In May, some 30 million people visited Upworthy, the sharing network that uses data-driven social media to draw attention to topics that matter. The milestone illustrates the strong, sustained growth being seen by the 14-month-old company across all key metrics:
Dwell time (the length of time the average user spends on the site) now exceeds six minutes. In May, the average dwell time peaked at 7:17. Subscriber growth continues to rise, passing three million in May. Email subscribers now top 1.1 million, Facebook fans now top 2.1 million, and Upworthy has 120,000 followers on twitter. At two million, the company now has more Facebook fans than many well-established media companies. Also, according to Facebook, roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has a friend who is connected to Upworthy.
"Upworthy is the single most socially optimized site we've seen," said Edward Kim, CEO of social-action measurement pioneer SimpleReach, whose clients include Time, Entertainment Weekly, and Forbes. "We track 5,000 publishers, and Upworthy content accounts for some 20% of all recorded social actions we measure. Their posts rank in the top 1% consistently — Upworthy is just a remarkable media network."
Upworthy.com has recently been called the fastest-growing media site of all time, was cited by Facebook as a model for telling compelling stories on their platform, and topped Time Magazine's recent list of its 50 Favorite Web sites.
"The best part for us is that the videos driving this insane growth are all deeply meaningful — they're about cancer, domestic abuse, gay identity, body image, fracking," said Upworthy co-founder Peter Koechley. "We believe the really important things in the world need better marketing — that if we put in a little effort to make meaningful things intriguing, tens of millions of people actually do care about them. But honestly, even we are surprised we're seeing this much growth so quickly."
According to data from Web site ranking firm Quantcast, Upworthy's 30 million unique visitors in May topped the traffic of several major-media sites, including Hulu.com, People.com, Us Magazine and NBC Sports.
