Agoracom Blog

AGORACOM Hits 1.31 Million Unique Visitors For Full Year 2008

Posted by AGORACOM at 10:10 AM on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Back on October 10th, we announced AGORACOM traffic results for the first full-year since the launch of our small-cap, wiki-powered “Investor Controlled Discussion Forums” on October 5, 2007.

Today, I am very pleased to announce our traffic results for the full year 2008.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, this snapshot from our Google analytics is worth several million

[PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGE, CLEAR GRAPH]

AGORACOM Traffic FY 2008

Suffice it to say, we are once again ecstatic with the results.  This is especially true given the state of the markets in Q4 2008.  We attribute much of this success to practicing what we preach. Specifically, when times are tough and your competitors are running for cover, crank up the marketing.  AGORACOM did just that with the launch of TV ads on Bloomberg, CNBC and BNN , as well as, the addition of Peter Grandich.

ELECTRONIC SHAREHOLDER FORUMS WILL REPLACE TRADITIONAL IR DEPARTMENTS AND IRO’S

To this end, we will continue to re-invest back into the success of our community, clients and members.  Look for significant news from AGORACOM on the mobile and international fronts shortly.  We’re building for the long-term here folks.  There is no stopping the web/mobile trend as the sole source of investor relations, investor collaboration and market information.  Investors are demanding it, loving it and we are going to continue delivering.  Electronic shareholder forums are going to replace traditional investor relations departments and IRO’s.  We’ve got a foothold and we’re not letting go.

CLIENTS AND MEMBERS THAT BELIEVED

I want to thank all of our great clients and members that believed in our model and breathed unbelievable life into this paradigm shifting platform. Without them, this would be one hell of an application with no users. A special thanks goes out to all HUB Leaders that abandoned their former communities at Stockhouse, Raging Bull, Yahoo Finance and others in hopes of a better experience. I’m glad our promises to you have been fulfilled.  Thank-You!

REPUTATION AND RANKING SYSTEM

When we created our community by combining UGC, Wiki and reputation based tools, we set out to destroy the stock discussion forum status quo that we have all come to hate over the past 10 years thanks to unrelenting spam, profanity, stock bashing, stock hyping and the unacceptable. Many thought it could not be done because we could neither change habits nor unseat the incumbents. We not only knew we could, we knew investors wanted us to.  All they needed was a solution that focused on quality over quantity.

Now, more than lip service, the following numbers speak for themselves:

THE TALE OF THE TAPE

(Figures for January 1, 2008 – December 31, 2008. All figures reported by Google Analytics)

  • Unique Visitors 1,311,797
  • Visits 7,936,725 (so close to 8 million…)
  • Page Views 95,958,206
  • Pages Per Visit 12.09
  • Avg Time On Site 9:19
  • Number Of Countries/Territories 207
  • Top 10 (Canada, USA, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Belgium, Australia, Sweden, Mexico, Switzerland)

The numbers look even better when you consider

  • We built our model on quality vs quantity. As such, this is pure discussion. No spam, flaming and bickering traffic.
  • We are only focusing on small-cap and micro-cap stocks …for now.

THE STATUS QUO IS CRUMBLING

We are very happy to see the data back up our theory that investors deeply desire the ability to amalgamate and discuss individual stock investments in a civilized community. investors are no longer willing to accept the unacceptable. Until now, the trash has ruled the day, forcing the majority of smart, collaborative and simply nice investors to abandon discussion forums for solitary or group research.  For a while, the market had lost its best research tool – people.

Eventually, the market corrects inefficiencies and AGORACOM corrected this one. By refusing to sacrifice quality for quantity, we will continue to attract great investing minds that have a lot to offer. Quality begets quality and now a massive community that both generates its own content and moderates itself is replacing the status quo.

CONCLUSION

This is Wiki meets IGC (investor generated content), meets reputation based systems at their finest. There are bigger communities to be sure – but can you find another vertical in which the need for a drastically more efficient model is needed more? As I’ve stated since October 2007, Trillions of dollars are at stake. People’s futures are at stake. The implications of inefficient or imperfect information are severe. We now know it to be true.

Electronic shareholder forums are vital to the lives of so many people. With the advent of top-notch financial bloggers such as Kedrosky and Ritholtz, as well as, stock micro-blogs, we are about to witness another paradigm shift in the way investors communicate and make decisions – and we’ll be a part of that too.  Stay tuned for more.

Regards,
George

12 Responses to “AGORACOM Hits 1.31 Million Unique Visitors For Full Year 2008”

  1. Tony Boerkamp says:

    I was kicked -off for no reason!

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  9. […] way too early to take a victory lap and we have a lot of work ahead of us to get the site up to AGORACOM traffic levels – but these numbers serve to support our contention that global demand for information pertaining […]

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