When we first covered real-time photo-blogging service DailyBooth last August, we had noticed how remarkably vibrant the community already was, and how quickly the site was amassing tons of traffic.
The startup was launched in February 2009, received some initial seed funding from Y Combinator over the summer and has now raised an additional $1 million from an all-star team of institutional and individual investors.
Wall Street Journal blog Digits broke the news earlier this morning, and reported that DailyBooth has secured ‘roughly’ $1 million in financing from Sequoia Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Betaworks, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose and Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake.
In an interview with DailyBooth co-founders Ryan Amos and Jon Wheatley, we learn that its users use the site like real-time poster child Twitter only with webcam-shot photos, which they say is in line with current trends of more personalization in short-form online communication means. The company says it’s currently receiving about six million monthly unique visitors, a number that’s reportedly still growing by about 35% a month. Talk about swift adoption and viralness.
The two men also went into the demographics a little, saying that the majority of its user base is located in the United Stated and other English-speaking countries such as the UK and Canada (which makes all the sense in the world, since the service isn’t multi-lingual yet). The majority of its users are 15-to-25 years old women, they add.
DailyBooth says it will use the extra cash to help them scale the service first and think about making money later on – currently they’re thinking in the direction of media-based businesses, premium offerings and offline distribution like photo-printing.
In conclusion: DailyBooth is growing fast, has gotten the attention and money from some of the nation’s most prolific and well-connected investors in real-time Internet startups and doesn’t appear to be all too worried with monetizing the service just yet.
Its co-founders were right: it is very much like Twitter.
Update: A couple more angels to announce: Former Googler and current Twitter advisor Chris Sacca and Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerMedia.
Man… why the heck am I trying to raise money in France? I’m gonna go find it abroad – really seems a lot easier!
(not that they don’t deserve it! It’s just that… $1m with a growth-only and “we’ll handle revenues later” business model.. well, thought it was not possible any more
)
Cool! I remember when jon first advertise this site on talkfreelance.
And now its so big, great job Jon and Ryan!
oh god.. Here we go again: Real Time.
Another buzzword that is we’re all going to hate in 2 years.
Geocities was real time too. I made a cool website with blinky stars and flashing links and it published it in…… real time!
woo-hoo!
Just like Twitter, expect with more bandwidth. I guess they will go broke twice as fast.
Please, someone enlighten me what’s the practical use of this service. I could post pics on Flickr to “followers”.
I like the idea for a long time but I just don’t see what’s wrong with using the many twitter-centric picture hosts (i.e. Twitpic) out there or flickr.
I think it is only a matter of time before Twitter allows this feature into their micro blogging platform. Once that happens I think sites like this will disappear.
i think a big part of the site is half-naked teenagers, which is a huge missing part of Twitter. so even if twitter launched this, teenagers still will be communicating through dailybooth.
“which makes all the sense in the world, since the service isn’t multi-lingual yet”
?? What? It would make sense if activation focused on those countries, or the product spread virally trough friends.
You know, other countries can handle English (that unknown language) reasonably well…
The internet is a big place. If we all pack up and stop creating start up’s then life would be pretty boring. Yes, there may be other services, even big ones, but whats to say that this, or other ones wont grow. I dont think that the Google boys really worried about their competiton when starting. I’m sure that in a couple of years time we are all going to be laughing when the new Google, Twitter, Facebook comes along.
During a talk at American University for new book (http://bit.ly/3SLceE), Gary Vaynerchuk said that he was an investor as well.
Have been playing with the app and having a lot of fun with it.
I’m glad they announced they’re traffic, because somehow Compete has them at only 144,000 unique visitors a month in the United States, which is completely off according to them. 6 million uniques is amazing in such a short-time with such little funding.
http://siteanal...dailybooth.com/
I prefer flickaday more. They have a much better feature set and have been doing this sort of thing since before it was cool.
it’s not about the idea, it’s about execution and flickaday is poorly executed.
I am Impressed! There are about 950 million people NOT on Twitter, so to say they will be wiped out is premature.
Carry on dude!
Congratulations guys! For those saying “when Twitter adds, or I could do this with Flickr or Facebook, etc” if people WANTED to do it with those services they wouldn’t have the traffic they do now. For Twitter the Dailybooth product would be a feature — the quality and effort difference between a product and a feature is significant.
@BradJashinsky: Compete and Quantcast numbers tend to be WAY off depending on how their sample (Quantcast publishes their sample size of ~40M on their main page) overlaps with the selected site.
Alexa also shows a very feeble trafic level.
Comparing it with other websites I have access to the analytics of, I agree with @BradJashinsky: they can’t be higher than 200K unique viewers/month.
comScore says DailyBooth has < 200K monthly uniques.
Quantcast also says this site has little traffic: http://www.quan.../dailybooth.com
Perhaps their traffic is heavily international?
Maybe TechCrunch can ask the company for some third-party analytics on dailybooth? Be great to know if the site has real traction or just buzz.
their demographic is 15-25 women. i think a lot of teenage sites go under the radar. maybe this is a missing hole in alexa, comScore, etc.
I don’t believe they have 6M uniques, but they have way more than 200k.
I estimate them at around 800k uniques per month. Alexa has them tied with MyProps.org – http://traffic....ops.org& whose traffic is known based on directly measured data: http://www.quan...e&width=520
I’ve studied Quantcast and Compete numbers extensively (compared them to directly measured data) and they are not even CLOSE to being accurate EXCEPT when the site is quantified by Quantcast, in which case each visit is directly measured (Dailybooth is not Quantcast Quantified).
The only non-direct measurement that is pretty useful is Alexa, but it can only be used to compare traffic between two sites (they don’t provide uniques). I have found comparisons on Alexa to be extremely accurate, which I verified by comparing sites that have directly measured traffic on Quantcast or Google.
Looks like fotolog.com
You can’t go wrong with that type of funding group (they aren’t idiots) – so this is def a company to watch!
6MM uniques? What press release did that come out of? According to all other 3rd party analytics services, they max out at 200K….what’s really going on here?
I estimate them at around 1M uniques per month, or a bit under. Alexa has them tied with MyProps.org http://traffic....ps.org& which is a bit under 1M based on directly measured data http://www.quan...e&width=520
I have found Alexa to be very accurate in comparing traffic between two sites (I verified this by comparing sites on Alexa for which I know the precise, directly measured traffic).
Aren’t all third party metrics like 60 days behind?
this is sickening, no more good ideas to fund for sequoia?
this idea is funded like thousands of times, again there is sucker like AOL that buys any shit that says i have traffic, i guess it’s all family business!
Congrats dailybooth! It is well deserved.
Their traffic growth is outstanding, but there are other startups with similar growth that do not receive the same press
http://traffic....yprops.org&
This seems interesting. I wonder if there will be any good pictures that get the site going, like hotornot.