherwise” and “It’s not collective voting when someone registers 1,000 accounts and votes. There’s no easy way to enforce that. We’re not about building links, so we don’t care”
• they’ve grown from twenty servers at the time of the acquisition to over 100 today

As with all social media, there are many bookmarking competitors. How do you share? delicious, ma.gnolia, furl, yahoo, google..…which is your favorite?

Add Jeff to your social network!

5 Responses to “Social Media By the Numbers: Delicious”

1. Utah SEO (67 comments.) Says:
   January 13th, 2008 at 6:23 pm

   I had no idea they coined the term “social bookmarking”. They deserve a bit more credit then for being such pioneers.

2. Wayne Smallman (13 comments.) Says:
   January 14th, 2008 at 2:46 am

   I use my Delicious account as adjunct to my feed, and a lot of my subscribers follow my bookmarks.

   I think Delicious is a great service, but the stupid tagging system really gets me down.

   I really do hope Delicious 2.0 goes comma-separated, with multi-word tags…

3. Matt Ridout (27 comments.) Says:
   January 14th, 2008 at 3:39 am

   Very nice stats here, must have taken some time to gather this. Thumbs up!

4. Dev Basu (31 comments.) Says:
   January 14th, 2008 at 8:31 am

   Tom is THE MAN when gathering such indepth data on web 2.0 industry giants

5. Mike (10 comments.) Says:
   January 14th, 2008 at 4:15 pm

   Maybe it is just my niche, but I get very little traffic from Delicious. Very nice information on Delicious.

Leave a Reply