It's hard to believe that it has only been a year that Pulse has been in existence. But as Pete's launch post attests, we rolled Pulse out to the world on August 5 of last year. Since then, it's been a mad dash of weekly releases to build out the feature set as rapidly as possible.
We've been really pleased with the great market reception for Pulse. Previously, we've talked about (first post and second post) how rapidly the "social graph" was getting wired together, aided by strong response to our Open initiatives and our innovative model of family/friend/business relationship categories. And that connecting up has actually accelerated in recent months, bringing total number of bi-directional connections to over 17 million!
Of course, that's not the most common metric for measuring success of a social network. More typically, one looks at the number of monthly unique visitors. Today, Compete just released the numbers for July, and while any traffic measurement system is imperfect (especially when a service offers client-based access options), this is a much followed source of traffic trends. They show a whopping 225% year-over-year growth in monthly unique visitors -- and 21% growth from June to July! Go, Pulse, go!
Of course, the specific numbers here are not really important; the trendline is what matters. Why? Well, Compete looks only at U.S. traffic, and Plaxo has a really large and growing international user base. In fact, we get almost half of our traffic from outside the U.S, so the Compete numbers certainly are undercounting our total.
But, hey, it's a birthday party. Let's not quibble. Pulse may only be twelve months old, but we're proud and excited to see how rapidly it's growing. (Check out how fast it's rising in rank.) Here's to accelerating growth in Pulse's second year!
John McCrea
VP of Marketing