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Posts Tagged ‘million-unique’

People in the online personals industry are buzzing. We’ve heard a rumor that online dating service and IAC property Match.com is acquiring fellow dating site Singlesnet. We’ve reached out to both companies for confirmation. Singleset’s representative wrote back to us to say: “I’m not in a position to discuss or consider this topic at the present time” Match.com has not yet responded.

If true, the acquisition wouldn’t be surprising. Match is in the habit of buying up potential competitors. The dating giant scooped up highly-targeted dating site network People Media last year for a whopping $80 million.

And Singlesnet’s traffic is fairly significant for a dating site that doesn’t have the resources of IAC-backed Match. According to comScore stats for January, Singlesnet saw 3 million unique visitors worldwide, which was half of Match.com’s 6.1 million unique visitors for the same period.

One thing we love around here at TechCrunch is data. And since we’re busy looking up our own traffic stats for 2009, we thought we might as well share those stats with everyone.

Total unique visitors across all TechCrunch sites in 2009, according to Google Analytics, were 69,482,978, up 55% from 2008’s 45 million unique visitors. Those vistors racked up 228,202,753 page views in 2009, up 90% from 2008’s 120 million page views.

TechCrunch is the largest site in our network, followed by CrunchGear, CrunchBase, MobileCrunch and TechCrunchIT, in that order.

Google search is the single biggest source of traffic, although it decreased from 37.3% in 2008 to 29.6% in 2009. Direct traffic is second, at 24% in 2009 (v. 25.3% in 2008). Then there’s a big drop to Digg (5.1% in 2009, 5.3% in 2008), Google sites (Reader, etc. (3.18% in 2009, 4.2% in 2008) and Twitter (2.9% in 2009, 1.2% in 2008). Feedburner, TechMeme, Facebook and Hacker News rounded out the list of top referrers in 2009.

Traffic so far in 2010 is way, way up on the TechCrunch sites (11.7 million unique visitors so far in 2009). We’ve heard anecdotally from others that traffic has surged in 2010 across most Internet sites. We’ll be digging into that trend shortly, too.

Music giant EMI is to deliver its premium music videos onto the platforms run by DailyMotion, the French-based ‘European YouTube’.

Content will go onto the main site, mobile, iPhone app and the DailyMotion channel on Internet-connected TVs. The deal covers all EMI’s labels, and the labels represented by EMI Label Services and EMI’s Caroline Distribution unit.

Artists featured from April will include Coldplay, Katy Perry, Robbie Williams and David Guetta. Dailymotion will deliver ads against the videos to all three screens.

Paris-based Dailymotion has over 65 million unique monthly visitors, according to comScore. It raised another €15 million in financing late last year. The venture recently turned profitable, but that additional investment was required to fund its steep growth. It expects a 50% increase in turnover in 2009 and 2010. DailyMotion says it currently serves 1 billion video views per month.

Glam Media, a vertical advertising network, has raised its fifth round of venture capital – $50 million from aeris CAPITAL, a Switzerland and Silicon Valley based private equity fund. The company is not disclosing the valuation of the round, but it is rumored to be around $750 million.

Glam’s last major funding was a $85 million combined debt and equity round in early 2008, two years ago, that valued the company at around $500 million.

$10 million – $15 million of this new round will be used to purchase stock from existing employees/founders as well as early venture investors. The rest of the round will be used for investment in the business and strategic acquisitions.

Profitable and Rolling

Glam is also announcing EBITDA profitability on North American operations and break-even results globally for Q4 2009. 2009 revenue was likely around $55 million, up from $40 million in 2008.

The company attracts nearly 160 million unique monthly worldwide visitors to the sites it controls and represents, putting it at no. 14 on Comscore’s top 100 worldwide Internet properties. Those visitors racked up over 2.5 billion page views and 2.5 billion minutes spent on the site. The network includes over 1,400 publishers and other content sites.

Glam attracts around 72 million montly U.S. visitors to its site, more than double competitor iVillage’s 33 million. The company, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley and New York City, is clearly gearing up for an IPO in the next 12 – 18 months.

Larry Cheng, Managing Partner at Volition Capital recently put together a list of the top VC blogs according to traffic. On that list, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is the top VC blogger, followed by Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures and Paul Graham of Y Combinator. But which VC firm Websites attract the most attention?  Today, Cheng released another list.  This time, he ranked technology VC firms by traffic to their websites during the fourth quarter of 2009 (as measured by Compete).

Topping the list is First Round Capital, with 31,632 average monthly uniques. Sequoia Capital, which sports a very spare look on its site with only a searchbox and four faint links underneath (“U.S.,” “Very Early,” “Early,” and “Growth”), has the second-most popular site with 22,441 average monthly uniques.  Rounding out third place is Bessemer Venture Partners with 14,825 average monthly uniques. In order to make the list, the firm’s website had to have monthly unique data from Compete for October, November, and December 2009. Volition Capital averaged the traffic and ranked 150 VC firm sites. Of course, the traffic stats are just one benchmark of popularity, but Cheng did say he will be updating the list quarterly.

