NetworthIQ Blog

Back in September I reported on NetworthIQ being #1 on MSN and the struggle with Yahoo and Google. I’m focused on the keywords net+worth and derivatives (like net worth calculator, etc.). 3 months later, we’ve maintained the #1 position on MSN and we’ve cracked the top 20 (#18) on Yahoo. But, we’re still nowhere to be found on Google. Our inital PageRank was 5, which is pretty good for a young site, so I need to do a little work to understand the discrepency between the major search engines here.

This last week marked the 5 month point for NetworthIQ, and we’re celebrating another milestone by hitting the 2000 user mark. As of now, here’s what the community looks like:

Total Users: 2036
Users with net worth entered: 1711
Public Profiles: 660 (32%)
Median net worth for all users: $84,000

As expected, the median has come down significantly from the 1500 user mark, as the occupations become more distributed.

Public profiles are also at the lowest percentage we’ve seen thus far, though they’re still above what we originally expected. Defaults matter when it comes to site registrations. For sites like Flickr and Del.icio.us, they share everything by default and have a vibrant community as a result. We’re dealing with more sensitive information, so we decided that sharing would not be the default. However, I’d be interested to see what people’s of opionions would be of making public profiles the default?

You may have noticed that development has slowed a bit. Time is precious, and there just doesn’t seem to be enough of it these days. Paging and sorting of the user listings is the closest to being ready. I’m also working on a “zeitgeist” section where we can offer highlights from around the site. There is a site re-design, with the long-overdue improvements in entering and navigating entries, well underway. That release, will mark our official release and exit from the public beta period.

It’s been a few months since we were in the NY Times, so I guess we were due for another traffic spike. Today, somebody by the name of Mark Millerton wrote an article listing his top 10 Web 2.0 sites and we made the cut!

6. NetWorthIQ - Wanna know how filthy rich you aren’t? NetWorthIQ allows you to enter in your debts, assets, cash, etc. and track your net worth over time. The site is easy to use and you can even compare yourself to other people your age, location, education level, etc. The graphs are pretty and the site really sets itself apart from the Web 2.0 pack.

Thanks Mark! Turns out that this article made the front page of Digg, which if you follow the web much, you’ll know that getting on the front page of Digg is a ticket to a huge surge in traffic. Though the Digg effect for us was indirect, it is still significant (too early to tell how it stacks up to the NY Times traffic, I’ll do a comparision after the smoke settles).

Welcome all newcomers, we’re happy to have you. This should bring my goal of 2000 users by the end of the year within reach.

FreeMoneyFinace is hosting this week’s Carnival of Debt Reduction. Check it out for tips on how you can make those charts even more impressive.

We hit the 1500 user mark today. The last hundred users took about 5 days, a pretty good pace. Here’s the breakdown:

Total users: 1502
Users with net worth entered: 1277
Public profiles: 560 (37%)
Median net worth for all users: $116,350

The influx of lawyers has raised the median from where it had been (around $100,00) for the last few months. I expect the median will drift back down as the distribution of occupations levels out again.

Speaking of Net Worth statistics. We released the NetworthIQ Net Worth Statistics earlier this week for our newsletter recipients, and now we’re releasing them for everybody to see. See anything interesting?

(Note: if you’re interested in receiving the newsletter, be sure to update your account to indicate you want it)

Check out this listing of Net Worths (hat tip to Adam Trachtenberg):

Forbes Fictional 15

You think they would skew the NetworthIQ stats?