twopointouch

There’s a report in the (London) Times about the sudden popularity of social networking site Piczo in the UK over a period of just 12 months:

…since last December this networking website for teenagers has grown eightfold, increasing its number of users from 1.2m to 10.5m, with nearly 4m in Britain alone.

Four million users in a population of 60mn is a lot by any standards. When you consider that Piczo is aimed at teenage users, maybe 10mn in total, then the numbers are phenomenal. TechCrunch reported in September: “Piczo is adding 35,000 new member registrations per day, 75% of which are teenagers between 13 and 16 years old.” According to Comscore, 59% of the UK’s teen web users visited Piczo in June 2006.

How have they done this? Well, the freeform page editing tools go way beyond what MySpace has to offer. There’s also much more photo storing space than MySpace gives to users. But perhaps more importantly, tapping into the safety concerns over other social networks seems to have been a smart move. You can’t just surf round Piczo, and there’s no search, so finding out about strangers’ profiles is a little tricky. Basically, users have to tell you the URL in order for you to find them.

In an interview with Techcrunch UK, Piczo CEO Jeremy Verba said that the service is, “like a house party, where you invite your friends over and listen to music [whereas] MySpace is more like a club…it’s for an older crowd, and you can’t necessarily control who they let in”.

The Times piece also suggests that Verba, an AOL veteran, really understands how not to annoy and alienate his users, something MySpace seems less apt at. While he’s confident that marketing money will follow the users, he doesn’t want to risk losing that valuable asset. “We need to monetise it in a respectful and smart way,” said Verba. “Our users own us and we don’t own them. We’d better listen very carefully to them. Hopefully, if we are serving our demographic, they will stay with us.”