Today, Wix announced that it raised a $3.5 million series B round From Mangrove Capital Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. The Israeli startup offers a Web-based Flash editor for making artful widgets and Websites, but without losing any SEO juice. (I’ve embedded two examples below).
The service has been showing some healthy growth since it launched in public beta last June. Co-CEO Allon Bloch tells me that Wix just crossed the 200,000-user mark, and is adding between 2,000 and 3,000 a day. These users are creating 2,000 new Web pages and widgets every day (the split is about 75/25 in favor of full-blown Web pages on MySpace and elsewhere).
In September, says Bloch, Wix content across the Web generated 20 million pageviews, up from 13 million in August. (Only a small fraction of that was on Wix.com itself). The U.S. makes up 50 percent of traffic. After that, the biggest countries for Wix are France, the UK, Brazil, and Canada.
Boch has a simple business plan: charge $5 to $10 a month for premium features that appeal to businesses and designers such as removing the Wix logo and letting them connect the Web pages to their domains.
Good for Wix!
I’m incredulous about their claim of retaining SEO juice. Flash is famous for being worthless to search engines. Even Emperor Steve hasn’t been able to get Flash to run on the Death Star, I mean iPhone.
Lately Google announced that they had a deal with Adobe and now can crawl Flash content the same as html, and Wix claims that they spit out a hybrid of flash and html (I don’t know what it means)
I can confirm that some flash content of mine (no other html content, descriptions, keywords etc to support it) is getting some surprisingly high results
This is interesting:
(from: http://support....our_new_website)
“2. Choose Your Platform With Care: Before you even write a word, it’s important to ensure your Website is designed in Format that Robots can read. For most html-based sites this is a given. It is also a given with Wix. Traditionally, this is not a given with Flash. So if you are thinking of using flash – dynamic visuals being great for humans – Wix may be the solution for you. (Wix creates an html mirror of all your web content that can be read by search engine robots but is invisible to your website visitors).”
I would like to see what it looks like.
Mazal Tov!!!
With THIS name they will not get a single German-speaking user
Congrats Gig and Allon!
Wix is the future of consumer web content development for social networks and beyond. It is great to see web publishing tools startups getting funded.
Have tried Sprout before based on Techcrunch recommendation. I’ll give WIX a spin.
-Dash
the bubble still has not burst
Wow… amazing that crap like this is still getting money. You call 70,000 users for Series B ‘early growth’? They’re like dinosaurs! My blog gets more traffic and I didn’t get all these millions in seed and series A…
Is it just I or does everyone see “Error 2032″ instead of widgets?
It looks like techcrunch killed their servers I mean the load time down right sucks over a minute and still a white page….
free website, free myspace layout, free FLash myspace layouts!!!
I don’t understand its all free I mean how many ADS does one have to click on before the investors get all this money back? Its not like it has the potential to be a myspace or a facebook in terms of traffic, what are these VC companies thinking? Really lets go high $.50 a click, it would take 17,000,000 ad clicks just to get your investment back….
WIX???
Wix has changed the life of my business. It is fantastic
wix site is still in beta yet their support consists of a French guy who’s very nice, but also hard to understand because he doesn’t even bother spelling his messages. This is not very professional and looks more like an amateur hacker operation from a dorm room. I wouldn’t risk paying a monthly fee. For example, this is how the company introduces the premium service on the forum:
http://forum.wi...=485&page=5
I think that the best thing, for a site creation, is not to be a beast concerning html, php, sql integratins etc because most of the peoples don’t care about because they don’t know it and this is the reason why they come to professionnals. The better thing is to be able to develop nice designs and it’s not accessible to everyone because it requires a nice design spirit, sensibility, artistic predispositions etc… Wix cezrtainly
OMG!
I still think the best Flash apps are the ones custom made, but the real professionals. No matter the kind of tools a service gives you at hand, because if you have no skills, or knowledge in usability, etc – it’s pointless. It will make the web look worse!
I just did a litle we-site in a few minutes.
Awesome this web site editor.
If until is in beta, i wonder what will do in the final version.
Wix is growing, but they were lucky with the timing of the investment. It’s surprising that the funds didn’t come out with an official release.
Read the interview with Allon Bloch and more on this story at: http://vccafe.c...ncing-series-b/
Wow, $3.5M? Thats a LOT of cash!
http://www.privacy.de.tc
they must have transferred the funds literally the day before the crash a couple weeks ago and are just now announcing… there is no way this deal would ever get funded on Sand Hill Road today… this is just another premium services model that won’t sell. Very few users will pay to generate their own content… the only hope is advertising sales, and that’s out the window in terms of an acceptable model. I can see a few hundred artist or web designers pay $5/mo over the long term… but that is not a way to generate ROI for the investors… I’d say the investors feel pretty stupid in the light of the new economic dawn.
if what you need is a flash design go to http://www.artd...gitalonline.com you will find all you need as far as flash.
WIX is a very advance application for editing Flash files on the web. It has many useful tools that are according to user need.
Shadow Stewart
Social Bookmarking Service
OT: I’m getting sick of seeing ‘privacy.de.tc’ getting spammed to the reply section of EVERY Digg article. The author (who normally posts as ‘Jeff’) leaves empty five word replies in each instance, and tag-lines all of his posts with his site address. It’s a blatantly transparent, cynical, Google baiting tactic, and it’s really starting to raise my hackles.
Go Vish!
does google crawl all flash content now or do you have to do anything special to make it work?
nothing to do
Wix is really a creative web app for Flash!
If you’ve checked out Wix I’d be interested to know what you think of my web app for making a free website.