MCLEAN, Va. - (Business Wire) Today, Mixx (
http://www.mixx.com), a branded social news site, celebrates the one year anniversary of the community
’s public BETA launch. With this first year mark, Mixx announces site metrics of 4 million monthly unique visitors. The Mixx community has increased its audience ten times over since April 2008 when the site then had 400,000 unique visitors.
Mixx Founder and CEO, Chris McGill, says he anticipates the site to continue to grow rapidly. “By year’s end, we expect to engage six million unique users per month as we add in new product features, platform enhancements and our continued expansion reach with publishers — all of which have added significant growth to our user base.”
Since Mixx opened the community in October 2007, USA TODAY, CNN.com, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and NPR among other branded news properties, and untold numbers of blogs have incorporated “add to” Mixx buttons onto story pages. Each online news site offers users direct access to Mixx’s networking and personalization tools through premiere, branded placement of Mixx buttons.
“USATODAY.com continues to introduce new and innovative ways to provide our users with a superior news experience, which includes community and social networking tools,” said Craig Moon President and Publisher of USA TODAY. “The social networking capabilities of the Mixx platform – including the user-driven tools to quickly surface breaking news – enable online news consumers to access personally relevant headlines and stories in an intuitive and engaging way.”
Growing the Mixx Community
When Mixx launched 12 months ago, Chris McGill described Mixx as being inspired by some of the Web’s most notable community sites. At launch, McGill painted a picture of the Mixx community as having “the face and body of a site like My Yahoo!, Netvibes or PageFlakes, a social media heart like a Digg or Reddit and LinkedIn limbs so you can hold hands if you like.” Mixx, McGill additionally noted, “is also inspired by Marvin Gaye, because we are all sensitive people with so much to give.”
Holding true to this vision, Mixx has rolled out dozens of product innovations in social media over the past year. Among other category differentiators, Mixx has carved a niche for itself among competing social news sites by delivering original, user-based content and features through Mixx Communities (http://www.mixx.com/groups/create_your_niche). To date, thousands of organizations and groups looking to establish their own custom, niche social media site have adopted the feature, which uses the Mixx platform, related tools and functionality. Organizations like TechCrunch and Advertising Week built their own Mixx Communities to serve as syndication platforms to circulate news content for annual conferences such as TechCrunch 50 and Advertising Week DC.
“Mixx is the most accessible and progressive social media site out there right now,” said Greg Davies, host of the Social Blend and Super Mixxer on Mixx. “Mixx continues to embrace us with new features and innovative ways to connect to fellow Mixxers. After opening its doors one year ago, Mixx is becoming the most inclusive social media community on the Web. At this point, we simply cannot imagine life without Mixx.”
Mixx also announces that it will launch the first Mixx Widget and Mixx Toolbar today. Like Mixx, the toolbar is designed for the end user in that it is fully configurable in its look and feel. Most importantly, the owner can pull in content on any subject of their liking based on Mixx tags. The Mixx Widget allows website owners to source content relevant to their area of focus and change it at will. The toolbar is built in conjunction with Searchme and has a Mixx It button that allows the user to submit any site to Mixx. It also has the latest headlines from Mixx built into it.
Both the widget (http://mixx.com/widget) and the toolbar (http://www.searchme.com/tools/toolbar/mixx/) will be available by 12PM EDT.
About Mixx
Mixx is owned by Recommended Reading, Inc., a privately-held company based in McLean, Virginia, dedicated to connecting users and publishers in an ever more crowded digital media environment. Mixx is a customizable social media website that empowers both users and publishers of mass market content with an unprecedented blend of user-recommended media, online social networking and comprehensive personalization tools. It is built on a fundamentally different structure that allows publishers to drive highly qualified traffic to their sites while transforming their audiences into grassroots evangelists. Mixx users engage in an intuitive, threaded experience as a result of their participation in community activities around topics they define, and creation of their own interest-based start pages with customized content submission and delivery. More information is available at www.mixx.com or info@mixx.com.
Dowd Agency for Mixx
Kelley Campau, 212-686-7777
kelley@dowdagency.com
