You may have heard that Hasbro, which produces the popular board game Scrabble, is asking Facebook to remove its Scrabulous app. As the name suggests, Scrabulous is an online version of Scrabble that has become one of the most popular Facebook apps – even founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recently admitted in a 60 Minutes interview that he enjoys playing the game with his grandparents.
I dipped into the Hitwise data to see if Hasbro’s concerns that users might confuse Scrabble and Scrabulous were warranted, and it seems that they may well be. The Scrabulous website receives nearly twice as much traffic from searches for “scrabble” as the official Scrabble.com website, which is only visited by 11% of UK Internet users searching for the term.
As the table below illustrates, four of the top search terms sending traffic to Scrabulous.com contain the word “scrabble”, with 53% of searches for “online scrabble” going to Scrabulous.

Scrabulous is not just a Facebook application, but can also be played via the company’s website. Interest has continued to grow, with visits to the website increasing 11-fold over the last year. Almost 40% of visitors to the website are over 55, with a skew towards women players.