I remember when I first learned about LinkedIn.com, and was the 4th person to sign up for it in Utah County. Soon I got into a competition with two friends to see who could end up with the most (real) connections. I finally won that competition, but we all ended up with hundreds of connections. But I remember when one of my friends knew they were losing on the connections number that they claimed to be winning on "endorsements." They changed their key metric, so that they could claim that they had actually won.
The key metric on Facebook apps used to be total installs. Some apps were incredibly viral, especially early on, and got millions of installs. But some of these apps were also fluff and lost their appeal very quickly, so they actually didn’t get used much. Later, Facebook reporting started focusing more on Daily Active Users (DAU), and apps were being valued by third party reporting systems based on how many people were using them each day. Last night, our social team told me that Facebook just replaced Daily Active Users with Monthly Active Users (MAU), and that we are one of the winners in this changing in reporting. With this metric, our We’re Related application jumps up to rank #23 overall for all Facebook apps, with more than 2.1 million Monthly Active Users. It’s gratifying to see our application being used by so many Facebook users world wide to connect with relatives.
Quantcast is now reporting that our FamilyLink Network of sites and apps for families now has 2.77 million uniques globally and 1.15 million from the U.S. The chart looks great, with real steady growth over the last few months. If this trend continues, we’ll soon become a top 1,000 internet property globally which could lead to more revenue opportunities for the company. Our advertising revenue continues to grow as a percentage of total revenue, and we’d like to see that trend continue, even though we absolutely love the subscription business model that WorldVitalRecords.com uses to generate the majority of our revenue.
We’ll also be launching a storefront later this month for the first time with thousands of products available for purchase, so for the first time we’ll be able to advertise these products to our millions of users.
Our investors support our hybrid business model (subscription, advertising, e-commerce) but it is hard to forecast each one of these with such a short track record. We started seling advertising in January. And now e-commerce is just about to launch. I’m sure all of these revenue streams will grow, but at what rate?
Can anyone who has worked in a company with a hybrid business model privately email me, or comment publicly about what they think is typical for the revenue-mix going forward?
I need to carve out a few hours to read some SEC filings from some internet companies so I can find some of this info out myself. A friend of mine said he’ll try to make SEC filings available on the Amazon Kindle, and I told him I’ll be subscribing to a bunch of them, so that every quarter I’ll get them pushed to my device
That reminds me of a great domain name that Provo Labs once
purchased for a potential service to make SEC filings more accessible
and searchable. The domain was suggested by social media creative
genius and podcaster Judd Bagley. It was 10qverymuch.com. We might even
still own it, if someone would like to make an offer for it.
I find myself reading TechCrunch and Mashable every morning on my back porch from my Kindle. I was amazed when I found myself paying for a subscription to these blogs, when they are actually free online, but they are really cheap and the Kindle reading experience is much more enjoyable and relaxing than sitting in front of a computer, or even using my blackberry or iphone. Yesterday I wanted to subscribe to the Economist on my Kindle, but it doesn’t seem to be available yet.