Hunch: Traffic Down, Registrations Way Up & We’re Smarter

Even though its traffic is down, Hunch says new user registrations have risen dramatically recently. And as more users register, Hunch says its recommendation engine keeps getting smarter.

Barely more than two months ago, Hunch began requiring visitors to register/login to use the site. In doing so, all Hunch visitors were required to answer the site’s “Teach Hunch About You” (THAY) questions — the information that Hunch relies on to make more accurate recommendations. To date, Hunch says its users have answered more than 50 million THAY questions. At the time of that June announcement, Hunch said that users with profiles typically get 20% to 40% better results.

In today’s blog post, Hunch shares some of the results of that change:

Since we changed Hunch to login only, our overall site traffic has dropped but the number of users registering daily has tripled to about 3,000 per day, growing aggregate accounts by about 15% every month. The accuracy of recommendations has gotten a lot better since Hunch is much smarter when users have an account.

Hunch also says it will soon announce “a number of partnership deals” that will involve Hunch being used to personalize other web sites.