These are tiny numbers as far as most Websites go, but these are not consumer-oriented sites. The people who go to the sites are prospective startup founders, partners, and people looking for information on VC portfolio companies. Still, it’s interesting to see that First Round took the top spot; perhaps because its VCs are heavy bloggers. In fact, there seems to be a correlation between blogging and traffic to the related VC website VC and seed firms with investors who blog heavily, such as Founders Fund, Founder Collective, Foundry Group, Union Square, and Spark, all have top 25 websites.

Here’s the list of the top ten:

Venture Capital Firm Directory (Avg. Monthly Uniques – Q409)

1. First Round Capital (31,632)
2. Sequoia Capital (22,441)
3. Bessemer Venture Partners (14,825)
4. Highland Capital Partners (12,704)
5. Garage Technology Ventures (12,375)
6. Draper Fisher Jurvetson (11,823)
7. New Enterprise Associates (11,762)
8. Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (10,924)
9. Polaris Venture Partners (10,217)
10. Benchmark Capital (10,162)

In the midst of massive headcount cuts, another AOL exec is departing the newly-independent company. Ralph Rivera, previously the Vice President of AOL Games and AOL Latino, where he was responsible for AOL’s portfolio of online casual games and helped expand its international reach, is leaving to become President of Major League Gaming, Online. MLG is a small but growing professional competitive video game league. Rivera will be tasked to lead digital strategy and online product development for the growing company.

Major League Gaming has shown strong growth in the past few years. The company claims 10 million unique visitors per month, more than double from a year ago, and 6 million video streams. The company has taken $46 Million in funding since inception and have recently landed Doritos and Hot Pockets as advertising partners.

Rivera believes MLG is at an “inflection point” and hopes to help it scale into a larger property. He joins a growing list of long-time executives to jump ship as AOL begins to purge 1/3 of its workforce. As the churn continues, many AOL vets are staring somewhere instead of building up the ‘New AOL’.

It’s official. Yelp is raising a huge chunk of change from Elevation Partners. According to a release, Elevation will invest as much as $100 million in the startup. For now, Yelp will be raising a $25 million in a Series E round from the firm. We broke the news last week here, when talk of the round was in the $50 million range. The initial infusion is half that, but Elevation could end up investing much more over time.

Elevation co-founder Marc Bodnick will be joining Yelp’s Board of Directors. We originally hear that Bono, an Elevation Partners partner, was to be the board representative for Yelp but it looks like Bodnick got the seat in the end.

The investment comes on the heels of dissolved buyout deal with Google. Yelp walked away from an all but signed deal to buy the startup for $550 million.

The investment includes both a primary investment component as well as a secondary offering for long time employees. These deals are now being referred to as “DST deals,” since DST first invested in Facebook in May 2009 at a $10 billion valuation and later funded employee buyouts at a $6.5 billion valuation. They did a similar deal with Zynga.

The release also revealed that traffic on the site increased to more than 26 million unique visitors in the month of December 2009 and the site now has 9 million reviews.

Scribd, a site that lets users and publishers upload and share documents, has a new board member. David Sacks, the founder of Geni and Yammer (and former COO of PayPal), joins the company as a director as of today.

Scribd had 8.1 million unique worldwide visitors in November 2009 (Comscore). They’ve raised $12.8 million in three funding rounds. Sacks is already an investor in the company.

Spartoo.com, the Europe’s version of Zappos.com, has closed a $17.4 million Series B round of funding round led by Highland Capital Partners and Endeavour Vision with A Plus Finance and CM-CIC Capital Privé participating. This brings the online shoe retailer’s total funding to $25.4 million.

Launched in 2006, Spartoo claims over 4 million unique visitors per month (Nielsen, November 2009) and a base of 600,000 regular customers. Spartoo operates sites in France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium and Luxembourg.

With web hosting services like Rackspace going down time, and time again, Down For Everyone Or Just Me has become a hot spot to check to see if a lagging site is down for everyone, or just you. The site was created as a side project by longtime Twitter engineer Alex Payne, and has managed to grow quite a large following.

Over the weekend, Payne sold the site to Bweeb, Inc, which is known for running Site5 Web Hosting. Although Payne isn’t too sure what Bweeb’s plans are for the site, I suspect they’ll keep its functionality largely the same (and people will keep coming to it).

In a blog post, Payne mentions that the site hasn’t received that much attention lately, and wanted a new owner that would continue development of the site and add some new features.

I had numerous feature requests after the site launched, but turning it into a robust, multi-homed uptime checker was never my goal. All I’ve ever done with the site is:

1. Ported it from a simple Ruby implementation to App Engine.
2. Put some ads on it; first Google AdWords, then later individual campaigns that I negotiated by email. I made about USD $300/month from the site, on average.
3. Wired up a Twitter account that would tweet out sites that were frequently seen by the service as “down” within a short time period. (This functionality has been inactive since November, 2008.)

The price of the sale was not disclosed, but Payne also mentioned that “it was proportional to the amount of time and effort I’ve put into it (that is, not much).” Payne has also made the source code of the site public again.

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