Every time Blekko starts to fade from the spotlight, it seems that another big group picks up the story. This time around its the almighty New York Times, who published a story about Blekko’s attempts to streamline search and provide more useful results. That article serves as a great platform for Blekko, but it also works as a great milestone: the attention of the New York Times tells us of Blekko’s success, but the article also provides some impressive updated statistics. Most notably, Blekko has now reached 750,000 monthly unique visitors.
That number, pulled from the April records, comes after previous reports of a 500,000 unique monthly figure from February and a 600,000 figure from March. The 500,000 figure has been touted from early in the year. Why would it be that Blekko was just “stable” for so long and is now seeing a spike? One answer is the influx of media attention in early 2011. This undoubtedly boosted Blekko’s numbers, and it may have taken the subsequent months to catch up and then exceed the figures provided by this advertisement-induced spike. Their 30% traffic increase from March to April may be the most accurate denotation of their true growth rate.
Of course, Blekko is also getting plenty of attention in its own right. Its partnership with Facebook, including the categorization of the “/likes” slashtag that denotes sites that were liked by your Facebook friends, as well as the company’s continued policy of zero spam tolerance have made an impression on users who have tried the site. Blekko has also been working the conference scene, hitting SXSW among other major conferences. Plus, extras like free t-shirts probably don’t hurt either.
Blekko is growing to the point that it’s (slightly) more than a blip on the radar. This may mean, among other things, that shady search engine optimizers may be giving a go at gaming the anti-spam search site soon. At that point, Blekko will either be showing its real capabilities or disintegrating into just another spam site. And how does the Blekko team feel about this potential upcoming battle? As Rich Skrenta, company CEO, puts it, “That’s a problem you want to have.”
[via the New York Times]
