Much is made by ezboard about the number of registered users they have. OK, their website is fairly out of date, but here they claim to have over 10 million active members. Elsewhere, it is claimed there are 13 million registered users. At DEMOfall 2005, they claimed 5 million users every month. If you look at the “Market Opportunity” section, it is claimed that Yuku had more than 14 million registered users and that it was growing at more than 200,000 registered users every month. That would mean that by March 2006, there should have been more than 15 million registered users on Yuku.

And yet, if you go to their user search, it displays one page of 20 users but claims there’s 388 pages: as with many aspects of Yuku, it’s broken. But even if that is correct, 388 x 20 = 7,760. Oh and any one person can have up to 5 profiles. Slightly less than 15,000,000 users then…

Apparently, they’ve started copying user profiles from ezboard over to Yuku which is why some people can’t set up accounts there to match their existing ezboard usernames. I suppose that helps with the registered user account: people having to register additional user accounts just to try it out.

Yuku: “Better than free”?

If you watch Robert Labatt’s presentation at DEMOfall, he says that Yuku is better than free becuase they share advertising revenues with the individual board owners (he refers to them as “community leaders”). He says that an average large community – whatever that is – should receive $3,000 to $5,000 a month.

I will admit to laughing when he says that Yuku backs up its sites on an ongoing basis – tell that to those who lost so much data when the backups were non-existent in June 2005 – and that what sets Yuku apart from other solutions is that they charge you a fee and don’t share advertising revenue.

Let’s just backtrack there for a moment.

Other solutions charging a fee, but the implication being that Yuku doesn’t, being “better than free”? Why then is there an FAQ post telling people that there will indeed be a cost for Gold boards, whatever they may be on Yuku? Never mind, surely it’ll all be explained in the main FAQs? Ah yes! There they say that Yuku is a completely free online service. So why the other FAQ saying there’s a cost? Or the section in the Yuku terms about fees and fee-based services?

Never mind: Yuku shares advertising revenue, unlike its competitors.

Does it? Er, then why can’t I find a single reference on Yuku to the plans and programmes for advertiser revenue sharing?

Maybe they haven’t settled this yet despite having apparently worked out revenue models last September. And yet in this blog entry for early March 2006 ezboard’s CEO specifically invited people to move their boards to Yuku there and then!