Google buys UK comparison website BeatThatQuote.com for £37.7 million | Hacker News Reader

Google buys UK comparison website BeatThatQuote.com for £37.7 million

thenextweb.com

32 pointsmjfern7 comments

"It was the fastest growing website in the UK in 2007, eclipsing the number of pageviews generated by popular social networks, including Facebook."

What does this mean? It can't mean it has more traffic than Facebook, does it mean it provided more outbound traffic to other sites than Facebook? Actually it says 2007, Facebook was quite small here in 2007 I guess, seems like a misleading and silly comparison to make.

maybe they mean (2007Traffic-2006Traffic)/2006Traffic (aka by %).

Its a percentage increase and pretty meaningless in my opinion. I was the first employee there and Head of Technology in 2006.

From the original press release re increase: The report reveals that BeatThatQuote.com grew its monthly audience of unique visitors by 1,165% from December 2006 to December 2007. Facebook came second in percentage terms with an increase of just 781% in comparison. http://www.sourcewire.com/releases/rel_display.php?relid=369...

It's 2011 now - 2007 is like half a century ago in this field...

I was also wondering about this. Not only does it say more than Facebook but more than "social networks" as a whole, including Facebook. Either their success is monumental or something is wrong here.

I wrote the story and took the statistic from BeatThatQuote's About page, found here: http://www.beatthatquote.com/about/

I guess I could have worded that better, apologies for the confusion.

It's an odd acquisition for Google - the UK comparison website market is highly competitive with the larger competitors spending a fortune on television advertising. BeatThatQuote are relative minnows, even if they are highly likely to be profitable minnows. Probably they're more notable for the white label sites they run for the likes of MSN and Yahoo...

SEO Book has their own theory about how BeatThatQuote might be achieving their much trumpeted growth statistics without assault the average UK consumer's ears with meerkat mascots or opera singers in every single commercial break http://www.seobook.com/beatthatquote-buythoselinks

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