The "Unique User Debate" I am not a frequent poster so I have no interest in getting into a big back and forth with this, but I just thought I would share a few things on my perspective for unique users (the main metric used by Ortsbo to measure growth). Note, this is not a commentary on the monetization of users, which is an entirely different topic.
Firstly, unique users (aka unique visitors) is an analytic used to measure website traffic. Unique users are calculated by cookies so that people using the same computer are not counted more than once when visiting a site like ortsbo.com. The use of this metric is certainly not without controversy and one can easily look into this with some time on google. One of the main points of controversy is that people using their work computer as opposed to their home computer would be counted as two unique users instead of one because the cookie assigned to each computer would be different. Furthermore, people who delete their cookies on their computer would be counted more than once as another, new cookie would be assigned to their computer which would register as a different unique user. People using two different browsers from the same computer can create a similar situation. And so on ... I am not on expert on this and there appears to be plenty of room for debate on internet chatrooms dedicated to web analytics ... so I'm not going to expand more on this. Lots more to learn on this though, so I encourage anyone wanting to learn more to spend some time and fill your boots.
The long and short of it ... the method of calculating unique visitors / users has the potential to overstate the number of actual users. From what I have seen, there is no consensus on how much things can be overstated; in some cases, people make arguments for users being half or one quarter of reported numbers but this is not a universal opinion. You cannot directly compare Facebook REGISTERED USERS to another site using UNIQUE USERS because they are not measuring the same thing.
HOWEVER ... that said, the use of unique users as a measure of web traffic DOES have a place in modern analytics. As an INT investor, I am not overly concerned about the unique user numbers that INT reports to be 100% representative of the actual number of users. When it comes to Ortsbo's users, I am personally more concerned with the trend (which is going up at a rapid rate) and that the company doing the web analytics is reputable ... in Ortsbo's case, Google Analytics is used and hence the question of reliability in my mind is satisfied. I am comfortable that INT is reporting unique user data in good faith that they deem to be accurate based on the information provided to them by their web analytics provider.
Furthermore, when you look at other companies, unique users ARE being used as a measure of traffic. One day, someone might revolutionize the web analytics field by developing a metric that is significantly more accurate than unique users (for sites that don't have the ability to measure registered users, such as Facebook) and eliminate all controversy on this subject. Until then, companies are using unique users and therefore we can compare apples to apples with companies using this metric. I am disagreeing with other posters on this board who were challenging people earlier on to name even one single company that uses unique users for reporting. I think there are some good examples of companies using this metric and some of these will be provided below.
First and foremost ... Youtube. A social media giant ... no one can challenge the popularity of this website. On this alone, I am comfortable enough to say that if it is good enough for Youtube (Google), then Ortsbo using unique users is good enough for me. "Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month"
https://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics/
Another social media name people will recognize is Yelp, who report traffic as unique visitors / users and who coincidently also use Google Analytics. "Yelp had a monthly average of approximately 71 million unique visitors in Q1 2012"
https://www.yelp-press.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=250809&p=irol-press
And how about Zynga ... another big social media company in the spotlight. They have reported unique user traffic in the highlights of their Q1 financial results. "Strong Growth in Player Network with 182 Million Monthly Unique Users, Up 25% Year-Over-Year:
https://investor.zynga.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=667869
And how about LinkedIn? Yup ... they cite unique visitors as well (different than their registered user base). From their financial metrics Q1 2012: "According to comScore, unique visitors (including members and non-members) averaged 102.5 million in the first quarter of 2012"
https://press.linkedin.com/about
U.S. real estate listing company Zillow, which boasts over 100 million U.S. homes listed, uses unique monthly users to demonstrate their growth statistics:
https://investors.zillow.com/events.cfm
And so does TripAdvisor ...
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tripadvisor-hits-50-million-unique-monthly-visitors-130107508.html
Respected news sources like BBC and Bloomberg also cite unique visitors / users as a measure of online usage of their news websites:
https://www.bloomberg.com/pressroom/facts/
https://blogs.journalism.co.uk/2012/05/22/media-release-bbc-com-records-15m-unique-users-across-europe-in-first-quarter/
Furthermore, the press does use unique user performance of social media companies like Facebook and Pinterest to comment on the progress of those companies:
https://ibnlive.in.com/news/facebooks-unique-visitors-slipped-in-may/267106-11.html
/www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-03-30/cnbc-pinterest-growth/53893824/1">https://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-03-30/cnbc-pinterest-growth/53893824/1
Anyway, I think the important point here is that INT is certainly not alone in reporting unique users or using it as a metric to determine traffic. It is not a perfect measure and I certainly don't dispute that ... there are other metrics like pageviews, that can be used. However, unique users is clearly in healthy use and even if one questions whether these statistics should be cut in half, etc., you would likely be applying this to all businesses and therefore the relative strength of users / visitors is still preserved.
QED
Respectfully,
BUMBLEBEE