LinkedIn versus OpenBC

In July 2005 I posted about the sizes of OpenBC and LinkedIn, because Alexa was pointing to the fact that OpenBC was bigger. In the comments, there were some valid arguments that said that the Alexa stats are irrelevant. But now some new things appeared. In the Read/WriteWeb postMySpace Streaks Ahead. In his post Richard MacManus links to an Article on the USA Today that lists the sizes of the of the top social networking sites. Among them is LinkedIn which is listed with 354,188 users in November 2005. Interestingly enough OpenBC issued a press release in December 2005 in which they said that they new have 800.000 users, 15 Million Searches a month and 125 million page impressions. If the numbers from the USA Today article are correct then OpenBC is _way_ bigger than LinkedIn, something I wouldn’t have expected. They are surely bigger in Germany, and possibly Europe, but one post in my comments makes the numbers cited in the USA Today wrong. Konstantin Guericke from LinkedIn said in the comment that they were adding 500k new users every 2 months.

Sadly, the battle, which is not really a battle both of them are fighting, is still not decided conclusively, as the numbers from the two sources just don’t add up.

Update : Thanks for the feedback of both Bill Liao of OpenBC and Tim the picture is once again getting clearer. First of all, the LinkedIn network is more like 4.000.000 which you see when you log in. The other hint really comes directly from Bill. He makes clear that OpenBC users are very active users and I can only say that from myself, using OpenBC a lot more than LinkedIn. So while OpenBC has a million users, LinkedIn has 4 million. But while OpenBC gets 125 million page impressions a month, LinkedIn gets 350k unique visitors! This is my large error in the post above. The comScore stats obviously point to unique visitors not registered members.

Sadly there are no Page Impression numbers from comScore, and comScore does not track the unique visitors of OpenBC (you need the same company tracking it or you are comparing apples to oranges) and hence we can’t clearly compare. But if 1 million users produce 125 million hits, then 4 would produce 500 million. That means that LinkedIn would have a ratio of over 1000 to 1 of Page Impressions to Unique Visits. Highly unlikely.

So… what does that mean? LinkedIn is bigger network wise. OpenBC has the _much_ more used platform and a lot more active users. Of course they also have forums so we might subtract 70% of the page impressions :) Ah well… it’s actually not that important but having been in stats I like numbers.

Thanks for the feedback guys. And Bill… OpenBC is A LOT bigger than LinkedIn via Alexa, even now.

Technorati Tags: Alexa, LinkedIn, OpenBC, Social Networking