Personal home pages not a runaway success
Techcrunch reports today on Yahoo!’s facelift for MyYahoo, and in the article they give user numbers for both MyYahoo and iGoogle. Neither company is going to be overjoyed with this performance:
The interface has been in need of a facelift for some time, as Yahoo has watched its userbase dwindle from 56.9 million users last November to 41.6 million in June. Comparatively, iGoogle has has seen increase from 23.8 users in November to 24.3 million unique visitors in May.
The Alexa rankings for Netvibes tell a similar story.
I think this tells us that personal home pages aren’t ramping up to become the default gateway to the internet for most people. I’m guessing the traffic is going to social networks, and the chart at the end of the Techcrunch article which shows Facebook against My Yahoo! and iGoogle shows they think the same thing too.
Techrunch also says:
Also notable is Yahoo’s announcement that they intend to allow external developers to create their own applications and modules for use on My Yahoo, along with other parts of the Yahoo network.
Which means their strategy is converging with Facebook and Myspace et al.
July 8th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Hey Nic - isn’t compete.com a better available source than alexa for web traffic data these days?
July 8th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Hi James - good to hear from you. Last time I looked compete.com was only north America, so I still use Alexa - which you’ve never liked :).
July 10th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Well, maybe if Google put a bit of effort into iGoogle it might be more popular - as you say, it’s been in need of an overhaul for ever. Don’t know about MyYahoo. Pageflakes is dying. Netvibes is trying to break out of the start page space. I’m sure they do need to merge with social networks. And get away from the ‘multiple boxes on a page’ model to actually integrate some stuff.