Micro-blogging in Poland - report

Although internet market in Poland is more or less mature, many worldwide leading services are not used by Polish users. The very special cases are, of course, Instant Messaging and what is maybe more interesting, micro-blogging.

In this post you will find information about Polish micro-blogging services, that overtook Twitter among users in Poland.

Micro-blogging is a form of multimedia blogging allowing users to post brief messages, or micromedia like MMS, photos, video or audio clips. Posted messages are visible to anyone, to restricted group of "friends" or to selected user only.

Worldwide leader in this category is Twitter.com. Its competitors was Jaiku and Pownce. Pownce is already dead, and Jaiku after acquisition by Google is invite-only. However many social networking websites included micro-blogging as a feature called "status updates". The most known and used is probably Live Feed in Facebook. Other kind of microblogging is Tumblr, which seems to be just a blog platform with very limited functionality.

Any of those services is commonly used in Poland. Instead we have three local micro-blogging services (Pinger.pl, blip.pl) and one major social networking website (grono.net) with such feature, called blimp.

According to the Google Adplanner and reach measured by Alexa.com, the leader is Pinger.pl. [Please note that we measure only website traffic, when many users are using those sevices via IM and widgets this traffic is not included here.]Pinger is owned by one of the leading horizontal portals, o2.pl. O2.pl has also it's own IM called tlen. Portal o2.pl has reach 48% with 1bn pageviews and 7,5 million users (Megapanel/PBI, September 2008), and is 7th most popular website in Poland. Its IM, tlen.pl has reach 5,03% and is on the 3rd position with huge gap to Skype (28,03%) and leading Gadu-Gadu (38,88%).

Pinger.pl has Alexa rank 260 in Poland. Google estimates traffic on Pinger to 350-380 k per month. Although Pinger is mostly used by teenagers, you may find there thoughts of one of o2.pl owners, Michał Brański. Website offers micro-blogging in Tumblr style - rather writing posts and comments than live chat. It seems that users on Pinger are redirected from Google and other websites owned by o2.pl.

Another player is blip.pl. Blip is owned by Gadu-Gadu (company that runs the most popular IM in Poland).

Unlike o2.pl, Gadu-Gadu seems to be unable to move its users between different services. Blip.pl is still very weak in reach (the same happens to Gadu-Gadu's social network MojaGeneracja.pl). On the other hand with 12-15k of new messages daily it is one of the biggest micro-blogging website in terms of active users in Europe.

According to Google blip has 36 - 39 k users per month. Its reach in Poland is only 0,2%. [Note, that it is website traffic only. We cannot measure widgets and IM with those tools]

Blip is not gaining traffic from Gadu-Gadu nor from search engines. "Also visited" websites shows clearly, that blip is place for heavy internet users, blog readers and IT professionals.

But it is not a traffic that makes blip valuable. Blip.pl has very dedicated and active community of users. As application is widely used by Polish IT professionals, blip has many 3rd party applications and mashups. The whole list of blip add-ons is here.

One of those applications, first developed as livestreaming mashup applications is pretending to be third player on this market. Flaker.pl is made by independent developers from Netguru company. It's traffic data are to small to be measured via Google. Alexa suggests, that flaker is sharing users with blip and its reach in some periods is even identical.

Blip since start had hard times with competitors. The only major social networking website with "status updates" is Grono.net. Grono is invite-only social network, that was the first website of such kind in Poland. Intel Capital in September 2007 bought shares of Grono.net planning to exit by IPO. Those plans were not realized since today, partly because unclear legal situation of the company, partly because of market situation.

Looking for new ways of attracting users, Grono.net has started its "status updates" with name Blimp, directly suggesting that it is copycat of blip.pl (then in private beta). Ther is no specific data for "Blimp" usage, however it did not make any impact on Grono.net traffic.

Polish micro-blogging is domain of local IM providers - o2.pl and Gadu-Gadu. The market will be shaken again, when nasza-klasa.pl will have it's own status updates. Whoever takes those statuses first into micro-blogging or IM system will win all the market.