A social networking site started in Dublin by a Swedish student has emerged as one of the fastest growing web phenomena to come from these shores and some 114,000 16- to 24-year olds can’t be wrong, can they?
Nimble.ie was started in February last year by Swedish student Per Jacobsson who was studying for a master’s in business and entrepreneurship at DIT in Aungier Street.
Backed by private investors, the site has managed to come up with a formula to make it sticky, as well as leverage enormous traffic from original Bebo and Facebook users by allowing them to copy over their entire address books to Nimble.ie
The site has other features such as web cameras across Dublin, integration with MSN Messenger and other features such as daily polls, comics, chatrooms and online games.
Some 60pc of Nimble’s 114,000 audience is female and the site’s owners reckon they have in the space of a single year captured 20pc of the Irish population of 16-24-year olds.
The site boasts between four and six million views per month, with the average visiting time lasting 20 minutes.
The site claims that visitors stay longer on the site than on international competitors like Bebo, with the average of 30 page views per user per visit.
“The site’s been growing quite steadily over the past few months and we’ve been taking a combination of users from Bebo and Facebook, with 98pc of visitors being solely Irish,” explained Nimble.ie spokeswoman, Amy Purcell.
“One of the winning factors is that when visitors come on they can add all their friends from Bebo and from Facebook.”
Purcell said she sees Bebo – which has over one million Irish users – as its main competitor in Ireland. “We’ve been keeping ourselves under the radar but now we’re going to embark on a major marketing campaign to boost our profile.”
She explained that monetisation for Nimble.ie will come through advertising and partnerships with colleges.
Purcell added that Nimble.ie is fully financed by its private backers and is currently examining expansion opportunities in countries like France and Spain.
By John Kennedy
