India: Chennai tops at Tagged
By Bala Shah and DJ

Not many are aware that California based website Tagged is the third most popular social networking site in the world.  Facebook is the leader with 600 million members; Twitter takes second place with 200 million members.  But ahead of LinkedIn is Tagged with about 100 million registered members. Tagged, which has been profitable for 3 years, is quite popular in India as well.

Greg Tseng launched Tagged in 2004 as a social network for teens. One element of this new site was to ensure great security so young men and women could feel safe online.  Tagged would later expand its membership to all age groups.  It has been turning a profit since 2007 with revenue of $32 million in 2010.  Tagged has been profiled in a number of international media including the New York Times on Jan 28, 2011.  It was also one of the key sponsors of the fourth annual Crunchies award.  The Crunchies are sponsored by 3 of the best known tech blogs in USA and India – Techcrunch, Gigaom and Venture Beat.

Techgoss has been noticing for some time that internet monitoring company Alexa consistently shows that India drives a large amount of traffic to Tagged.  Intrigued, we contacted Tagged in USA to get more details of its membership from India.  Tagged,  which says its differentiator from sites like Facebook is that while Facebook leverages existing friendships, Tagged is a place to meet new people.  The site enables anyone to meet and socialize with new people through social games, customized profiles, virtual gifts, advanced browsing features and more.

Tagged gave Techgoss more details of its site

“
Grew registered users to over 100 million in 2010
Total Revenue over $32 million
Virtual currency revenue up 71% over 2009
Subscription revenue up 50% over 2009
Third consecutive year of profitability
Over 100 million new friend connections made each month
Available in 220 countries and 18 languages

Our data shows India is in our top 20 countries (#16) with about 250,000 monthly unique users and the largest concentration is in the city of Chennai. As our overall engagement per user is second only to Facebook, it is not surprising you show significant Tagged traffic in the country.

Average time per visit from India is high at 17 minutes and sessions average 15 page views per session
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