Six million users, 381.6 million check-ins; Foursquare continues its climb to rule social location
Foursquare posted a very cool infographic on its blog today, highlighting the startup’s huge year of 3400 percent growth in 2010. (We’ve embedded it at the bottom.)
The company also announced that it registered its six millionth user last week, a month and a half after reaching five million users. Because they announced having reached three million users back near the very end of August, it’s probably safe to say that the service’s growth has stabilized: they’re adding about two million new users every three months. Look for the seven million member announcement sometime near the end of February, or first week in March. It’s hard to say what Foursquare’s growth means for other location services. Google Latitude, for example, already claimed to have nine million users back in mid-December. Google declined to comment, however, on whether that number reflected just how many times the app had been downloaded or whether it actually stood for monthly active users. And because Latitude is more about tracking the user’s location in real-time, it’s hard to compare that to Foursquare’s check-ins.
That said, Foursquare saw a total of 381.6 million check-ins in 2010 in “every single country,” with North Korea being the last one to the party. Plus, there was that one check-in from space. The biggest event for the service was Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, which accumulated 30,525 check-ins the day before Halloween. The top five most popular brand pages were MTV (118,370 followers), Bravo (114,202), the History Channel (101,352), Zagat (97,883) and VH1 (76,494). I found these stats pretty remarkable, especially since most of these numbers (except for MTV’s) rival the brands’ follower numbers on Twitter, which are as follows: MTV (1.1 million), Bravo (83,746), the History Channel (56,613), Zagat (161,091) and VH1 (101,399). This shows that Foursquare could be as powerful a place to interact with fans as is Twitter, which gets most of the media attention outside the tech sphere. Be sure to check out the infographic for some other awesome statistics.
Steven Loeb
