Blog network/ citizen journalism site Instablogs is currently negotiating a $3 million round of funding, sources familiar with the deal have told TechCrunch.
The India based Instablogs launched in October 2005 originally as a blog network. The site has changed over time to become predominantly a citizen journalism site that competes with services such as Newsvine, complete with mainstream media syndication deals.
We’ve seen a number of documents related to Instablog’s quest for funding, but as no deal has been finalized we won’t publish them in full, however some interesting stats and quotes as follows:
- Instablogs is doing 2.5+ million page views per month with 12,000 registered members
- $300,000 in revenue last year
- The company is profitable and is pitching its location as a competitve advantage cost wise
From the SWOT analysis Instablog lists its Weaknesses as a high attrition rate of writers, low CPM rates and 30% unsold inventory.
Projections:
Instablogs says that it wants to use the funding to:
Expand the business model, hire key management, technology development which includes but not limited to buying more servers and additional bandwidth, partnership and alliances with more News Agencies, to invest and retain core writers, and online and offline advertising.
I can remember covering Instablogs the day it launched and it was a rocky start. The site had 46 mostly empty blogs and didn’t initially gain a lot of positive coverage. Today lack of content is a problem they don’t have, with a fairly well-rounded portal covering a wide variety of topic areas. The numbers are fairly impressive, and should they take funding it would further legitimize the blogging/ CitJ space as a business proposition.
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they currently make $250,000? why do they need funding? must be a typo
> $300,000 in revenue last year
The pic says 25,0000 USD — do they mean 25,000 USD or 250,000 USD etc?
And if $300,000 revenue last year, how come End-of-2008’s is projected to be $100,000 only?
At last the time has come that TechCrunch started covering startups from India.
Rajan Tawate
Cool:)
The the blind few above - that’s revenue per month in the table, not year.
Whom are they raising it from?
Thanks @5, wonderful presentation table (including “25,0000 USD”)…
Hey you calling blind bitch….shit you are worse than Duncan when it comes to typos….in what country do people use “the” twice to start a sentence….you R Tard
read again it says 25,0000 per month…..
I visit Instablogs a lot. I like the site. It still has a few problems but what impresses me is the comments. I get into arguments with people all over the world!
For 07 they are averaging $10 CPM, which may be on the high end for a general media site. Then by the end of 2010 they increase their page views by 12x but their revenues by 34x. I think this is the part where they use their model to expand their business model.
Highly questionable full-text content sources wrt copyrights clearance…
and it’s more like “instanews” rather than “instablogs“…
I highly doubt they are averaging $10 CPM right now. They aren’t even running any ads on their front page right now.
The projection table is pretty… what’s the word… arbitrary (at best)?
Looks like a good idea but how are they making $25K per month right now with only Alexa ranking of 41K???
http://alexa.com/data/details/.....ablogs.com
just wondering…
I like the fact that you can customize the page. (delete stories, choose how much to display etc,.).
It actually reminded me of Spotback (http://news.spotback.com/) though Spotback looks much more professional…
and what about 2.5 million view a month?
2.5 million/30days = 83K views per day, the Alexa stats are not reflecting that although Alexa isn’t completely reliable.
Even compete.com says 80K per month:
http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv
Can we get some “real” stat here? We are not dumb people here.
Good luck to the Instablogs crew. Like Duncan it was easy to see they had a rough start, but they have a passionate team and an incredibly engaged community. While the traffic isn’t huge, it’s now at a healthy level, and with a decent sales team could do quite well.
Best of luck to Ankit, Nandini and the entire team on closing their round!
Hi, I am the CEO of Instablogs Network.
Thanks for the review Duncan.
And let me answer few questions.
Instablogs started as a blog network. We launched few blogs in October 05 as Duncan mentioned.
In pursuit of bringing our bloggers and readers closer, next year we launched a semi walled community, aggregating our own blogs, adding social networking features, network based tagging etc. The response was good. But we realized in few months that our audiences wanted more.
They wanted to walk shoulder to shoulder with our bloggers producing content. So this new version was planned and was beta tested with few thousand members on different domain http://www.instablogsinc.com (Oh that may also answer why our Alexa rank dropped), as major of the activity went onto the new domain.
Now this version is intended to bring traditional media, bloggers and CitJs all together under one umbrella not competing but complementing each other.
Why instablogs? not instanews?
Instablogs is a community which is build around opinions on current events and news. And IMO blogging is nothing but sharing. On Instablogs people share opinions.
Instablogs Network has 2.5 million pageviews. Out of which Instablogs.com domain gets around 1 million of them.
