BranchOut Keeps Falling Down, Down

It has been nearly three weeks since I wrote about BranchOut’s meteoric rise and subsequent fall here on ERE. But because of the speed at which this LinkedIn clone continues to disintegrate, an update seems to be in order. It is actually very impressive to see how fast things can unravel when a service apparently doesn’t deliver any real value and initial growth was only fueled by spammy registration tactics.

Since June 1, BranchOut is losing an average of 4.1% of its remaining monthly active users every single day! Its monthly active users currently stands at 3 million; less than two months ago it peaked at 13.9 million.

Notwithstanding this impressive arterial bleed, BranchOut’s CEO Rick Marini continues to talk up his book and promotes BranchOut as a LinkedIn for the masses. Only the masses are running away from BranchOut, not toward it. In an interview on CNBC the question of plummeting numbers was asked to Marini, to which he responded that when you have success there always will be criticism … great deflection, but no answer. The guy clearly has had his fair share of media training. Sadly enough my inquiry of May 29 to BranchOut regarding this massive loss of users still remains unanswered.

What Is Exactly Happening With BranchOut?

This is a short history of BranchOut from the perspective of its monthly active users:

The incredibly rapid growth in the number of monthly active users could only be fueled by a massive number of people signing up for BranchOut; conversely, the rapid decline can only be caused by a drying up of new registrants and nobody returning back to the service after initial signup  This clearly suggests some kind of Ponzi scheme where people signing up invite more people to sign up, turning a trickle into a tsunami. However, if everybody within the Facebook ecosystem has been invited many times over, the tsunami reverts back to a trickle. And if there are hardly any users returning to BranchOut after initial registration the whole thing comes crashing down.

However, the numbers are nothing more than a very strong indication of this assumption. As the monthly active users lag actual usage per day, the number of daily active users is potentially more insightful. The “problem” with this number is that it is also made up of people signing up as well as returning users. Without more detail it is hard to tell what is actually happening on a day-to-day basis. Is there actually a solid foundation of returning users, or is it predominantly new registrants?

To try and investigate this a bit further I have asked two very simple questions: how many people  posted Facebook messages using the phrase “started using BranchOut” or the phrase “your professional profile on Facebook” since January 1, 2012. The reason for asking these two questions is this; BranchOut sends Facebook messages on your behalf. The first message when you sign up for BranchOut uses the phrase “started using BranchOut.” When you endorse other BranchOut users, the following Facebook message is sent: I endorsed <name> on @BranchOut, “your professional profile on Facebook.” The number of messages will give an indication of the ratio between new registrants and returning users.

For the Dutch situation I used Coosto, and this is the result:

Since it is hardly discernible, there are only four Facebook messages with the phrase “your professional profile on Facebook” compared to 3,865 messages with the phrase “started using BranchOut.” So, no discernible user activity (0.10% of number of signed-up users) after initial signup. The 0.10% is even lower than the percentage I postulated nearly three weeks ago, when I assumed 0.14% of registered users are actually “using” the service.

At present I have no way of discovering if this picture can be extrapolated to the whole user base of BranchOut. But it can be taken as a very strong indication that hardly anybody finds anything of value with BranchOut which would prompt them to return to the service. There are simply no returning users to be found.

Although BranchOut is declining rapidly, it is still by far the biggest LinkedIn clone on Facebook.