Since Plaxo launched its Plaxo Pulse service it has seen another surge in its growth. The last time Plaxo published its numbers was in 2006 when it reported 15 million active users after it doubled its userbase within 6 months. Since then it has launched its popular Pulse service and the first live OpenSocial implementation.
Last week John McCrea (vice president of marketing for Plaxo) contacted me with an interesting tidbit of information regarding the growth of Plaxo Pulse. It seems that in terms of adding new Pulse users the Netherlands has the highest growth rate of all countries. Dutch Pulse pageviews jumped from 2% of total to 6% of total in one week. As you can see in the graph here, it is highly likely that Dutch users will overtake the UK to become the second-largest userbase outside the US.
Netherlands is light green; UK is dark yellow
There seems to be no special event that led to this sudden growth except the OpenSocial announcement by Google. However, the Netherlands is a very active social networking country with its largest social network (Hyves) adding its 5th million member somewhere this week.
Same thing happened to LinkedIn, according to a Dutch newspaper called nrc.next. http://www.nrc.nl/next/article763902.ece
As we say in Holland, when one sheep crosses the dam… (others follow)
Yeas Ernst-Jan, that is the only conclusion I could draw so far. I don’t remember any big articles in the press about Plaxo in recent weeks that could explain this growth. Apparently, if we go, we all go…
Question is, do LinkedIn members move to Plaxo, or are they using two tools? On short term and on long term…
I think there was a special event that led to this growth: the introduction of Pulse. I’ve been a Plaxo user for years and only a few other contacts did. I’m not sure when they launched Pulse, but I’m under the impression that this inovation is responsible for this growth. Pulse brings together the principles of sites like linkedin and the content sharing options from Hyves, Flickr, Youtube, etc. Well done!
@Stijn indeed it has everything to do with the introduction of pulse. The interesting part stays why The Netherlands saw a huge uptake over the last couple of weeks.
I’ve noticed that lots of people were inviting me to Pulse.
@Boris Hyves is adding its 5th million member tomorrow night. There is a special party as well. 800 people can enter the party, but over 30.000 have signed up!! Talking about an active social network!
@Patrick: do you think you can sneak us in? We need to report on that party and test all the champagne there, right?