These guys are selling links to casino and gambling sites. Check their home page of http://www.adventureblog.org/ (One of instablogs network site). What next they will sell us viagra and ciallis. Or will they sell child pornography. They call it citizen journalism. It’s a shame they are using the power of the crowd to monetize by selling casino based links on their sites.
Let me see if this 0blogs can has more blogs than instablogs in less time…
Nice Site.
Do you have actual reporters?
What is the deal with the A.P. newswire? You have permission for that?
And how exactly do you make money? I don’t see ads. Am I missing something?
0blogs? How come there’s no blogs yet? Lol… j/k
Thank you Ankit for the clarification.
Good luck in your projects, the design looks really good though.
One suggestion I might have is to add a big “what is this” button to the homepage. I went to the site and had to click many times to find out what Instablogs are about.
Best regards,
Max from http://sitehoppin.com
Right.. that’s exactly what the name says — zero blogs
Thanks SiteHoppers, will surely instruct our design team to do that.
@HiddenDanger
We pay AP a monthly fees. AP is really good in N.America, Middle East but Latin America and Africa it doesn`t have much updations. We are trying to get more wire services.
Actual Reporters
We have many of them, from over 60 countries including Moldova, USA, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kenya, UK etc. We have a very vibrant community, not just restricted to few countries.
Try spending few minutes on IB, and I assure you would like what you see.
SWAT analysis. Is that deliberate or ignorance? As an MBA (double major) I thought I should have been SWOT that means Strength Weaknesses Opportunities Threats.
You can’t ’swat’ us. We are no flies mate.
Jonty
correct, and I should pay more attention to spell checks
On the revenue side I presume $25k, must have been a typo in the presentation (a did the shot directly from it without edit).
It seems to be that the table was done in a hurry.
1) In lossy jpg format. (PNG anyone?)
2) Inline spellcheck underline present
3) Error in figures ($25,0000?)
Not what I would expect from Tech Crunch…
Duncan,
Re: “I can remember covering Instablogs the day it launched and it was a rocky start. The site had 46 mostly empty blogs….”
1. Try digging into their archive; almost 70-80% of the articles are violating copyright norms. They follow the “Cut-Copy-Paste” jargon.
2. “75 Citizen Journalists???” No wonder they constantly spam Indian Job-Search Websites, each day, everyday.
jonty, just wndering what MBA school u went to…ne idea or itz a secret? LOL..so wat special weapons and tactics (swat) u use mate?
I liked the interface. Must congratulate the guys behind Instablogs. Its one of the best interface I have seen for a news site in a long long time.
But if they truly want to become a global news site, they have to get good content from all of the countries. I tried digging many countries and found those sections to be updated only once in weeks. Only US, UK, India etc are regularly updated.
Hey Steve@27
Try interpreting the difference between a Jargon and baloney… your avowal of the same puts you in a loners pedigree which makes your quipping a baloney against those 83K visitors… u might well use the CCP Jargon to have you comprehend this now.
Editors. I’ve already commented that I’m not sure a financing is really a newsworthy event. I understand, enquiring minds want to know. And I understand the rationale for you guys covering this. But again as a recovering venture guy, now back in another CEO gig, I don’t know why companies spend time talking about rounds. I guess I’m just old fashioned in thinking that only things like customers, subscribers, revenue, results, really matter. But I digress …
However, now I think you guys digress. A company is “negotiating” a financing? What’s next, a company hopes to raise a round? Followed by, Brittney seen at Sequoia?
I very much value what you folks are doing. And there really is plenty of interesting, newsworthy stuff. So please don’t slide into the noise. I’m counting on you to provide some level of filter. Thanks and keep up the good work.
Adding to the ongoing debate, here i have managed to interview Ankit Maheshwari,, CTO and CEO, Instablogs and Nandini Maheshwari, co-founder, Instablogs.
Dive onto the excerpts to get the first-hand information:
http://www.elitechoice.org/200.....-and-team/
@ Duncan Riley
Giving space on TechCrunch and taking time out to do a review of Instablogs, does indicate the Indian start up has arrived on the Global stage.
Never mind the typographical error or the speculation about the dollars, what does matters that the site has had its ups and downs and now that it is being counted alongside peers, is motivating enough to keep going
This sucks- reality of these guys is available on net. There is plenty of discussions about instablogs and their actual business.
Some links about them can be found here: http://www.startupdunia.com/20.....ty-crisis/
and http://elliottback.com/wp/instablogs-sucks/
I think this is enough to guess what goes behind computer screens.
about the typo does this mean carelessness of the author of this article.what’s the use of editors.