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January 13, 2006

Dogster Turns Two

Michael Arrington

39 comments »

Dogster, led by founder and CEO Ted Rheingold, turned two years old yesterday. The company is located in San Francisco.

Dogster is a home page site just for dogs. You can see the page for my dog, Laguna, here as an example. A key part of the site is social interaction among dogs, and Laguna has a number of “friends” that are linked on the page. Dogster also allows tagging of photos, and has just launched a Groups feature (there are already 239 Groups) In general, humans do not interact and you do not know who the dogs’ owners are. For a lot of dog-crazy owners, this is perfect.

Needless to say, Dogster has some pretty loyal users, and the site statistics reflect this:

  • Total human members: 153,000+
  • Total pet pages: 185,000 (130k dogs, 55k cats)
  • Average new pet pages per day: 525
  • Page serves December 2005: 10,100,000
  • Total photos on the site: 750,000
  • Distinct friend-to-friend connections: 5,030,000
  • Virtual treats givens: 7,079,000
  • Total forum postings: 232,000 (1,500 new posts a day)
  • Total pet diaries: 28,000+

Dogster even has a search engine for dog friendly hotels.

The story of Dogster is great, too. Ted was out of work and taking odd jobs here and there, and decided to just follow a dream and create the site. Within 3 months the site was cash flow positive and by month 18 Dogster was profitable. The company never raised outside funds other than from friends and family

Dogster generates revenue from premium accounts ($20 per year), advertising, and sponsorships both on the side and for things like “The World’s Coolest Dog and Cat Show“, which was sponsored by Target, Nintendo and others. The show, by the way, had 20,000 entrants and over 1,000,000 total votes.

Catster (launched in June 2004) is Dogster’s sister site, but I hate cats and refuse to write about it. :-)

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2006 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. arjun

    January 13th, 2006 at 3:42 pm

    an interesting site…looks like it could use a web2.0 facelift though :-)

  2. Scott Rafer

    January 13th, 2006 at 4:36 pm

    AJAX and tags aren’t necessarily the thing for a mainstream site. These guys have users who don’t code and live outside the Bay Area.

  3. Tiddles the Cat

    January 13th, 2006 at 4:48 pm

    Dear Mike,

    May wet furballs torment your soul! Your TechCrunch blog would be nothing without your loyal fanbase of feline readers - please retract your anti-cat comments immediately, or I’ll post my thoughts to Meoworandum, the popular cat-based news site.

    Sincerely

    Tiddles

  4. Paul Montgomery

    January 13th, 2006 at 5:02 pm

    I would like to support Mike for his strident anti-cat stance. Cats destroy native fauna populations, stink up otherwise respectable houses, and generally act too snooty to be likable.

    I think I’ll head over to some Web 2.0 sites to Dogg this story. Maybe it will get Slashdogged too.

  5. Russell Limprecht

    January 13th, 2006 at 5:29 pm

    Mike,

    You could start CatCrunch. Get someone else to write it.

  6. Tiddles the Cat

    January 13th, 2006 at 5:45 pm

    Dogg is a moronic site run by imbecilic canines with nothing better to do than brag about how Slashdog is too Web 1.0 for them. This “wisdom of hounds” garbage is a load of doggy poop propogated by the so-called A-list doggers. Dogg sucks - meoworandum will win out!

    Tiddles

  7. Tiddles the Cat

    January 13th, 2006 at 5:47 pm

    And before the spelling hounds start chasing my tail, I meant “propagated”, not “propogated”.

    Tiddles.

  8. Michael Arrington

    January 13th, 2006 at 7:13 pm

    Great comments guys.

  9. Chunni Babu

    January 13th, 2006 at 7:25 pm

    checkout http://www.kutta.com/
    kutta means dog in hindi. of course, none of this has got anything to do with web2.0 - dogs yes.

  10. uno

    January 14th, 2006 at 1:33 pm

    More company reviews like this and I’m off Techcrunch…

  11. Michael Arrington

    January 14th, 2006 at 2:46 pm

    Uno - why? I like seeing sites bootstrap operations and push themselves towards profitablity.

  12. Kevin Burton

    January 14th, 2006 at 5:53 pm

    Forget Meoworandum… just use TailRank… yuk yuk yuk. :-P

  13. Tiddles the Cat

    January 14th, 2006 at 6:05 pm

    Kevin,

    We were having a serious conversation about the political divisions between canines and felines in the Web 2.0 ecosystem, and you had to go and ruin it with a cheap pun. Shame on you!

  14. Nathan

    January 15th, 2006 at 8:33 am

    Dogster & Catster. Wow, both great sites.

    Regarding the web2.0 face lift. The sites run, they are functional and they are already user driven communities?

    What does a web2.0 face lift include? A bit more javascript?

  15. miscreant

    January 17th, 2006 at 2:35 am

    you gotta be kidding me… dogs have stinky fur, they require owner-operated bathing to keep clean, and slobber profusely on everything. I won’t even mention picking up after dogs, which people here in Hollywood seem to have a hard time doing.

    I love both cats and dogs. Anyone who says one is superior to the other has obviously never had a great specimen of the “inferior” species.

  16. Damian

    January 18th, 2006 at 11:37 am

    Any idea how much money they’re actually making? I just wonder what these kind of sites make on a monthly basis….

  17. Peter Wolken

    April 13th, 2006 at 6:37 pm

    Did you get the info you asked for? How much revenue per month? I doubt that this can be a big business. What is your guess?

  18. developer

    June 5th, 2006 at 5:15 pm

    I thought this was a great article, and I also like reading about bootstrapped operations that have become profitable. I would like to know more about the revenue.

  19. David Monaghan

    June 12th, 2006 at 1:24 am

    Is that two years old in dog years or human years? Heh, just kidding of course. I just came across this one, a little late but it’s a good find in any case. Going to check out Catster now too, both really good ideas if you ask me, people love their pets.

    On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog, except when you’re on Dogster.

  20. Petster

    July 1st, 2006 at 10:22 am

    how about http://www.petster.com ?

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