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Posts Tagged ‘south-america’

Online vacation rental giant HomeAway this morning announced that it is expanding its global footprint and moving into South America with the acquisition of the publisher of AlugueTemporada.com.br, Brazil’s leading vacation rental site. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed.

With its acquisition of what HomeAway claims is the largest vacation rental website in South America with over 12,000 property listings, the company is for the first time extending its virtual borders beyond North America and Europe and increasing its total vacation rental listings to a respectable 475,000 properties.

AlugueTemporada.com.br will continue to operate as an independent brand from its office in Rio de Janeiro, the city that will – conveniently – be hosting both the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics.

Seems like HomeAway is on a bit of a buying spree more than two years after it raised a whopping $250 million in a single financing round – just last week it announced that it had purchased BedAndBreakfast.com for an equally undisclosed sum.

HomeAway also operates HomeAway.com, VRBO.com, BedAndBreakfast.com and VacationRentals.com in the US and multiple vacation rental sites in France, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

Expect more small acquisitions from HomeAway in the months to come.

In August, we covered mobile ad network InMobi, which was been performing very well in the Asia and Africa and beginning to expand to Europe. My colleague Robin Wauters wrote that while InMobi was seeing success in some global markets, traction in Europe is key for the ad network to really take off. Four months later, InMobi is now profitable and seeing a fair amount of growth in Europe and South America.

Asia, where the ad network had a stronghold, currently employs the highest number of ad impressions for InMobi, with 4,950 million ads each month. In Africa, InMobi delivers 900 million impressions per month. But the rapid growth for InMobi has been concentrated in South America, where ad impressions have grown by 1306% in the last six months, and Europe, where InMobi has delivered 850 million impressions per month. InMobi also reports that it has delivered 7.5 billion monthly mobile advertising requests globally.

Based on our understanding of their eCPMS, growth and past monthly revenue, it looks like InMobi is now generating $1.6 million in monthly revenues and could be on pace for a $20 million annual revenue run rate. To put this in perspective, leading mobile ad network AdMob is approaching a $100 million revenue run-rate. And InMobi is eyeing the U.S. market for additional expansion. The company’s mobile advertising service, which is targeted more to the mobile web than applications, is currently available in 30 countries, cites advertisers like Reebok, Yamaha, and Cricket Nirvana and recently signed on several new global publishers including Ebuddy, hi5, and Friendster.

For InMobi’s profitability and considerable growth, the startup has raised relatively little money compared to some of its competitors. The company raised a total of $7.6 million to date, starting out with a $500k seed round from a group of angel investors and followed up by a multi-million financing round led by Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures (the VC firm started by Ram Shriram, early backer and founding board member of Google).

Of course the big elephant in the room is Google’s recent acquisition of AdMob and how that will effect InMobi’s continued expansion into the U.S. market. And there’s the possibility that Google could make a move to overtake InMobi’s stronghold in other countries.

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OLX, the Craigslist for the rest of the world, has raised $5 million in Series C funding from General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund and DN Capital, bringing the total funding raised to $28.5 million. OLX raised $13.5 million in Series B funding in April 2008 from the same investors as above, and raised an undisclosed Series A round of $10 million in September 2006 with the same VCs and various angels participating.

While the free classifieds site has trouble competing with Craigslist in the U.S., OLX has a strong user base internationally. With a presence in more than 87 countries in 39 languages, OLX’s popularity lies mainly in Spain, India, Portugal, Mexico, South America, China, and the Philippines.

Fabrice Grinda, founder and CEO of OLX says the new investment will be used to make new acquisitions, implement site improvements, expand globally, and pursue aggressive marketing initiatives. In 2007 OLX has made an investment in Edeng.cn, a Chinese free classifieds site and acquired Mundoanuncio.com, a Craigslist-like classifieds site targeting the Hispanic market, in 2006. Much of its success in the Philippines can be attributed to its white label partnership with Friendster. Its offices are also spread over the globe with 125 employees (OLX has added almost 35 employees since last year) working in New York, Buenos Aires, Beijing, and Moscow.

