San Francisco based social networking site Piczo will announce a third round of financing later today – $11 million, led by new investors U.S. Venture Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners (an early Skype investor). Existing investors Sierra Ventures and Catamount also participated. Piczo previously raised $7 million over two rounds.
Piczo is one of the larger social networks, with 10 million unique visitors generating 2 billion or so page views per month. Their niche is younger teens – 75% of Piczo’s members are between 13-16 years old. And Piczo focuses on security and privacy. Site visitors cannot search or browse user profiles (they must know the exact URL of the member profile), and and there are numerous ways for users, parents and others to report inappropriate behavior. Piczo has full time staff reviewing all complaints and takes swift action to protect its members. The company’s largest single market is the UK, which accounts for 40% of their users and 50% of page views.
We compared Piczo to MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Tagged, Friendster and others back in September. See here for other Piczo coverage.
Some people might say that young users seeking security are the most viable of any niche social networking market but I think they are just an indication that future generations will be interested in social networking in general and will look to specific sites to fill their most pressing needs. Congrats to Piczo.
For crying out loud, how many rounds are these guys going to need for a profitability event? Bubble much?
Congratulations, Piczo!
Kudos for the great work in enforcing security & privacy.
I fail to understand why a social networking site, assuming they have as many employees as Legacy.com (45) and MySpace (60) who do nothing but review content, needs $18 million dollars (especially when websites are not as expensive to build any more). Are they having lavish parties that we’re not invited to? Unless they’re blowing it mostly on advertising….which is ironic if their business model is based on advertising.
Amy, I’m having trouble with the idea too. I have trouble with a lot of the funding amounts I see here, even in a climate where some seemingly unintelligent acquisitions are made, the investment amounts don’t seem to be at all in proportion to either what I’d estimate costs to be at or what I’d expect a liquidity event to be worth. This is very likely due to ignorance on my part, if so could someone please enlighten me?
Oh good, just what the world needs. Another social networking site.
Someone needs to start a company that lets people network all the social networks they belong to.
Seems to me that Pizco is one of those horses now, where they have to win the race or they lose everything. Hopefully they will figure out how to sell the site off to Google, who are flush with overpriced stock, or MySpace before market realities kick in. Next we will hear that Club Penguin is getting millions. At least Club Pengin sounds better and easier to remember. If I were investing millions I would expect more than a 5 digit name thrown on the wall.
geez that’s a lot of money. i hope they can make it last!
Piczo is a great site, concept and has a solid user base. It will only grow once its kid friendly features catch on more outside the UK. It will be interesting to see exactly how they spend that 11mm, yes it will be for expansion but how will they stand out?
Honestly, if you can’t profit with 2 BILLION page views per month, I don’t know who would hand you another 18 million, but I guess it’s pretty high stakes poker out there. I think the idea is that these sites need ot make a major push, become a major player, or quit.
I would think more of them would just grab hold of profitability and do more of what they’re doing than to sell more and more of the company off. I guess that’s why I’m neither granting nor securing my 4th round of VC funding.
Piczo was actually a decent business when it was run by several guys here in SF in the bootstrap mode. I happen to know that they had very decent traffic when they operated on budgets like 100-200k/yr.
They decided to make it big however. Now their traffic is flat, and the company is controlled by greedy VC. I think it’s a failure.
This is the most impossible site to view. It takes the cake in fugly. I dare anyone to stay on this site for more than 30 minutes. Your head will explode. Complete and utter chaos. maybe that’s why the kids like it?
sounds like they are being rewarded for building a strong presence in a very attractive niche – valuations and funding needs are all relative to the marketing value of their audience. nicely done!
With that type of usage, I’d agree it’s not a good sign if they’re not close to profitability and need this much money. Hopefully the investors see something that’s not apparent to the rest of us. Otherwise it seems like another one of those “if we just give them more money we’ll accelerate the path to profitability” investments that usually just accelerates the spending. It reminds me of the hypothetical situation where an investor asks “We’re losing money on every product we sell. What can we do?” And the executive answers “It’s easy. We’ll make it up on volume!”
haha Drama 2.0 that quote is so dead on
Dick your last sentence was correct.
