ResearchGate to nowhere?
I’m a little baffled by the recent $35M funding round, which included Bill Gates, for social network for scientists ResearchGate. And of course the media baiting quote from RG that it wants to win a Nobel Prize for its efforts.
One look at the traffic stats tells you all you need to know as a potential investor. The graph below is from Alexa, which is known to undercount traffic, but it can be used to reliably compare competitors relative to each other. The redline is Academia.edu and the blue is ResearchGate over the past six months. Alexa ranks RG at the 5,433 most visited site, with Academia.edu at 2,686 most visited.
While RG claims to have 2.9M users, only a very tiny fraction of those are actives. Other traffic analytics stats confirm these numbers. My guess is roughly <5% at most are active each month (active meaning visit the site at least once). Then there is roughly the same amount of non-registered users visting the site per month. Are at most 145K registered users (+150K non users) visiting the site per month, with no revenue other than a small jobs board, worth $35M in funding? This probably values RG north of $150-200M. I must be missing something, or else Academia.edu should ask for $70M in its next funding round.
Then there is the value proposition. I fail to see any with RG. Academia.edu doesn’t have a lot either, but certainly more than RG. A lot of scientists have also compared Mendeley to RG and Academia.edu, which definitely has value proposition to users, and never raised such a round. One could also throw in FigShare, which has some overlapping functionality and more value add, yet it has never achieved anywhere near such funding to date.
Probably the biggest strike against such a large round however is researcher sentiment. I’ve yet to meet anyone exclaiming RG as beneficial to their work (quite the opposite in fact with many reports of spamming and site scraping). On the other hand, I hear plenty of scientists talking about the value of FigShare, Mendeley, Papers, and even Academia.edu to their work. One has to wonder what kind of due diligence was done by the investors here.
