It’s a little harsh on the eye and could do with an interface makeover but Don’t Stay In could well be the biggest UK-based social network you’ve never heard of. That said, you have probably heard of it if you like going clubbing and having your photo taken by DSI “spotters”, because as its publicly available traffic page shows, it’s clocking up some good numbers. After four years of organic growth 
it now has over 350,000 users (but is signing up about 10k a month), is clocking 30m page impressions per month and has over 13,000 members logging-in and uploading photos over the course of a day. As the comments on this Trendcatching post attest, Don’t Stay In has passionate users, cultural relevance and real community - the kind a lot of Web2 companies would kill for. The business model is based on selling advertising and tickets. Clubbers can build a profile on the site and interact with other clubbers and content. Promoters get a digital platform for promoting events.
The fact that it has scaled to multiple countries (albeit all in English) shows ambition on the part of its three young founders, Dave, Tim and John (and their 15 staff). It even turns out that in 2005 Channel 4 made an entire half hour show about the site, an MPG of which is available here. I also ran a comparison of the site against some more recent competitors like Trusted Places, WeHangHere, and even the better funded Qype, and Don’t Stay In beats all of them (see below). My initial impression is that this could be a potential acquisition or investment which could be taken to the next level.
Mike, not sure where your numbers came from, but the site lists ‘511 members currently logged in’ which is a bit shy of 13,000! Also, it seems a bit, how can I put this, turgid …
In the clubbing scene this is a big site, and if you’re not on it, you’re not clubbing. I have had a great time with the site literally since its inception. And before facebook it was THE site to rush to after the lights went up at 6am and upload you’re pictures and tag them. For many it still is.
It is a true word of mouth set up, free cards are given to new members that request them, and you give them out when you take a photo of someone when out. I believe it’s truly made clubbing more friendly.
A few downfalls have been the clique’ness that groups of people enevitably conjour up, and many “pro-spotters” spend their entire nights just taking pictures in hope of, I can only guess, a break at professional photography.
Originally donations were quite common, though advertising has become more prevelant over time, and ticket sales are a relatively recent introduction. It’s a great site!
Hi Guys. John from DSI here. The 511 is users active in the last five minutes. We have about 40-50,000 uniques a day.
Some more detailed stats are avaliable here:
http://s6.dontstayin.com/6f/41/6f416902-65c1-4e71-bdbb-6de19abed023.gif
The site has a lot of depth that you dont really see straight away, have a good play with it before judging us!
The hot forums page has some nice times updates, so you can see how often the popular forums get updated:
http://www.dontstayin.com/pages/hotforums
The live chat on the left hand side is also a nice little site wide feature where peopel can IM all day long.
We currently working on a new user wizard that should help people on their first visit.
I think Tim is having a chat with Mike now giving him a few more details. If you have any questions give us a shout.
Ivan - Apologies, have changed that to read, 13,000 over the course of a day. These - of course - are numbers they publish and are not independently verified.
Being the owner of a UK dance brand, I have used Dontstayin from a business angle, and seen amazing results.
What initially started with some people handing out cards in our club has quickly progressed into a 1000+ members community that we now have instant access to to tell them about our events.
The one thing that DSI manages to do where many sites have fallen down, is gain a national coverage, and not be too localised (although London does hold a majority of members).
DSI gives us the ability to run our own website within itself, so we don’t have to fuss about with maintaining an entire site ourselves, and can get on with promoting.
I’d recommend this site to any other promoters out there. Feel free to check out http://www.dsi.summitevents.net if you would like to see how we feel we are using the site to it’s full potential.
Great find Mike. I remember the TV programme. Started out as a way to get clubbers together, although I guess that now, people are doing it on Facebook.
From memory, the guys claim that membership was fiercely loyal and I would argue that it would still enjoy significant support if it ventured into something like Facebook to increase numbers rather than lose members because of the features Facebook has to offer.
Mike, you don’t seem like a hardcore clubber so I’m not that suprised you haven’t heard of them
DSI has delivered really well and although I don’t know the team personally, people who do put a lot of the success down to the personalities of the founders and how well they fitted with the community they were building.
Nic had mentioned somehting similar in this post: http://www.theequitykicker.com/2007/11/30/personality-important-on-social-media-sites/
Hi all - if you’d like to have a jolly good laugh, here’s the documentary about DontStayIn that was made for Channel 4 back in 2005:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-2814261186846054856
Congratulations to the dsi team. We at Qype have been following several other clubbing and party picture websites in Europe and we are quite impressed with what they are doing in the UK.
It just goes to show that the local/social model can work on so many different levels. I see the usage patterns and behaviour being different to what we see on local review sites like Qype, which is a good thing