IRC-Galleria remains the most active social media on the net

www.irc-galleria.net has been the most loaded/active website of Scandinavia since about 2006. Back in September of 2006 this article (in Finnish) was published claiming IG as the most busy website in Scandinavia. Since that time the key numbers have gone up significantly.

The level of user activity remains at a much higher level than any other social media site on the web. In terms of "how often do the users login and do stuff?" IG pretty much beats the heck out of Facebook and posse. And they show no signs of slowing down either.

Some fresh stats:

- About 950.000 unique visitors per week (according to TNS Metrix)
- Over 504 thousand registered users
- Average user is 20.29 years, 60% are over 18
- The site reaches over 70% of 15-24 year old Finns monthly (making it a huge youth media in Finland, bigger by reach than any TV channel)
- Almost 60% of the registered users log in daily.
- 80% of the users log in weekly.
- Every day over 70.000 new pictures are added.
- There are 8 326 692 pictures visible.
- And millions more hidden from the public (estimated at 30-40 million pics total)
- every day over 40.000 blog entries are written on the site.
- Many audio blog entries and video blog entries as well.
- IG's users have self-organized to more than 500K community and interest groups.
- Over 1 million messages/comments are written every day
- There are an estimated 2-3+ billion comments (some really old ones get cleared occasionally etc).
- Monthly page loads are around 2.5 up to 4.2 (or so) billion per month. This is a significant percentage of Facebook or Yahoo! page loads, generated by site that has a fraction of the users they do; just one very strong proof of IG's super-active members.
- Front page alone gets tens of millions of loads per day, up to few thousand per second etc.

As a result of this amazing activity level that has remained high for years and years IG is also one of the most brilliant examples of end user revenue generation and profit. Who ever says that there are no models on how to monetize social media is dead wrong and obviously hasn't looked at IRC-Galleria.

How many of their registered users pay money for any of the services on the site? As many as over 80%. This number is significantly higher than any other conversion rate in any service I have heard of. I challenge you to find a service that would be "free, paying is optional" that would have a conversion rate higher than that anywhere in the world.

While I'm not a part of the company any more operationally (I'm an owner of Sulake nowdays), their success and strong continuing growth is something I (and the whole team) can be very proud of! It's a shame that the service isn't in english and going head to head with Facebook, because with those key figures expanded to a global scale, it would certainly win ;-) Which is probably part of the why IG is going to come out with some internationalization news and things in the near future..