While OLX may play second fiddle to Craigslist in the U.S., the site prides itself on being a second-generation free classifieds site, complete with Web 2.0 features such as social network widgets, better search capabilities, interactive maps, and mobile functionality. Craigslist has recently been under scrutiny by Attorney Generals over prostitution and the “Craigslist Murder” that have taken place in conjunction with the site. eBay’s Kijiji is also a competitor in the space, but Kijiji has set its sights on catching up to Craigslist in the U.S., even considering a name change.

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I’m getting shit for this post no matter what. By insinuating business magazines are better off than papers when I currently write a column for BusinessWeek people will call me biased. (As Arrington would say, “consider that your disclosure.”) Likewise, I have a lot of friends at all three publications who probably won’t appreciate what I have to say, because it’s not in their economic interest.

But Arrington keeps berating me to write a post today, so here goes.

24/7 Wall Street did a post the other day saying the sun was setting on Fortune, Forbes and BusinessWeek, and its facts about the finances of these publications are sad and mostly indisputable. Indeed, cutting frequency and staff are near certainties for at least BusinessWeek and Fortune. But I don’t agree that those realities mean the magazines can no longer afford quality, edited, long-form investigative stories.

There’s an obvious option for these magazines, and I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about it: Ruthlessly collapse the print and online staffs, run everything online as soon as they write it, except one or two cover-length, long-form glossy pieces. Those will anchor the print issue, rounded out by the best stories from online. Then cut the money spent on trying to court new subscribers, shifting the entire marketing budget to promote the Web or real-life conferences and branded events. You could even use reader comments to flesh the online pieces out more for the print edition, driving more engagement in both the print and online versions. Voila! One publication, not two pretending to be one. And guess what? One publication is a hell of a lot cheaper, even if it’s printed on dead trees.

Under this system, you still have the enterprise articles, like the Fortune piece 24/7 cites about Bernie Madoff. You just focus and only do one or two of them an issue, keeping 99.9% of your staff focused on writing stellar daily online content. And you optimize your staff to be scrappier, more productive and adapt from an old way of doing journalism, to something closer to blogging. People who can’t or refuse to adapt won’t have jobs. That may sound cruel but if the magazines themselves don’t adapt, no one there will.

This plan would save a ton of money. That’s right: They can save tons of money and still print a publication. Big national magazines have different economics than a metro daily paper. In some cases the biggest cost is a bloated staff, in others a highly-paid staff with generous corporate credit lines. Remember, most of these staffers were hired during better times and while layoffs have been frequent, they haven’t been as far reaching as they probably should have been. With all due respect to 24/7 Wall Street, the average compensation package at one of these three publications isn’t $60,000 unless you got hired out of school in the last few years. Think higher. Much higher.

Now a lot of these publications will tell you they’re all one staff now. But go through the staff boxes and see how many of those names blog, write breaking news online or write anything online with any frequency. Hint: If the question “Is this for print or online?” keeps coming up in your organization, you’re doing it wrong. Aside from one investigative piece per issue, there shouldn’t be a difference between the two. As a practical matter, it’s not that different from all of the magazine copy running online after the fact. But if you think about it, that policy elevates the magazine above online. It should be reversed.

Why not go the route of closing print completely and going online? First off, you’d kill the print ad revenue stream which is still the bulk of these magazines’ business. But it also abandons the magazines’ competitive advantage. For a lot of people magazines are different from newspapers. They’re printed on nice paper with glossy, glitzy photo shoots and painstaking graphic design for a reason. People in them like putting them on their coffee table—or better yet, framing them. Don’t underestimate the power reporters working on a cover have to convince a reluctant CEO to talk to them or give them exclusives. It may be one of the few advantages they’ve got over increasingly influential blogs. Similarly, there’s still a huge swath of readers who like flipping through a hard copy of BusinessWeek or Fortune on the plane, or even on a Sunday afternoon. The business world isn’t all tech, after all. And as a reporter, I have to be honest. There’s nothing quite like seeing your article printed in a glossy magazine. That can be a valuable retention and recruiting tool when used well. As can the implicit promise that the publication still values long-form, investigative reporting that has some shelf life to it.

It’s not that big, glossy, deeply-reported magazine stories are better than blogs. But they are a different way to tell certain important, complex stories, the same way a book is a different way to tell a story than an article. Not all news needs that kind of methodical, intensely-edited and graphic designed treatment, but I’d argue one or two per month do. And if newspapers keep crumbling, magazines are going to be the only places left that know how to do it.

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