Bebo statistics explained

There has been quite a bit of confusion around the numbers I (and others) have quoted related to Bebo’s page views, uniques, etc. Jim Scheinman, Bebo’s VP of Business Development and Sales, kindly stopped by and clarified things in the comments of my original post on the company’s $15M financing:

Much of the confusion in the #s above (and frankly in many blog postings) about Bebo’s and other SN site #s come from the mashing of various data sources. So, for example, while Bebo reported 2.5 Billion monthly page views (and we’re actually just shy of 3 Billion now), we never reported the 1 million unique user #. In fact, I’m not sure where that came from, but I suspect it’s a Media Metrix/Comscore unique user # for US members only. Our internal data shows that Bebo overall has significantly higher unique user #s, and you can do the research to see what 3rd parties report our monthly unique user # to be. Bebo’s key markets are the UK, IE, US, CA, AU & NZ which comprises almost all of our traffic. So, the #s will vary if you’re looking only at the US market (which many US publications do) or at Bebo’s total market.
Also, when you use Alexa to look at traffic, you’re looking at the total traffic from all countries. So, in Bebo’s case, that’ll be our total traffic from our 6 core markets. In Orkut’s case, that’ll be their total traffic, which is almost entirely from Brazil, and so on. The key thing to remember there is that not all traffic is created equally (ie — I’d rather own the UK market than the Brazilian market if my primary revenue source is advertising).

Thanks Jim, much appreciated.

Tag: bebo