Congratulations to Jeremy and Piczo…. and I’m sorry for all those messages on your cell phone.
“Site visitors cannot search or browse user profiles (they must know the exact URL of the member profile)”
Absolutely false. On the very front page are a bunch of profiles to browse! And no login required!
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I am shocked at how outdated all of the information on the internet about Piczo is! They underwent a major change at least 2 weeks ago. The members are outraged! It almost seems as if Piczo has been hacked! They changed the home page completely! It’s as if there are 2 separate sites there. Like the creator of this “new Piczo” as they call it, is the evil stepmom, the “new Piczo” is one of the evil stepdaughters and the web building part of the site is Cinderella.
What do I mean? Well, as someone who had a site there before the changes I did my best to make this “new Piczo” work for me, but it didn’t work out. This is what is going on. The “new Piczo” -which is for blogging, does not connect with the web site building part of the site. You are forced to create a new nickname. You can then upload an image to be your display picture and you have limited….very limited account options available. These account options are NOT the same as the account options you already had before the changes. You cannot access your original account information at all!
The display picture you upload there does not affect the web building avatar setting. When you go to work on your site you will have the display pic that you had before the change to Piczo happened. You cannot change it. But you can change the one you set in the blogging part.
They put a navigation bar on top of everyone’s site. That navigation only goes to the blogging part of Piczo. You only have access to your friends if you put a friends list on your site. And you can only add your friends via the old toolbar. I had figured that one out on my own. You can no longer click on the meebo chat icons of your friends and visit their sites. If you try to do that you will get an error message.
There is no messaging service now. No contacting your friends or sending them messages. There are no flagging buttons on the web building part of the site now. You cannot add new friends there. The comment boards most of the time will not allow you to leave comments. Even if you are logged in, when you click to add a message you get prompted to log in and when you do that you get redirected to the “new Piczo”. There is no more seeing your friends updates, no more homepage, period, where you can access all of the site’s features.
The blogging part of the site works pretty much just fine. Just sometimes there are blank pages…some kind of error in the site’s system? I don’t know, but I do not like the blogging part. The main reason is that security is gone. There is none. Kids of all ages are posting pics of themselves and giving out personal information in their blogs.
There has also been porn sites making blogs there. One had 9 direct links to porn in it. [there is a flagging option in the blogs] so I flagged that blog like 14 times in one day. It stayed up for at least 3 days before it got removed. Then there was another blog with porn in it the same day the other one finally got deleted.
If you cancel your account all it does it remove the new username you were forced to make. I don’t know if cancelling your account would delete a site you created with that new username because I didn’t try to create a site. Cancelling your account the way it stands right now, does not remove the sites you created prior to the change. I have a serious problem with that. What if Piczo is being hacked right now and that is why there are these problems? That means that the account information I have set to my sites is vulnerable. Trust me, I have learned my lesson from this. I am already being a lot more careful about the information I have on accounts, now. Lesson learned, so nobody has to say anything to me about that.
BUT the issue really is that there are young people who had accounts there. With all the boasting of the safety of Piczo there is no telling how much personal information could be in these accounts, or even on their websites for that matter. Some are set to password protect, but if there is a hacker on the loose there, that password protected site is not safe.
On top of all of that, there are a lot of people complaining that they follow the directions on how to get logged in and have access to their sites, but they are never able to log in.
It just seems like Piczo was recreated and then got abandoned. The only person who responds to anyone in the comments section of the Official Piczo Blog is someone who sounds like a little kid. This person actually used someone else’s username and claimed it was them. This person has completely ignored my legitimate complaints and questions and just tries to throw insults at me. It is a complete mess there. Lots of people have left.