Portland-based AboutUs has secured a $2.5 million round of financing from Voyager Capital with the VC firm’s managing director Erik Benson joining its board, reports TechFlash. The company operates a wiki for information primarily about small businesses, organizations, and ‘anything that has a website’. Yes, that includes TechCrunch.
This is different from our own wiki Crunchbase, which featured detailed profiles of companies, products and people even if they don’t have their own websites.
The wiki service attracts a very decent 7 million unique visitors per month to its network of over 12 million pages, and has plans of turning it from a mere resource of information to a full-fledged collaborative work space. In that regard, it’s different from Wikipedia, although both wikis use MediaWiki to power the network.
AboutUs generates revenue from on-site advertising but also sells services like wiki page design and copywriting. According to TechFlash, who spoke with CEO Ray King, AboutUs is already running a profit from its operations, which probably explains why Voyager Capital took the risk of putting more money in the company even in the current economic climate.
We first wrote about the company back in November 2006 when it raised $1 million (the new investment brings its total funding is now about $5 million).
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Congratulations to Ray King and AboutUs.
Great to see a company innovating and succeeding with an ad supported model in this environment. I am very interested in seeing how AboutUs evolves.
Very useful website. It lets me know a lot about a company and how it operates and who’s behind it and their contact info.
Most have contact info hidden. This is an open site.
http://kisalt.us/590/
Innovating? Can you explain that? You harvest info on a wiki, info that is most likely available through other online databases.
Innovative? hardly.. very hardly.
You know that they put contact information of webmasters on this site (I know it’s a Wiki), and you actually have to edit the damn thing yourself to get the personal info removed..
This is just a spam SEO play. You guys know how many ppl search for the actual domain name like http://www.yahoo.com in search engines? Not many websites even target these keywords.. so to me this is just a spam SEO play. 6 million visitors per month is easily achievable.. because they have a page for every domain name in the universe.
Does anyone here actually use this service? It’s USELESS.. PERIOD. No sense even pretending it’s not.
Henley, your comment is very true.
AboutUs is pure S.P.A.M. and this is worse than most forms because you have to remove your personal details from the site, which can take time if you own a lot of web stuff.
Pure garbage and a vile company to have online. It makes me gringe to think that there are actual “respected” investors putting money into supporting this.
AboutUs appears to be worse than locator dude. at least locator owns the names he proliferates.
$2.5 million for a site that is basically a copy of the WHOIS data records?
Agree with the commenter above. This is just a spam SEO play.
If aboutus actually offered something new (content, functionality, social media interaction, etc.) then perhaps they’d be onto something.
I completely agree with you. It is a complete waste of funds. I don’t see any solid business model in this.
Sarah
Probably why you are not a VC.
I had always assumed this company was linkbait spam. I only visit their pages by mistake.
It does have the possibility of becoming a truly interesting data repository, but that would take a lot of work.
So how come they have 0 traffic according to Alexa? Something is fishy here. You don’t have 7M uniques and no data on Alexa.
try AboutUs.org instead of AboutUs.com
Yes, Jose you are so smart
Seems ridiculous - definately an SEO play. I just tried it on our website (NewsCred.com) and it was pretty useless.
I wonder what there revenue model is. Most companies wont pay just to have their site posted.
It is a free site that anyone can update.
@Jose. Something is really fishy here. There is nothing new about the site. Just a copycat of other Wikis out there. Nothing revolutionary.
Very useful website. It lets me know a lot about a company and how it operates and who’s behind it and their contact info.
Most have contact info hidden. This is an open site.
Their traffic will go away in a second if either google penalises them or revert back to the old format for domain-name navigational searches (displaying only the concerned website) as it was before 2007
Whois predates wiki. AboutUs uses wiki to add a “whatis” layer to the traditional whois information. We’re pleased to watch this layer grow.
Well, I like others here only land on this site be accident.
I also don’t see much more than standard whois and contact us information showing for every domain on the web.
If that type of content is worthy of 2 million dollars, then there’s hope for everyone
On the other hand, hats off to AboutUs, they got someone to pay them for this data.
I checked out one website i know and put their url and lo and behold a lot of the information are wrong, address is wrong too. i’m not sure about the use of the website if info is wrong.
Nat
http://www.halflet.com
That’s the whole point of a Wiki! If the information is incorrect, go ahead and fix it.
I was always curious on how they get their URL information, since they seem to have everysite I’ve ever tried.
Does it cover blogs as well?
The point of a wiki is that you can add info. if you want people that either intentionally or unintentionally land on your AboutUs.org wiki page to have good info, add it. Its up to you, your customers and the entire community. As more info is added to the site, the more valuable it will be. And you can determine how fast that happens.
My business partner had a great point regarding AboutUs: they are 1 step away from being a search engine.
Finally, part of the reason they were given VC money is because they are profitable. When your startup becomes profitable, then you can complain. Until then, don’t hate.