Taking place tonight in Seattle is The Naked Truth 2009, a Redfin-hosted conference to give entrepreneurs advice. Michael is there participating as an expert to discuss industry trends. This year’s topic is revenue models for consumer Internet startups. The four presenting startups, Redfin, UrbanSpoon, Picnik and Animoto have some interesting information to share via their slides, which we’re posting below, pointing out a few of the highlights.
For those who want to follow along live, you can find the video of the event here.
First up, restaurant recommendation service UrbanSpoon, which was recently bought by IAC. Some highlights of their slide:
- Of their visitors on the web, 74% come from Google.
- Of their visitors through mobile devices, 99% come through the iPhone (they have one of the more popular apps).
- They’re seeing more than double the revenue off of those mobile users versus web users.
- When they were featured in an iPhone commercial, they saw 300% growth.
Next up, online imaging editing service, Picnik (which has a partnership with Yahoo to edit Flickr pictures).
- 80% of their revenues come from paid subscriptions, the other 20% from advertising.
- About half of their subscribers do so on the first visit to the site, 75% of those do within 4 visits.
- “Partnerships are not nirvana” — obviously a shot at Yahoo.
Video slideshow maker Animoto (which recently raised a new round of funding):
- They have 700 paid users per 100,000 users, but are already cash-flow positive with that.
- They say their hybrid model (freemium + virtual goods) is working
And finally, online real estate company, Redfin:
Nice statistics. Shows that SEO cannot be ignored. Many of these sites make $1,000s/mo just from search referral traffic. Thanks. PS: I live in Seattle, but sadly was not able to come tonight.
I’m a huge Picnik evangelist and have brought them many customers through my raves (online and offline). Very cool to get a glimpse at their numbers. I think they’re in this for the long haul, and took great pleasure in renewing my subscription a few months ago.
The Picnik team is also rather accessible and pro-active in customer service, not leaving it to one support silo. This is the kind of behavior that makes me love a company and enjoy giving them my money.
Really wanting to see a larger version of the picture accompanying the article.
The angles are amazing and my eyes are attracted. Guess I’ll have to do some web-sleuth work unless somebody knows where I can find a larger higher resolution version of this picture titled “638653-20090622194016-21709-8214860″
My search only results in linking me to leeches.
If anybody could provide me more information about this image @keldwud on twitter or on gmail, I would appreciate it.
Thanks.
Picture is of the event venue: Olympic Sculpture Park of Seattle. Map: http://tr.im/rGR4
I believe this is the photo:
http://www.flic...ianv/358509155/
Can you go back and watch the event now?
Thanks to the team at Seattle 2.0 TV the event will be available for viewing later at: http://www.seattle20.com/tv/
Stay tuned!
Thanks to our friends at Seattle 2.0 TV you’ll be able to view it here later:
http://www.seattle20.com/tv/
Always good to see quantitative evidence that speaks to the efficacy of SEO as a marketing method that shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought. Or as something any idiot who’s discovered meta tags can do well, but that’s another post.
Also glad to see Picnik doing well. I’m one of the people who signed up for the premium service after the first visit, and months later I’m still impressed with how easy it is to get such good results.
pretty interesting.
I guess SEO tends to be managed sometimes as an afterthough because it can be tricky to manage it as measurable activity, once you decide to invest on it.
With SEM, I got a clear visibility over my leads, costs, and room for improvement. I can budget growth,…
With SEO, once you are done scratching the surface and need to invest serious time and/or money on it, to go beyond the low hanging fruits, you end up putting money against the stability of an algorithm (google ranking) you have no control over, neither contractual TOS that you can rely upon.
Such an insightful article. Thanks for posting.
I have just read this report which is also pretty amazing:
http://www.mark...us-p-61902.html
best part of the included screenshots from picnik:
“Bitnik confidential – do not forward”