Here’s a good link showing some of the Alexa ranks for Seattle’s startup companies.
You’ll note that there’s only 6 companies that are 10,000 and over on Alexa rank.
Why is 10,000 an important number? Well, it’s pretty fuzzy, but generally 10k is a good rule of thumb for sites over a million pageviews a day. 30 million pageviews/month isn’t even a major site – after all, many sites do billions per day.
What’s the reason why these sites are sucking so much on adoption? Looking through the bunch, it seems like while they are good products, they aren’t great at virally promoting themselves. We’re talking about the various ruthless ways you can acquire users.
Looking through these, only a couple make extensive use of widgets: iLike, and Snapvine are the big ones. (As an aside, Snapvine is undercounted because they have mostly widget distribution, but have millions of widgets out on MySpace and others). And furthermore, I don’t see any folks that are doing the ruthless things that Tagged.com does to acquire users.
The only guess I have is that Seattle doesn’t have a cottage industry of entrepreneurs who have been working on getting things viral the way that the Bay Area does? Or perhaps someone else has other ideas?