TripAdvisor Acquires Facebook App Where I’ve Been For $3 Million

August 16th, 2007 at 9:19 pm

I’m going to go out on a limb and say I believe that is more than it’s worth. Kudos to the developers, quite a coup.

August 16th, 2007 at 9:24 pm

Yup, I remember reading his post on the dev discussion board too. There must be some mistake in the $/user. Maybe they misplaced a decimal point…

August 16th, 2007 at 9:34 pm

Oh. My. God.

Kudos.

August 16th, 2007 at 10:04 pm

the hook to this app is the simple interaction model, and unique look (e.g., not google or yahoo maps api). he did a great job on that front. that said, there’s about 25 grand of value in the app itself. travelzoo, tripadvisor, sherman’s travel and friend pay a couple of bucks per email address so they can pummel users with their “special deals.” they discounted that by 50% because there’s no way of telling if facebook users have any loyalty to their little map if something better comes along.

that said — right place, right time. congrats

August 16th, 2007 at 10:37 pm

At $1.30/user I think it’s a steal. It’s not really about the app. but about the userbase. Often it’s way more expensive to acquire users than what was paid - and it being the competitive travel business only makes it even more of a steal.

August 16th, 2007 at 11:16 pm

$-per-user are crappy valuation metrics. any buyer who is evaluating deals using that math deserves what they’re getting.

while there is probably a floor price based on per-user #’s, the higher-end of acquisition deals is more likely based on how engaged the user is, which is indicated by time-on-site and/or canvas page metrics or other usage metrics.

my rant on this subject is here:
User Engagement is a depth, not a breadth, metric

August 17th, 2007 at 12:46 am

Is this the first facebook app purchase? I don’t remember seeing another being bought.

Also, this is intriguing as to my possibility to become a facebook app dev.

August 17th, 2007 at 1:26 am

Congrats to Craig! He was quick to execute and kept the concept brilliantly simple + with no prior business developed it as a standalone (not like many travel apps, including ours - first to admit!).

One place I like to compare numbers is travbuddy.com because on their site they display their total member numbers vs. on FB which displays the total members currently with the app installed/on their profile. Knowing that travbuddy started off with about 50 000 members before their facebook app, you can see they’ve added about 850 000 members in the past two months. Their app on Facebook reports about 400 000 members, meaning less than half of whom originally added it have kept it. I’d assume that percentage to be slightly less on where i’ve been because it is a standalone app and facebook members prefer these, but let’s say it’s between 30 and 40%. With 2.5 million active occurences of the app, the real number of people who have added it in that period will be something like 3.3 to 4 million! If tripadvisor really has access to all those email addresses now, that’s under a buck per email address. Whether they do something with that remains to be seen of course (I wouldn’t really recommend it and I don’t think the guys over there are that stupid).

On top of all the above, this is an app which will probably have 5 million users in another 2 months, maybe 10 million in a year. Every day that goes by with another 50 000 apps added makes the math better and better. I say congrats to Tripadvisor and Craig!

August 17th, 2007 at 2:38 am

In one word “@mazing”. The reason for $$$s is Facbook API for sure!

August 17th, 2007 at 6:39 am

This is crazy. Congrats to Craig. I wonder what the plans are for the app? Will they pull it out and make it its own site with advertisement and then feed the data into Facebook. I will say it is a cool app but I don’t want it to clutter my Facebook page.

August 17th, 2007 at 7:45 am

Facebook should capitalize on this great advertising for potential App developers. The potential for a 3 million payout is a lot of motivation to design something unique.

August 17th, 2007 at 9:29 am

Great job and congratulations! Facebook apps are great marketing channels for companies as TripAdvisor has realized. They cannot and will not exist as stand-alone companies.

August 17th, 2007 at 11:36 am

This is not true.

http://mashable.com/2007/08/17.....-facebook/

August 17th, 2007 at 12:33 pm

Kind of amazed that this is the only article I saw on this topic that did not offer some kind of skepticism… Which would have proved to be well-founded, since TripAdvisor denied the rumor.

August 17th, 2007 at 1:30 pm

Newsflash: Google is buying the Golden Gate Bridge because Batboy just jumped off and they want to make it safer. Just wanted to share it with the TechCrunch audience because I read it on a blog or something on the Internet.

Thanks for the solid reporting TechCrunch.

August 17th, 2007 at 4:29 pm

Hello everyone, my official statement:

There have been some rumors in the market that we have sold our business. These rumors are not true. Our future development plans, combined with our robust community of users, current growth rates, and the attractiveness of the travel vertical, have led to a number of strategic discussions with potential partners/acquirers, but we have not agreed to any deals and we are committed to building Where I’ve Been into a sustainable and profitable standalone business. We are, however, exploring all avenues to maximize the value and usefulness of our product for our user base and we expect to announce new product features/enhancements, from both internal development and through strategic business partnerships, in the weeks and months ahead.

August 19th, 2007 at 2:49 pm

Michael, you should talk to Naval Ravikant from Hitforge. He’s the one that ‘leaked’ the news first at the appdevcon (see transcript at http://www.insidefacebook.com/.....francisco/).

Now, was it really my comment that prompted the follow up post? Got to love the blogging world if that’s the case….

August 28th, 2007 at 11:37 am

Hi Everyone, Me again…

We have not sold, we are actually looking to hire people and continue working on Where I’ve Been, if you would like to join me and you live in the Philadelphia area then please let me know:

http://www.whereivebeen.com/jobs.php