Corvus Consulting

Every so often a story about one or another web service passing a big milestone catches my eye. Numbers like 100,000, 1 million, 10 million, and so on, they make for good headlines, but what do they mean?

As milestones go, their significance is largely psychological, like the satisfaction (and mild thrill) of watching your car’s odometer roll over from 999,999 to 000,000. Even if we know that the last kilometer isn’t all that different from the ones before, it still feels special and is fun to watch.

Website registration counts are sort of the same: they impress, they’re fun to recognize, but they don’t tell you as much as they might seem.

This is not to say it’s a big scam; as the saying goes, where there’s smoke there’s fire, and we can safely say that where a site is growing in registrations there is definitely some attention and activity.

A few reasons that signup counts don’t tell the full story:

Multiple Accounts: people can sign up multiple times because they forget user names and passwords. In socially-oriented services, multiple accounts are used to manage multiple identities and manage exposure of personal interests and activities.

Hit and Run: especially common when websites launch, people will sign up to check things out, but then not return. The site’s design can enhance this effect by hiding desirable content from non-members. The result is plenty of dormant accounts that are counted on par with active ones.

Uncontrolled Registration: Sites that don’t require some kind of verification step are subject to having plenty of fake or otherwise invalid accounts. Sites that are a popular target for any kind of spam activity and don’t control registration are almost certain to have a high count of accounts that aren’t used by people or for legitimate purposes.

I considered not posting these reasons because they do provide a bit of a recipe for artificially driving up registration counts, but there is a way to see through the illusion no matter how it comes about: just watch the site for a few days. Are there other signs of life? Do you see evidence of the site being used for the reasons it was made? For example, I could tell you that Digg.com has x number of registrations, but that’s meaningless until you take a look at Digg Spy, and see in real-time the activity there, you know that it’s a site where things are indeed happening.

And that’s the key point here: the strength of a site is in the members who use it and use it well. That’s a real measure of how well the relationship between the product and customers is working out, even if it doesn’t make for catchy headlines.